adminLOS ANGELES. — A beloved icon. A fighter who transcended his sport. A symbol of heroism, courage and defiance.
Muhammad Ali was all of these things and more to countless millions of admirers around the world during his remarkable life and times.
Yet for Joe Frazier, the overwhelming adoration given to Ali during and after his career would always be hard to stomach.
Frazier, who died in 2011, was to be Ali’s greatest rival in the ring, the two men fighting three blood-curdling battles that culminated with their epic 1975 collision in Manila.
But the noble nature of Frazier and Ali’s rivalry inside the ropes masked an ugly feud, stoked by Ali, that was to leave Frazier nursing a grudge for decades after the two men finally hung up their gloves, a far cry from the time in the 1960s when they had been friends.
During Ali’s exile from boxing following his refusal to fight in Vietnam, when he was stripped of his title and widely ostracised in mainstream America, Frazier lent Ali money and lobbied then president Richard Nixon to allow him to box.
The friendship soured when Ali returned to boxing, and his “Fight of the Century” against Frazier was set for March 8, 1971 in Madison Square Garden.
Ali, a hero of the black civil rights movement, relentlessly portrayed Frazier in offensive terms, painting him as an “Uncle Tom”, a passive, inarticulate pawn of the “White Establishment”.
“Joe Frazier is an Uncle Tom. He works for the enemy,” Ali taunted.
Whether an early example of promotional trash-talk or genuinely held sentiment, Ali’s words stung Frazier — the son of Alabama sharecroppers who had been subjected to racism in his youth — to the core.
In his 1996 autobiography, Frazier described Ali’s verbal salvos as a “cynical attempt to make me feel isolated from my own people”.
“He thought that would weaken me when it came time to face him in that ring. Well, he was wrong. It didn’t weaken me, it awakened me to what a cheap-shot son of a b * * *h he was,” Frazier wrote.
Frazier exacted a measure of revenge by flooring Ali in the 15th round of their first fight before going on to take a unanimous decision victory. — AFP.
Online Reporter