Hey Joe

The most popular tourist spot in Philadelphia is the plaza in front of the Arts Museum where the statue of Rocky Balboa stands, gloved fists raised to the heavens.

Every day, visitors who fancy they’re fit try to sprint up the 72 steps (“The most famous steps in America,” according to the Guardian) to have a picture taken at the plinth. I wonder what Joe Frazier makes of it all.
Pictures of Smokin’ Joe greeting John Duddy following his victory over Anthony Bonsante at Madison Square Garden in the early hours of St. Patrick’s Day testified to the Derry middleweight’s growing reputation in the States. But the images served, too, as a reminder of the injustice which has long been inflicted on Frazier.
The fact that Rocky VI had been showing in the Strand Multiplex the previous week gave Frazier’s attendance at the Derryman’s fight an additional piquancy.
Frazier’s greatness as a fighter has become dimmed in the mass memory over the last 30 years. In part at least, this has arisen from his fearsome rivalry and subsequent feud with Muhammed Ali. Some have never forgiven him for out-pointing Ali to retain his title at the Garden’s main arena in 1971. The perfect script had demanded that hitherto unbeaten Ali reclaim the crown which bigots had stripped from him for refusing to be drafted into the war on Vietnam. It seemed to the millions who felt somehow cheated that this thwarting of fate had been contrived out of spite against history. Frazier had rained on the perfect parade which they’d planned.
But that doesn’t entirely explain why Ali’s other major rivals, George Foreman and Larry Holmes, remain popular celebrities and are comfortably off, while Frazier lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment above a gym in the same run-down area of Philly where he spent his teenage years and where he still helps train young fighters. He is by no means a derelict and shows no sign of self-pity. But he could accurately be described as down on his luck.
He appears to be paying the price for not just denting the legend but for the poisonous animosity with Ali which persists to this day. “Ali still insults him any time his name comes up, calling him an ugly gorilla and so forth. Joe hits back, but he’s not good at that sort of exchange,” writes Pulitzer-winning author David Halberstam.
Seemingly, Frazier cannot understand the denial of respect that he reasonably believes is his due, which leads him to lash out in ways which make it easy for anybody who wants an excuse for giving him no credit.
When Ali, trembling from Parkinsons, lit the Olympic flame at the Atlanta Games in 1996, Frazier told a reporter that he would have liked to have toppled him over into the fire.
It may be that neither man can break clean from the other because history has bound them together. “Technically the loser of two of the three fights, [Frazier] seems not to understand that they ennobled him as much as they did Ali,” reckons Halberstam. “The only way we know of Ali’s greatness is because of Frazier’s equivalent greatness, that in the end there was no real difference between them as fighters, and when sports fans and historians think back, they will think of the fights as classics, with no identifiable winner or loser. These are men who, like it or not, have become prisoners of each other and those three nights.”
Ali won the second fight at the Garden on points, although a number of good judges at the ringside, including Red Smith of the New York Times and Bob Fiske of Ring magazine, thought the decision positively perverse.
The third fight was the Thrilla in Manila in 1975, when the pair pounded one another with fists of stone for 14 rounds. Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, refused to let his man come out for the 15th. Ali called it the “closest thing there is to dying.”
In the same year, Sylvester Stallone arrived in Philadephia to make the first Rocky film. Script-writer and director as well as lead actor, he picked up on a story of the teenage Frazier preparing for fights by punching sides of beef in the refrigeration room of the slaughterhouse where he worked, and incorporated the tale into his scenario. It made for the most memorable scene in the movie.
Rocky wasn’t just fictional, he was fantastical. In 1975, as since, white America couldn’t produce a real-life heavyweight champ. So Stallone concocted a fantasy figure to take on and eventually whip the motor-mouthed, uppity black guy who’d grabbed hold of the title. He sought to make his movie more plausible by filching a fragment from Joe Frazier’s life and using it to adorn the incredible tale of a honky heavyweight hero.
The third relevant thing that happened in 1975 was the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Even as the helicopters clattered up and away from the roof of the Saigon embassy building, the cowards and the whores were raising a finger to check what way the new wind was blowing. All of a sudden, in an ersatz act of expiation, the bourgeois consensus embraced Ali. The racists and war-mongers who had wanted him flogged as a traitor now craved any opportunity to be seen simpering by his side. Frazier, whom Ali had derided as a “house-boy” and an “Uncle Tom” for an insufficiency of insolence towards the white elite, was rapidly discarded by those who had so recently looked to him to button the lip of the garrulous black braggart.
His fall from the pedestal of fame was also greeted as no more than he deserved by the cool customers who now saw Ali as their ticket of re-entry into the establishment with radical credentials intact.
There was no role for Frazier in the favoured scenario of either faction.
It could be that the personal hostility which Ali continues to direct against Frazier has its source in a residue of guilt – that part of the price of his elevation to high celebrity status in a world which had spurned him was a wholly undeserved denial of respect to Joe Frazier.
Today, it goes virtually unremarked that there’s a statue to the fictional Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia, but no tribute of any kind to the actual world heavyweight champion who lived in the city throughout the period in which the movies are set, and lives there still.
Joe Frazier was a working-class hero who battled his way to world success using only his own fists. The release of the insanely stupid sixth Rocky yarn emphasised the grotesque inappropriateness of the way he has been treated by the city to which he brought glory.
It was the picture of him grinning shyly in the background as Martin McGuinness rejoiced with John Duddy at the Garden, the scene of that double-edged triumph 36 years ago that had defined his own career, which prompted these thoughts. I’d like to think that all those who chanced into Joe Frazier’s company that night had some sense of the measure of the man, were aware that they were in the presence of true greatness.