It was one of the most iconic boxing matches of all time, and the culmination
of an intense rivalry between the fight legends Muhammad Ali and Joe
Frazier. Yet the so-called Thriller in Manila, as argued in a new
documentary of the same name, was marred by the racist antics and erratic
behaviour of Ali, whose relentless abuse of Frazier became strangely
obsessional and ultimately revealed the dark heart of a beloved sporting
hero.
Here, in an exclusive interview with The Times, Frazier reveals his
true feelings about Ali, the myth and the man, and the verbal abuse he
received at his hands. “I was never worried about him running off at the
lips,” he says confidently. “Because I had a chance to give it right back to
him in kind, in every round.”
Admittedly, the case for the prosecution of Ali, as delivered in the movie, is
pretty solid. The film charts the degeneration of a relationship that began
in friendship.
During Ali’s three-year ban from boxing because of his conscientious objection
to the Vietnam War, it was Frazier who offered him support, financially and
professionally (by appealing to boxing commissions to revoke their
withdrawal of Ali’s licence). But after Ali’s return to the ring in 1970 the
relationship soured, and by their third and final fight in Manila in October
1975 Ali’s traditional pre-fight antics had become ugly, obsessive (he
stalked Frazier’s hotel even when the media weren’t around), and defined by
sinister racist rhetoric — Ali’s team caricatured Frazier as a gorilla, wore
gorilla T-shirts and regularly humiliated him in public, while Ali called
him an “Uncle Tom”, a “flat-nose”, and implied that he was intellectually
inferior.
“He’s the other type negro, he’s not like me!” Ali famously
said, during his Parkinson interview in 1974, alluding to his status as a
racially superior African American. “There are two types of slaves, and Joe
Frazier is worse than you [pointing to Parky] to me!” Sunni Khalid, an
African American sports journalist, clarifies this in the movie. “An Uncle
Tom is someone who is considered subservient to white people or the wishes
of white people,” he says. “It is probably the greatest insult
that one black man can call another.”
Frazier dismisses the notion that Ali’s racist taunts affected him, but
neither does he deny their impropriety. “I paid no attention whatsoever to
the words he said to me,” he says. “I was never concerned about being
treated bad by him. I grew up in animosity, bigotry and hatred [in South
Carolina], and had to go to different schools, different movies and
different restaurants. How badly can you get treated? Whereas this guy
[Ali], he just makes a lot of noise. He calls me names, but it’s all right.
I’ve been called worse names than that by other people. I’ve just never had
the chance to beat them up!” Frazier won the first of their three bouts. The
Manila fight, won by Ali, was stopped between the 14th and 15th rounds on
the order of Eddie Futch, Frazier’s trainer.
The smoking gun in the avalanche of racial abuse is a short interview that Ali
gave to New Zealand television in 1975, just weeks before the fight. Here,
as Ali espouses his strident racial beliefs (including a complete separation
of the races), he boasts about attending a Ku Klux Klan rally. “It was a
hell of a scene, all those white hoods, the bonfire, and me on the platform
talking,” he begins, with something approaching pride. “I says: ‘Black
people should marry their own women!’ I says: ‘Blue birds with blue birds,
red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles! God
didn’t make no mistake!’ And they say [imitates cheering]: ‘Yeahhhhh! Now
you teach the rest of them niggers and everything’ll be all right!’ ”
In any context, this is a startling confession to come from an
African-American, especially one, such as Ali, so frequently associated with
the civil rights movement, and so unapologetically lionised in movies such
as When We Were Kings and Michael Mann’s Ali. But in the context of
the documentary it merely confirms the premise that history has got it
wrong, that Ali is far from being The Greatest, and that perhaps the quiet
“Smokin’ ” Joe Frazier was the real champ after all.
“When we found that piece of archive I was like: ‘This is f***ing nuts!’ ”
says the Thriller in Manila director John Dower. “But I’ve always
sensed that people would rather brush all the difficult stuff about Ali
under the carpet because it doesn’t fit with the myth of the great freedom
fighter of the 1960s.” Dower’s film explicitly turns its back on Ali who,
unsurprisingly, did not want to take part in it (his agent and publicist
were both approached for this article, but neither responded with comment).
Instead, through gorgeous, moody portraits of the 64-year-old Joe Frazier
today, and through witness testimonies from both sides of the Frazier/Ali
divide, he builds a compelling picture of a fighter with none of Ali’s flair
for self-promotion, but one whose own greatness is equally indisputable (he
was one of 14 children, born into poverty, who fought his way to the top of
his profession). “Joe is a proper, truly iconic figure,” Dower says. “But
what he did and what he achieved has always been overshadowed by Ali.”
This, naturally, has left the Frazier camp in a tight spot. Do they endorse
Dower’s documentary, contributing to the evisceration of a beloved American
hero who has Parkinson’s disease? Or do they distance themselves from it,
which means somehow denying and diminishing Frazier’s own legacy?
Frazier’s son Marvis, also a former fighter, says that it is water under the
bridge. “We’re not looking to bash Mr Muhammad,” he says. “And you don’t
kick a man when he’s down. Yes, he said a lot of bad things, but you forgive
and forget. When Mr Muhammad came here, to Philadelphia, for the National
Basketball Association’s All-Stars game , he met my father and they talked
about the past and the hurts. And there was hugging, forgiveness, tears in
the eyes, the whole bit. But, you know, the public never hears about that.”
Even Frazier says that it is time to let go of the past. “Just move on, I
would say. Move on and leave it behind,” he says. “I did my job, he tried to
do his job, poor devil. We’re not going to try and live off that forever.”
And yet one suspects that Ali’s multimillionaire demigod status must rankle,
especially to a man such as Frazier, who is living out his retirement in a
back room in his gym, in the badlands of North Philadelphia. Frazier’s
manager, Les Wolff, certainly thinks so. “Ali has always been a huge
marketing industry,” he says. “He was surrounded by highly professional
marketing and PR people, while Joe was surrounded by family. I really
believe that if Joe had been equally marketed, Ali would be in his shadows
today.”
In the past, of course, the bad blood between Frazier and Ali has been
impossible to hide. When asked, in 1996, for his reactions to the frail
Ali’s lighting of the giant Olympic flame in Atlanta, Frazier responded by
saying that someone should have pushed him in. One of his most controversial
assertions has been that Ali’s Parkinson’s disease is direct and divine
retribution for past sins and youthful arrogance.
Today, although talk of forgiveness abounds, Frazier can’t quite let this go.
“He liked to think that he was a little bit more above a normal man,” he
says. “That he stood up much more tall above you and I. But that’s the job
of the Good Man above. So therefore I think He [God] tried to quieten him
down, to let him see the mistake he’d made. But I guess He didn’t stop
there, and went further than just quietening him down.”
Ultimately, Dower says, what the movie does, and what the subsequent debate
will hopefully engender, is a re-evaluation of Ali that might remove some of
his stardust but will also, thankfully, return to him some of his complexity
and conflicting humanity. “In a way, Ali’s been done a disservice recently
by being turned into something benign,” he says, “whereas he’s a much more
interesting character than that.” And, true, Thriller in Manila
closes with a quote of confession from Ali, given to The New York Times
in 2001. “I’ve said a lot of things in the heat of the moment I shouldn’t
have said, called him names I shouldn’t have called him. I apologise for
that, I am sorry. It was meant to promote the fight.”
As for Frazier, well, the man known to millions as Smokin’ Joe (“Call me
Smoke,” he says) argues that Ali’s fluctuating status in the public eye does
not concern him, and that what his own public sees in him is not the glamour
and the allure of celebrity and stardom, but just someone, like them, who’s
trying to do the right thing. “I think the people who appreciate me are the
ones who appreciate a guy who plays a game, and plays it fair,” he says, in
a wickedly subtle allusion to his slippery foe. “Everything I’ve done over
the years, as a boxer and a champion, I’ve done it because that was me, that
was how I was raised. I can’t change that, and I will continue to be that
way until the day when I close my eyes and fold my hands across my chest.”
Thriller in Manila is being screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest on Nov 5 and 8,
and is on More4 on Nov 11 at 10pm
