What “Joe Frazier” reminds me of is how important boxing used to be in my life, and how inconsequential it is now.
When Foreman beat Frazier, I could give you highlights of the careers of every HW champ from John L Sullivan to Foreman (and quite a bit of detail for many of them), and could not conceive of missing a big fight, let alone a championship. And I’m pretty sure I read every word printed about Ali, and a majority of articles about heavyweight boxing in general in the national media, before 1975. Now, I have no idea who the champ is, and the only boxer I can name who I’m pretty sure is still active is Pacquiao.
I guess taking all the big fights off network TV and putting it on PPV had a lot to do with it (although I drove 200 miles to see the first Ali-Frazier fight in a theater), and having three or four concurrent champs in the same weight class also had a lot to do with it, but if you had told my 20-year-old self that there would be a day when I wouldn’t even know the name of the heavyweight champ, I would have thought you were crazy.
Anyway, back to Joe. I never really cared for him – probably because I was a big Ali fan and didn’t consider Frazier’s title legitimate – but he changed my mind when they finally fought for the title. He really did come out smokin’ – never mind the left hook; I never saw a boxer’s head move so fast, bobbing and weaving at hyperspeed, and he did it the entire fight. As an amateur boxer myself, I was in awe of how hard he must have trained to be able to keep up that pace for a full 15 rounds. I considered it the greatest athletic performance I had ever seen.
Which made me appreciate Foreman all the more, when he made Frazier look like a second-rate Tough Guy competitor. Young people today know Foreman as a big, fat, smiling goof, but in the early 70’s, he was like the Terminator, scowling and devastating. Ali had his toughest fights (before he continued fighting well past his prime) with Frazier and Norton, and Foreman made both of them look like tomato cans.
Poor Joe, he probably thought beating Ali would at last make him popular, but the only people it made him popular with were the rednecks who hated Ali for “dodging” the draft.
Reminds me of an even sadder story, when Sonny Liston won the championship by knocking out Floyd Patterson in about 2 minutes. He had done time, and had worked as a mob enforcer, and people considered him a thug, while Patterson was about as popular as a black champion could be at that time. After beating Patterson easily, Liston reportedly spent the flight back home practicing a speech about how he would do his best to be a good champion and put his past behind him. He naturally expected a big crowd to greet him, but when he got off the plane, there was nobody there except for a couple of local sportswriters. Not even winning the greatest title in sports could get people to admire him.
