Smokin Joe Frazier got his nickname because of his punching power. One of the hardest hitting heavyweights in a long, long time. He nearly beat the black off Muhammad Ali in the Thriilla in Manila. 
Some say Muhammad Ali’s brain injuries and Parkinson came from those hard hitting fights with Frazier. Frazier was a fighter a lot of contenders feared.
Those fights with Frazier and Ali will always be one of my cherished memories.
aww… one of my all-time boxing greats. i recently watched thrilla and i thought joe had a pretty good fighting technique against clay/ali. in fact, i thought frazier’s bob-and-hook was the only technique that worked on ali.
Bruford - Joe Frazier. Jeff Berlin, the bassist, wrote this piece while watching Frazier box on TV with the sound muted - the rhythms are derived from Frazier’s movements.
I read recently that Ali said the Manilla fight against Frazier was the closest he could imagine to dying.
Ali deserves his reputation as “the Greatest”. He needed opponents of Frazier’s quality to get that.
Ali was in many ways a classy guy. The conspicuous exception was the way he talked about Frazier. It was very effective as publicity, but deeply wrong and indeed contemptible. Joe understandably resented this most of his life, though he recently said he’d forgiven Ali.
RIP Joe.
He’s punchin’ angels, now.
Moved Cafe Society --> the Game Room.
Smokin Joe has left and gone away.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
I’ve been a fan of boxing for quite a long time, making the transition from radio broadcasts to TV. Joe Frazier was a class act and a boxer that most fighters didn’t want to be in the ring with. Ali learned just what a Frazier left hook was all about when he found himself somehow lying on the canvass, looking up at the ref.
“They told me Joe Frazier was through.”
“They lied.”
“Everybody’s talkin’ 'bout Joe Frazier.”
Joe Frazier moved forward and kept coming at his opponents. He kept pressing, pressing, attacking.
Tenacity combined with doing everything he could with everything he had in a time when heavyweight boxing was just amazing.
Saw you around the Philly area, Joe. You were a customer at my family’s downtown Philly store for years, and you were just a straight up cool guy.
He also had one of the best ever lines on The Simpsons.
“Webster’s dictionary defines excellence as ‘the state or condition of being excellent.’ And now, the winner of the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding
Achievement in the Field of Excellence…”
RIP.
He was nasty to Ali the last few years saying Ali’s mental condition is proof that he won the matches.
Said with affection:
“Down goes Frazier!”
I was never a big boxing fan, Joe, but you always struck me as a good man. RIP.
Awwww… and Ali called Frazier an ugly Uncle Tom, and “the white man’s champion.”
Ali had no business talking trash if he wasn’t willing to take in in return
I’m not a boxing expert, but Frazier was one of the greats. And Frazier stuck up for Ali, so the way Ali spoke about Frazier was repulsive even if it was very effective hype for their fights.
Frazier was a great fighter. I loved boxing back then and he and Foreman and Ali were the main reasons. (Well Sugar Ray Leonard too). With Frazier’s passing it did bring up one thing though, as awful as Howard Cosell was with Baseball announcing, none were better for doing a boxing match. The excitement of Frazier down and getting back up and brought be back to a time when boxing was a really big deal at it was the people like Frazier & Cosell now both gone and Ali & Foreman and Leonard and Hearns that made the sport so good in my youth.
Those fights were epic.
There is probably something to that but it is not the real reason. From the violence of the Frazier fights Ali found that he could take a punch. Based on that, Ali utilized his “rope-a-dope” strategy against Foreman. Taking the beating he did and still knocking out Foreman was incomprehensible. Dementia from hits to the head are cumulative. If Frazier had knocked out Ali a couple of times and Ali retired he might be fine today. Instead, Ali went on to take some horrible punches to extend his career. We’ve seen the result of that.
If you read the early "autobiography " of Ali (which was actually written by Alex Haley, the guy that wrote “Roots”) there is a chapter, (which may be entirely fictional), where Ali and Frazier are riding together in a car. They manage to resolve the differences between them. Again, it may all be fiction but I don’t think it would have been published if, on some level, Ali and Frazier hadn’t developed some mutual respect.
If my memory is correct, Ali called Floyd Patterson an “Uncle Tom” and humiliated him in the ring. He did say Frazier was ugly but that is far from the most outrageous thing that Ali ever said. And, if you ever saw Ali, in his prime, in person, everyone else looked ugly. Ali was scary good looking.
I was and remain, an Ali fan. Yet, I have all the respect in the world for Joe Frazier. He was the real deal. He earned every bit of whatever he got out of life which was probably a lot less than he deserved. He was the perfect opponent for Ali. Knowing something about boxing, you can’t go through three wars like that without having a huge amount of respect for your opponent.
RIP Joe Frazier. You are honored and respected. Your death kills a little bit of my youth. We all have lost something when we lose you.
Not only did he stuck up for him, he offered and gave him money to get him through the bad patches when he was banned. Then when Ali came back he hit him with the racial and gorrilla stuff.
Joe was very angry and bitter about the treatment. I remember when he was on the Howard Stern show a while ago. The played a bit of Ali mumbling, Joe laughed and said “I did that!” Hard to listen to but it was how he still felt.
RIP Smokin Joe, we won’t see your like agian.
We’ll never know, but I think Ali’s pugilistic dementia is the result of a long career of training and fights, and probably extending that career several years beyond his prime. I think it’s tempting to blame his condition on a couple of fights, but I’m not sure it’s true. On the other hand after Frazier died I saw an SI writer say that the losses to Ali are one reason Frazier just died of cancer. That’s stupid.
Ali was quoted as saying “Joe Frazier is an Uncle Tom. He works for the enemy.” That was on top of saying Frazier looked like a gorilla and an ape, which are both race-tinged.