Joe Frazier Biography: The Man Who Helped Ali and Never Got Free of Him

Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali. He is the only man who beat the version of Ali that history remembers, and he did it in the biggest fight ever staged.

That should have made him a folk hero for life. It never quite did, and the reason has very little to do with boxing.

The Loan Ali Never Repaid

Between 1967 and 1970, Ali was stripped of the heavyweight title, refused a licence in every state, and left without an income for declining induction into the US military.

Frazier, rising through the division in his absence, lent him money. He also said publicly and repeatedly that Ali should be allowed to fight again, at a moment when saying so carried a cost.

When Ali came back, he sold their first meeting by calling Frazier an Uncle Tom, a tool of white America, and comparing him to a gorilla. Those taunts landed on a man who had grown up sharecropping in the segregated South, aimed by a man who had grown up middle-class in Louisville. The irony was obvious at the time and changed nothing. A large part of Black America was recruited to root against him.

Frazier carried it for the rest of his life. He said so in interviews and in his 1996 memoir, and only partly let it go after Ali issued a public apology in 2001.

Everything else in this story sits underneath that one.

Laurel Bay, a Brick, and a Meat Locker

He was born on January 12, 1944 in Beaufort, South Carolina, and raised on a farm at Laurel Bay, second youngest of a dozen children.

A childhood accident shaped his entire style. Running from the family hog, he was struck by a brick, and the left arm never straightened properly again. It is why he fought bent forward with that arm cocked, and why the left hook became the only punch he ever really needed.

He left for New York at 15, settled in Philadelphia in 1959, and took a job at the Cross Brothers meat-packing plant, training by hitting sides of beef in the cold room. A film crew borrowed the image fifteen years later and most people now assume it was invented for the screen.

At a Police Athletic League gym he found Yancey “Yank” Durham, who trained him until Durham’s death in 1973. Frazier won Golden Gloves titles in 1962, 1963 and 1964. He went to the Tokyo Olympics only because Buster Mathis was injured, and won heavyweight gold fighting the closing rounds on a broken left thumb he hid from the officials.

Cloverlay: Eighty Shares at $250

Back in Philadelphia, a local minister introduced Frazier to F. Bruce Baldwin, president of Abbotts Dairies, who assembled an investor syndicate to fund the professional career. They called it Cloverlay, from “clover” for luck and “overlay” from betting.

The structure is worth setting out, because it is the most concrete evidence of how a fighter’s money worked in that era, and it rarely appears alongside the usual story of Frazier dying poor.

Cloverlay sold 80 shares at $250 apiece to bankers, doctors, lawyers, clergy and journalists around the city. Frazier drew $100 a week against 50 percent of his purses, and his training expenses came out of the syndicate’s half.

Those $250 shares split repeatedly. One was later reported to be worth more than $14,000.

He debuted on August 16, 1965, took the New York State version of the title from Mathis in March 1968, and unified the championship by stopping Jimmy Ellis on February 16, 1970. He was undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, and a large part of the public treated the belt as borrowed.

March 8, 1971: Fifteen Rounds and a Left Hook

Madison Square Garden. Two undefeated heavyweights with legitimate claims to the same title, each guaranteed a then-unheard-of $2.5 million, which the breakdown of Frazier’s finances follows to its bleak conclusion.

He walked through the jab for fourteen rounds, absorbing more than any sensible man would. In the fifteenth he put Ali on the canvas with the left hook that remains the most replayed punch in heavyweight history.

Unanimous decision. He had won the Fight of the Century.

Two years later he ran into a 24-year-old wrecking machine. On January 22, 1973 in Kingston, Jamaica, George Foreman knocked him down six times inside two rounds. Ali outpointed him in a non-title rematch at the Garden in January 1974.

October 1, 1975: Fourteen Rounds in Manila

The third fight is the one both men said nearly killed them.

In brutal heat at the Araneta Coliseum, Frazier and Ali fought fourteen rounds of escalating punishment. Frazier’s eyes had almost completely closed. His trainer Eddie Futch refused to let him answer the bell for the fifteenth.

Frazier objected bitterly, and never fully accepted it. Ali, on his stool, said afterwards it was the closest thing to dying he knew of.

Neither was the same fighter again. Foreman stopped him in five in June 1976 and he retired, returning once in December 1981 for a draw with Floyd Cummings.

North Broad Street, and Why the Estate Misses the Point

He bought his gym at 2917 North Broad Street from Cloverlay, ran it for decades, trained fighters there including his son Marvis, and lived for years in an apartment above it. He fronted a soul band, Joe Frazier and the Knockouts. He stayed in Philadelphia, which had adopted him long before the rest of the country got round to it.

Joe Frazier died of liver cancer on November 7, 2011, aged 67. Ali came to the funeral. The gym was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, and a statue modelled on the moment after the fifteenth-round knockdown was unveiled in the city in 2015, three decades after Philadelphia put one up for a fictional boxer.

Here is what I take from the Cloverlay arrangement, and it cuts against the tidy lesson people draw from his estate. Frazier was not simply careless with money. He signed a deal at 21, before he had leverage, that gave half of everything he earned to a room full of Philadelphia professionals, and those investors turned $250 into $14,000 while the man doing the fighting drew a hundred dollars a week. He sits low on our richest boxers list, and part of that was spending. A good part of it was the contract.

He was the man in the other corner, and the other corner belonged to the most famous athlete who ever lived. That framing cost him a fortune and most of the credit. It never cost him the fight.