“We’re just two coloured boys from the ghetto and we have now the entire world watching us in the best event of all time!”
Thus did Muhammad Ali describe himself and Joe Frazier hours before they faced off at Madison Square Garden 50 years ago this week in a highly-anticipated rematch, the second in a trilogy of iconic slugfests between the pair of champion boxers.
Promoters dubbed the competition “Super Fight II,” a title that never stuck.
Seldom does the second Ali-Frazier fight make it onto boxing historians’ rankings of history’s biggest heavyweight title bouts, or of Ali’s best performances—an honor routinely accorded the primary and third matches.
It’s time that modified.
The previous Ali-Frazier meeting, hailed as “The Fight of the Century,” also held within the Garden, in March 1971, had been an event of world significance: The primary fight between two undefeated heavyweight champions, fraught with the fiery politics of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Ali was pretty-faced and fleet-footed, a rhyming-and-jiving convert to Islam attempting to regain the belt after three-and-a-half years of exile, imposed after he resisted military induction into the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector.
Plodding and poorly spoken, Frazier was the hard-luck son of a South Carolina sharecropper who had captured Olympic gold back in 1964.
A decade later, Frazier was now a favourite of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, which viewed the conflict in Vietnam more favorably.
For 15 grueling rounds, Ali worked his left jab during that first match, firing off blinding mixtures to his opponent’s face, while Frazier, bobbing and weaving, a tough goal, moved in relentlessly, punishing Ali’s head and midsection.
Lower than a minute into the ultimate round, Frazier uncorked a left hook to Ali’s jaw that briefly floored The Biggest.
The Garden erupted.
Frazier drew the unanimous decision — and a three-week stay within the hospital.
Now, because the Age of Sequels dawned— “The Godfather Part II” was soon to debut — Ali and Frazier agreed to fulfill, on Jan. 23, within the Manhattan studios of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” to review the videotape of that first match alongside host Howard Cosell.
As usual, Ali taunted Frazier cruelly about his looks and education, and the latter, three-and-a-half inches shorter than Ali — his reach a full six-and-a-half inches shorter — had enough.
Boy, the way you figure I’m ignorant? asked the casually-clad Frazier, standing menacingly over his rival.
Right away, Ali, in a dark three-piece suit, rose to pre-empt Frazier’s aggression with a headlock — Sit down quick, Joe! — as producers, technicians, and flunkies dove onto them, muffled microphones scraping and scratching because the duo tumbled from the foot-high riser to the concrete floor, wrestling like school kids.
Citing “deplorable conduct” that “demeaned the game of boxing,” the Latest York State Athletic Commission later fined them each $5,000.
So when the bell sounded to open Super Fight II a number of days later, there was already bad blood and the Garden audience — 20,748 strong, larger than the primary Ali-Frazier bout, celebrities shimmering in extravagant Soul Chic threads — expected war.
But of what intensity?
Super-Fight II was to be a 12-round match.
Frazier, then 30, had lost the heavyweight championship in Jamaica a 12 months earlier, when George Foreman pummeled him to the canvas six times in two rounds, prompting Cosell’s legendary call: Down goes FRAY-zhuh! Down goes FRAY-zhuh!
Ali, at 32, had fought 139 rounds because the first Frazier fight in 1971, including two matches with a young ex-Marine named Ken Norton, who broke Ali’s jaw in March 1973.
Furthermore, Ali’s right hand was injured and weak, requiring cortisone shots.
Of the third man within the ring, referee Tony Perez, Cosell said he possessed “the youth, the know-how, the swiftness, and the strength to execute his job.”
Lithe and limber, Ali danced just like the Ali of old: a balletic, backward-circling motion from which he struck like a cobra.
He was first to attach, 35 seconds in, with a right-left-left combo that thrilled the gang.
Though he had pledged to avoid the clowning and rope-a-dope tactics that undermined his performance during his first battle with Frazier, The Biggest couldn’t resist displays of the Ali Shuffle — his legs kicking in a distracting blur—and a playful wink on the sportswriters sitting ringside.
Near the tip of Round 2, Ali threw a pointy right that lifted Frazier off the canvas, just as Foreman had done in Jamaica.
Frazier staggered to the ropes.
“Joe’s backing off for the primary time within the fight!” Cosell shouted. “He was hurt by that right of Ali’s!”
Suddenly, Perez interposed and waved the combatants to their corners—but no bell had rung; in truth, the ref was 20 seconds early.
He swiftly realized his error and bade the fighters to resume.
Ali’s mouth piece had fallen out.
Still, he battered Frazier anew until the bell,10 seconds later, sounded for real.
Frazier had been spared major damage, if not an early knockout.
“A confusing incident,” Cosell mused.
After that Ali’s dancing slowed, with more clinching—but every round featured furious trades of blows.
The fighters’ blended rhythms and repertoires dictated that neither could rating without taking a shot, or several, in return.
As of their first fight, Frazier got here on strong in the center rounds, smiling, mocking Ali’s dancing, goading him in clinches — You bought no sting in your punch! — just for Ali to snap Frazier’s head back with more jabs and hooks.
“Joe was actually taunting Ali and got belted!” Cosell observed.
By Round 10, Ali’s nose was bleeding.
However the boxing exhibition continued.
Under constant exhortation from his cornerman-trainer Drew Bundini Brown — Don’t stop dancin’! Box ’im to death! — Ali stayed off the ropes.
Near round’s end, he pounded Frazier’s face six consecutive times.
As Round 11 opened, the judges and Perez favored Ali on their scorecards.
Larry Merchant of The Post declared that Ali was thus far ahead on points, “He can’t lose unless he gets knocked out.”
His opponent knew it, too.
“Frazier swinging wildly,” Cosell said.
As of their first bout, Ali finished strong, landing nine punches in seven seconds.
When the bell for Round 12 clanged, the fighters gamely touched gloves at ring-center.
Seeking to dazzle the judges one last time, Ali reprised the Shuffle.
Cosell sensed an anticlimax: “I believe there’s a realization amongst everybody that this…bout between two past champions…was lacking much of the thrill of the prior fight. It’s been a boxing contest on Ali’s part, and he has scored often… but quite clearly without power…And Frazier has shown nothing of what he showed in the primary fight.”
When Ali’s victory by unanimous decision was announced, spectators mobbed the ring.
“Absolute bedlam prevails!” Cosell screamed.
Climbing in, the broadcaster found Frazier’s eyes swollen like lumpy potatoes, his lower lip split and bloodied.
Smokin’ Joe seemed philosophical in regards to the loss.
“I got no argument about nuthin’,” he told Cosell.
The subsequent day’s Post declared: “ONE AND ONE.”
Ali was generous in victory.
“Joe Frazier is great,” he said, “a a lot better fighter than I assumed,” adding his opponent “had me out on my feet twice.”
Nine months later Ali got his shot at George Foreman.
Held within the central African nation of Zaire, now the Congo, “The Rumble within the Jungle” capped Ali’s return from exile with a shocking eighth-round knockout of the larger, younger champion, widely thought invincible.
Ali had reclaimed the heavyweight crown 10 years after first capturing it, as an 8-1 underdog named Cassius Clay, from Sonny Liston, one other mauler previously thought invincible.
Three more fights followed the “Rumble” for Ali — 41 rounds of him looking sluggish, getting hit altogether too often — before the champion gave Frazier a probability to avenge his loss in Super Fight II.
The ultimate meeting between Ali and Frazier, staged within the Philippines in October 1975, was dubbed “The Thrilla in Manila,” and is usually cited as the best, most brutal heavyweight title fight of all time.
Thrilla mirrored the sooner contests: Ali dominating early, Frazier surging in the center, the champ rising, Lazarus-like, in the ultimate rounds.
Frazier’s face was so disfigured his corner refused to permit him to reply the bell for the fifteenth round: a TKO, the trilogy’s only knockout.
Super Fight II is the forgotten installment within the Ali-Frazier trilogy.
“Each men were beginning to slip just a little bit, but they were each such fierce warriors, it’s one among those fights that’s painful to look at,” Jonathan Eig, creator of the 2017 bestselling biography Ali: A Life, said of the fight recently.
Fifty years on, the match warrants re-examination, and a conclusion different from the anticlimax Cosell discerned.
Described by the Associated Press as “action-packed,” it was each a terrific spectacle and one among Ali’s biggest performances: the bout where he most convincingly dispatched Frazier, who at all times gave him a lot trouble, and Ali’s last great dancing exhibition.
“The second fight is the one where Ali really figures Frazier out,” said Eig. “Ali has his best ‘Frazier moment’ in Fight II.”
The bell has been sounded — and a historical reexamination is under way.
James Rosen is chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and the creator, most recently, of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”
“We’re just two coloured boys from the ghetto and we have now the entire world watching us in the best event of all time!”
Thus did Muhammad Ali describe himself and Joe Frazier hours before they faced off at Madison Square Garden 50 years ago this week in a highly-anticipated rematch, the second in a trilogy of iconic slugfests between the pair of champion boxers.
Promoters dubbed the competition “Super Fight II,” a title that never stuck.
Seldom does the second Ali-Frazier fight make it onto boxing historians’ rankings of history’s biggest heavyweight title bouts, or of Ali’s best performances—an honor routinely accorded the primary and third matches.
It’s time that modified.
The previous Ali-Frazier meeting, hailed as “The Fight of the Century,” also held within the Garden, in March 1971, had been an event of world significance: The primary fight between two undefeated heavyweight champions, fraught with the fiery politics of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Ali was pretty-faced and fleet-footed, a rhyming-and-jiving convert to Islam attempting to regain the belt after three-and-a-half years of exile, imposed after he resisted military induction into the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector.
Plodding and poorly spoken, Frazier was the hard-luck son of a South Carolina sharecropper who had captured Olympic gold back in 1964.
A decade later, Frazier was now a favourite of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, which viewed the conflict in Vietnam more favorably.
For 15 grueling rounds, Ali worked his left jab during that first match, firing off blinding mixtures to his opponent’s face, while Frazier, bobbing and weaving, a tough goal, moved in relentlessly, punishing Ali’s head and midsection.
Lower than a minute into the ultimate round, Frazier uncorked a left hook to Ali’s jaw that briefly floored The Biggest.
The Garden erupted.
Frazier drew the unanimous decision — and a three-week stay within the hospital.
Now, because the Age of Sequels dawned— “The Godfather Part II” was soon to debut — Ali and Frazier agreed to fulfill, on Jan. 23, within the Manhattan studios of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” to review the videotape of that first match alongside host Howard Cosell.
As usual, Ali taunted Frazier cruelly about his looks and education, and the latter, three-and-a-half inches shorter than Ali — his reach a full six-and-a-half inches shorter — had enough.
Boy, the way you figure I’m ignorant? asked the casually-clad Frazier, standing menacingly over his rival.
Right away, Ali, in a dark three-piece suit, rose to pre-empt Frazier’s aggression with a headlock — Sit down quick, Joe! — as producers, technicians, and flunkies dove onto them, muffled microphones scraping and scratching because the duo tumbled from the foot-high riser to the concrete floor, wrestling like school kids.
Citing “deplorable conduct” that “demeaned the game of boxing,” the Latest York State Athletic Commission later fined them each $5,000.
So when the bell sounded to open Super Fight II a number of days later, there was already bad blood and the Garden audience — 20,748 strong, larger than the primary Ali-Frazier bout, celebrities shimmering in extravagant Soul Chic threads — expected war.
But of what intensity?
Super-Fight II was to be a 12-round match.
Frazier, then 30, had lost the heavyweight championship in Jamaica a 12 months earlier, when George Foreman pummeled him to the canvas six times in two rounds, prompting Cosell’s legendary call: Down goes FRAY-zhuh! Down goes FRAY-zhuh!
Ali, at 32, had fought 139 rounds because the first Frazier fight in 1971, including two matches with a young ex-Marine named Ken Norton, who broke Ali’s jaw in March 1973.
Furthermore, Ali’s right hand was injured and weak, requiring cortisone shots.
Of the third man within the ring, referee Tony Perez, Cosell said he possessed “the youth, the know-how, the swiftness, and the strength to execute his job.”
Lithe and limber, Ali danced just like the Ali of old: a balletic, backward-circling motion from which he struck like a cobra.
He was first to attach, 35 seconds in, with a right-left-left combo that thrilled the gang.
Though he had pledged to avoid the clowning and rope-a-dope tactics that undermined his performance during his first battle with Frazier, The Biggest couldn’t resist displays of the Ali Shuffle — his legs kicking in a distracting blur—and a playful wink on the sportswriters sitting ringside.
Near the tip of Round 2, Ali threw a pointy right that lifted Frazier off the canvas, just as Foreman had done in Jamaica.
Frazier staggered to the ropes.
“Joe’s backing off for the primary time within the fight!” Cosell shouted. “He was hurt by that right of Ali’s!”
Suddenly, Perez interposed and waved the combatants to their corners—but no bell had rung; in truth, the ref was 20 seconds early.
He swiftly realized his error and bade the fighters to resume.
Ali’s mouth piece had fallen out.
Still, he battered Frazier anew until the bell,10 seconds later, sounded for real.
Frazier had been spared major damage, if not an early knockout.
“A confusing incident,” Cosell mused.
After that Ali’s dancing slowed, with more clinching—but every round featured furious trades of blows.
The fighters’ blended rhythms and repertoires dictated that neither could rating without taking a shot, or several, in return.
As of their first fight, Frazier got here on strong in the center rounds, smiling, mocking Ali’s dancing, goading him in clinches — You bought no sting in your punch! — just for Ali to snap Frazier’s head back with more jabs and hooks.
“Joe was actually taunting Ali and got belted!” Cosell observed.
By Round 10, Ali’s nose was bleeding.
However the boxing exhibition continued.
Under constant exhortation from his cornerman-trainer Drew Bundini Brown — Don’t stop dancin’! Box ’im to death! — Ali stayed off the ropes.
Near round’s end, he pounded Frazier’s face six consecutive times.
As Round 11 opened, the judges and Perez favored Ali on their scorecards.
Larry Merchant of The Post declared that Ali was thus far ahead on points, “He can’t lose unless he gets knocked out.”
His opponent knew it, too.
“Frazier swinging wildly,” Cosell said.
As of their first bout, Ali finished strong, landing nine punches in seven seconds.
When the bell for Round 12 clanged, the fighters gamely touched gloves at ring-center.
Seeking to dazzle the judges one last time, Ali reprised the Shuffle.
Cosell sensed an anticlimax: “I believe there’s a realization amongst everybody that this…bout between two past champions…was lacking much of the thrill of the prior fight. It’s been a boxing contest on Ali’s part, and he has scored often… but quite clearly without power…And Frazier has shown nothing of what he showed in the primary fight.”
When Ali’s victory by unanimous decision was announced, spectators mobbed the ring.
“Absolute bedlam prevails!” Cosell screamed.
Climbing in, the broadcaster found Frazier’s eyes swollen like lumpy potatoes, his lower lip split and bloodied.
Smokin’ Joe seemed philosophical in regards to the loss.
“I got no argument about nuthin’,” he told Cosell.
The subsequent day’s Post declared: “ONE AND ONE.”
Ali was generous in victory.
“Joe Frazier is great,” he said, “a a lot better fighter than I assumed,” adding his opponent “had me out on my feet twice.”
Nine months later Ali got his shot at George Foreman.
Held within the central African nation of Zaire, now the Congo, “The Rumble within the Jungle” capped Ali’s return from exile with a shocking eighth-round knockout of the larger, younger champion, widely thought invincible.
Ali had reclaimed the heavyweight crown 10 years after first capturing it, as an 8-1 underdog named Cassius Clay, from Sonny Liston, one other mauler previously thought invincible.
Three more fights followed the “Rumble” for Ali — 41 rounds of him looking sluggish, getting hit altogether too often — before the champion gave Frazier a probability to avenge his loss in Super Fight II.
The ultimate meeting between Ali and Frazier, staged within the Philippines in October 1975, was dubbed “The Thrilla in Manila,” and is usually cited as the best, most brutal heavyweight title fight of all time.
Thrilla mirrored the sooner contests: Ali dominating early, Frazier surging in the center, the champ rising, Lazarus-like, in the ultimate rounds.
Frazier’s face was so disfigured his corner refused to permit him to reply the bell for the fifteenth round: a TKO, the trilogy’s only knockout.
Super Fight II is the forgotten installment within the Ali-Frazier trilogy.
“Each men were beginning to slip just a little bit, but they were each such fierce warriors, it’s one among those fights that’s painful to look at,” Jonathan Eig, creator of the 2017 bestselling biography Ali: A Life, said of the fight recently.
Fifty years on, the match warrants re-examination, and a conclusion different from the anticlimax Cosell discerned.
Described by the Associated Press as “action-packed,” it was each a terrific spectacle and one among Ali’s biggest performances: the bout where he most convincingly dispatched Frazier, who at all times gave him a lot trouble, and Ali’s last great dancing exhibition.
“The second fight is the one where Ali really figures Frazier out,” said Eig. “Ali has his best ‘Frazier moment’ in Fight II.”
The bell has been sounded — and a historical reexamination is under way.
James Rosen is chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and the creator, most recently, of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”
