Ali would call it "the closest thing to dying" he had ever known. Half a century later, their brutal finale endures — a descent into boxing's abyss that left two men broken and a sport forever changed.
Muhammad Ali was just barely into his forties and still pretty freshly retired for good. He was having dinner one evening with a writer who couldn’t help but notice the way the chicken leg trembled in his hand, resisting his attempts to bring it to his mouth.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Ali told Mark Kram, who’d covered so many of his fights for Sports Illustrated throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Kram had come to the fighter’s home and had been shown all the pictures and posters, memorabilia from Ali’s time as the greatest fighter from his generation.
But there was a glaring omission in Ali’s little shrine to his own career — Joe Frazier wasn’t anywhere to be found. No pictures from their great trilogy. No little reminders of the way they transformed one another from champions to legends. Nothing.
Was this intentional, Kram tried asking. Just an oversight, maybe? As he wrote in his book “The Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier,” Ali stayed tight-lipped, but grew increasingly morose as the evening wore on and the chicken leg failed to cooperate. Maybe it would be interesting to watch some of their old fights, the writer suggested. How about “The Thrilla in Manila,” the final installment in their rivalry? If Ali preferred, they would only watch the good rounds.
“What good rounds?” Ali replied. He’d watch the other fights with the writer if he wanted, but not that one. “It was the greatest fight of my life, and it wasn’t about style,” Ali explained. “It was where I had to go for it, a place where you drop through a trapdoor.”
So why not watch it again? His answer was simple: “I don’t wanna look at hell again.”
It was 50 years ago today, on Oct. 1, 1975, that Ali and Frazier met for the third and final time in what many boxing fans and writers would later regard as the most brutal fight they’d ever witnessed. Fernando Marcos, then the president of the Philippines but ruling it as a dictator under martial law, forked over millions of dollars to bring the fight to Manila, hoping to show that the capital city was safe for tourism and foreign investment of all kinds.
It was also 105 degrees Fahrenheit by the time the two fighters stepped into the ring just after 10 o’clock in the morning, in order to accommodate a primetime broadcast schedule in North America. The added crush of the humidity made the air feel like “boiling water,” according to Ali’s personal physician Ferdie Pacheco. Under the arena’s aluminum roof, conditions were almost painfully suffocating even those whose activities that morning were confined to chair.
But the heat was only part of it. What transformed it into more than just a boxing match was the history between the two men. Jerry Izenberg, now 95, still remembers being ringside on that October morning. He covered the bout for The Newark Star-Ledger, and later included an account of it in his excellent boxing history “Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing.” In that chapter, Izenberg referred to the bout as "a walk through hell."
Ali may have been the reigning heavyweight champ at the time, having recaptured the title with his dramatic win over George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle” bout in Zaire two years earlier, but here the belt was essentially just an added trinket.
“They were fighting for the heavyweight championship of each other,” Izenberg told Uncrowned. “Those two, they would have rather died than lose to the other guy.”
Izenberg didn’t necessarily show up in Manila expecting to see a great battle. The first Ali-Frazier bout in 1971 — dubbed “The Fight of the Century” — was a cultural phenomenon. Only part of that had to do with the fact that it was a clash of undefeated champions. Mostly, it was a culture war battle. Ali had only recently been reinstated, having lost his title and very nearly his freedom for refusing to be drafted into the armed services during the Vietnam War some four years prior. Ali would eventually win this battle after the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction in the summer of 1971, but to much of the nation he was still despised as a draft-dodging radical.
They were fighting for the heavyweight championship of each other. Those two, they would have rather died than lose to the other guy.Jerry Izenberg
Frazier was not a particularly political man, but he had captured all the relevant forms of the heavyweight title in Ali’s absence. He was a natural rival for Ali, and in the lead-up to the fight he was also drafted into a war he did not choose, but a sociopolitical one rather than a shooting war.
“Joe Frazier was an available symbol behind whom people who hated Ali could unite,” sports broadcaster Bryant Gumbel once noted. Ali, always in search of a compelling antagonist who he could set himself in dramatic opposition to, was only too willing to play into that narrative. He branded Frazier as an ignorant tool of the white establishment, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and a white man’s champion.
The irony, Izenberg pointed out, was that in many ways Frazier had lived the harshest aspects of the Black experience in America far more than Ali had.
“Frazier told me a lot of things over the years, but one of them he always came back to was how he despised Ali for what he was,” Izenberg said. “You know, he heard the story about how Ali got into boxing because somebody stole his bike when he was 12 or 13 or something like that. Joe would say, ‘Yeah, I really weep for him. When I was that age, I was plowing fields for two white guys, doing a man’s day of work.’”
The way Frazier told it later, his childhood in South Carolina meant showing up to work as a farm laborer and being told “to the mule.” When it was lunchtime he was told “in an hour.” At quitting time, they said “in the morning.” That was his life, day in and day out, until he eventually moved north to Philadelphia and took up boxing while working in a slaughterhouse.
“Ali, he lived a whole different experience,” Izenberg said. “He had a nice upbringing. He was spoiled by his aunts. Not his father. Maybe his mother a little bit. But definitely his aunts spoiled him. So when he said those things about Frazier, you know, Joe’s son was getting into fights at school because kids were repeating things they’d heard Ali say about his dad. Joe was not ever going to let that go.”
Frazier won the first fight in 1971, flooring Ali with a late left hook that cemented his decision victory on the judges’ scorecards. But the fight took a brutal physical toll on Frazier. His style depended on getting in close enough to uncork his best punch — a short, cracking left hook. That meant wading through the snake bite of Ali’s jab and the snapping right hand that often followed it. Ali left Madison Square Garden that night with a sore jaw from Frazier’s left hook, but he was back on TV and talking to reporters the next day, framing the decision as a robbery and reveling in the attention while Frazier recovered in the hospital.
“It’s not like I even won,” Frazier would say later. “He’s robbing me. Like nothing changed.”
Frazier lost the title two years later in devastating fashion, with George Foreman knocking him down six times inside of two rounds before the fight was stopped. Frazier also lost a decision in the rematch with Ali the following year in a 1974 fight that saw Ali repeatedly tie Frazier up in close while holding him behind the neck and battering him with uppercuts.
By the time Ali reclaimed the title from Foreman in late 1974, he was intent on cashing in on the belt while he could. Fights against a rotating crop of heavyweight contenders were bringing in decent paydays, but also seemed to be a game of diminishing returns. Izenberg recalled seeing Ali at a fight in Malaysia, where he easily defeated Joe Bugner while also announcing his retirement (one of them, anyway).
Two days before, Izenberg said, he was walking down a hotel hallway when he heard Ali shouting: “I’ll knock him out. I’ll knock the sucker out.”
When he followed the sound through an open door, he saw Ali watching fight film of Frazier, calling him an “old man” who “can’t fight.” (Frazier was actually two years younger than Ali.) But wait, Izenberg said, wasn’t Ali retired? Isn’t that what he’d just said?
“No, just trying to sell tickets,” Ali replied. “Wait ’til I get my hands on Frazier.”
The press conference to announce a third fight between Ali and Frazier was held in New York City in 1975. On the way there, Ali stopped in a novelty store and spotted a small gorilla figurine.
“He erupted into wild laughter and immediately purchased it,” Izenberg wrote in his book. “When Ali stepped up to the podium [at the press conference], he held up the little gorilla and punched it repeatedly as he looked at Frazier and shouted, ‘It will be a killa and a thrilla and a chilla when I get the gorilla in Manila.’”
To Ali, this was just another day in the office. He knew how to hype a fight better than any boxer who had ever lived. He was a master of memorable quips and rhyming couplets that wormed their way into the collective consciousness, building public interest in each new bout.
But to Frazier, it was the latest and perhaps deepest wound in a rivalry that he felt had undermined his entire career. He blamed Ali for turning so many Black Americans against him. He’d been an Olympic gold medalist and then an undefeated heavyweight champion who handed Ali his first professional loss, and still he felt as if he was only known as the villain in Ali’s tale of heroic triumph.
So when Ali labeled him the “gorilla” to be trounced in Manila, Frazier boiled over with anger. After the press conference, according to Izenberg, Frazier told one of Ali’s friends that their man had gone too far this time. He was told that it was all just pre-fight hype, that some day they’d look back on it and laugh.
“That day will never come,” Frazier replied.
Those in his camp had worried that Frazier was in decline. The vision in his left eye was never good, and it was getting worse. In a sense, his dreaded left hook had developed as a necessary tool to compensate for that weakness. It gave opponents an incentive to move anywhere except to his left, where he’d no longer be able to see them well if at all.
Frazier had been an Olympic gold medalist and then an undefeated heavyweight champion who handed Ali his first professional loss, and still he felt as if he was only known as the villain in Ali’s tale of heroic triumph.
But for a third meeting with Ali, he’d need something extra. Eddie Futch, Frazier's longtime trainer, brought in a Philadelphia middleweight named George Benton, who helped Frazier add a right hand to his arsenal. He trained for the fight as if it were the last one he would ever have, and maybe he believed it was.
“I’m gonna shoot it all over there,” Frazier is said to have told Futch. “This is the end of the line. … I mean it. This is the end of him or me.”
Futch did his part both in the gym and out of it. He’d been enraged by the work of referee Tony Perez in the second Ali-Frazier bout, blaming him for allowing Ali to hold the back of Frazier’s neck while hitting him. It had happened a total of 133 times in that second fight, Futch said. He knew because he watched it back and counted each one. He would not put his fighter in the ring with a referee he didn’t trust to be fair and impartial. When he heard that Zack Clayton, a man he knew from the Philadelphia fighting scene, had been proposed as referee, Futch threatened to pull Frazier from the bout two days prior. He’d seen Clayton ringside at a fight, he said, cheering for Ali.
“If it’s Clayton,” Futch told Izenberg, “there’s no fight.”
What Izenberg learned later was that Futch had reached out to Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo. He knew Clayton’s regular job was in the civil service sector working for the city of Philadelphia. He convinced the mayor to tell Clayton that he needed to be at work in the city of Brotherly Love — and nowhere near Manila. If he went to the Philippines, he’d be out of a job. It worked as a strategy to keep Clayton out of the ring, but when Futch suggested they replace him with a local referee, he was told there was concern that a Filipino ref might not be big enough to get between and separate two heavyweights.
“I don’t care if they choose a 60-pound dwarf,” Futch said. “It ain’t gonna be Zack Clayton.”
In the end, the job went to a Manila police officer named Sonny Padilla. That choice, as much as the heat, contributed to the grueling nature of the fight itself, according to Izenberg.
“Referees are like fighters,” he said. “They all have their own style. Frazier wanted a referee who would let him fight on the inside. Ali wanted a referee who would let him fight at a distance. And if you notice in the fight, there were almost no clinches. [Padilla] got right in there, he knocked Ali’s glove off the back of Frazier’s neck, and he kept them fighting at just a terrific pace the whole time.”
At first, the fight followed a predictable rhythm. Ali came out strong in the opening rounds, as he always had against Frazier. Ali peppered him with jabs and even stung him with several early right hands. As Mark Kram put it later, Frazier’s head was getting popped back so often in those first few rounds that he saw more of the arena rafters than he did of Ali.
At ringside, Ali’s supporters looked supremely confident, as if this was proof that Frazier was as diminished as they thought and Ali was in for his easiest outing yet against his old rival. But that, Kram wrote, was simply proof that “some people never learned a thing about Frazier.”
By the fifth round, Frazier was bleeding but also surging. He could find Ali now. He’d once again had to wade through some punishment to do it, but as the heat and the pace began to slow Ali, Frazier managed to bull his way in and force Ali toward the ropes. Even better, he managed to land that right hand he’d developed, to the visible shock of Ali.
“Ali had one of the greatest fight IQs of any heavyweight,” Izenberg said. “And I think Eddie Futch knew and respected that. He knew that if Frazier could hit him with a good right hand, Ali would stop and analyze that. What just happened? Where did that come from? And when Joe hit him with that right hand, you know, Ali always liked to talk in his fights. He said, ‘You can’t do that! You’re an old man, you can’t learn new tricks!’ And Frazier yelled back, ‘You ought to talk to George Benton!’ And he hit him with it again.”
In those middle rounds, Frazier became relentless. He fought out of his low crouch, forcing Ali to reach down for him and expose his body to punishing blows.
“Joe shoveled into his kidneys, his liver, into his heart region, where fighters have observed the pain is excruciating,” Kram wrote. “With non-stop digging, a wild boar going for a truffle, Joe jerked up out of the pit and sent out — Splat! Splat! — two evil left hooks to Ali’s head. [Ali trainer Angelo] Dundee said those hooks were the hardest he had ever seen thrown, and after them, Ali was fighting for his life.”
When Joe hit him with that right hand, Ali said, ‘You can’t do that! You’re an old man, you can’t learn new tricks!’ And Frazier yelled back, ‘You ought to talk to George Benton!’ And he hit him with it again.Jerry Izenberg
Ali later said he almost quit on the stool before Round 11. The exhaustion and the punishment — it was, he said, the closest thing to dying he’d ever experienced. Somehow, maybe because he simply couldn’t allow Frazier to have this victory over him, he not only endured — but began to come back in the fight.
“Ali took a beating like you'd never believe anyone could take,” Ali’s physician, Ferdie Pacheco, said later. “When he said afterward that it was the closest thing he'd ever known to death — let me tell you something: If dying is that hard, I'd hate to see it coming. But Frazier took the same beating. And in the 14th round, Ali just about took his head off. I was cringing. The heat was awesome. Both men were dehydrated. The place was like a time-bomb. I thought we were close to a fatality.”
In Round 13, Ali sent Frazier’s mouthpiece flying several rows back into the crowd. In the next round, he battered Frazier with repeated right hands, leaving him so hurt that, according to Izenberg, “all [Ali] had to do was take a step forward and push him over and it would have been done.” But Ali couldn’t take that step. He could barely stand himself.
When Frazier came back to the corner before that final round, Futch took a look at his worsening left eye and made a decision. If Frazier continued to take that beating, he feared, he might lose the eye entirely. He might even suffer something worse. Futch had been with him for that first Ali fight, the one that left a victorious Frazier hovering near death in a hospital room. Frazier was now essentially sightless and exhausted, a helpless target for Ali with three minutes still to go. Futch had seen enough, and he told Frazier so.
“No, no, no,” Joe shouted, according to Kram’s account. “You can’t do that to me!”
“Sit down, son,” Futch told him. “It’s over. No one will forget what you did here today.”
To some at ringside, it was still anybody’s fight. The scorecards read differently, suggesting that Frazier would have needed an improbable and almost impossible knockout win in that final round. When he was later criticized for calling it off with just one round to go, Futch replied that he was “a handler of fighters” — not a timekeeper.
Ali, too, had reached his limit. He dropped to his knees in the center of the ring, his legs unable to keep him up. He had outlasted Frazier in a brutal battle of wills — but just barely. Later, in the locker room, he sank onto a couch, immobile and barely able to talk through swollen and split lips. When he was asked if he’d be willing to speak to the press, his handlers fumed. But once Ali was told that Frazier was already out there, his head jolted up.
“Get me my comb,” he said.
Ali would later say that both he and Frazier went to Manila as champions, and came back as old men. Frazier fought twice more but never won another fight. Ali won his next six, but those included at least two decisions that could have easily gone the other way, and may have fallen in his favor at least partially due to his almost mythical status atop the heavyweight division. Those in his camp remembered him running his fingers over the bumps in his skull following that last Frazier fight and asking himself why he’d keep doing a thing like this.
He finally lost his title to Leon Spinks in 1978, then got it back one last time in the rematch. He kept vowing to quit, then coming back for one more, one more. At least part of it was financial necessity, even after all the big fights and big paydays. Ali traveled with an entourage that spent his money like it was a contest.
One member of the entourage was said to have noted that Ali was surrounded by “professional hangers-on,” adding: “We got the best in the business.”
He’d also lost both money and property in his split with his second wife Belinda. That, too, had been exacerbated by his trip to Manila to meet Frazier for a third time. While there, Ali’s mistress had been introduced as his wife to the president of the Philippines, and Belinda learned of it through the newspapers.
“She got on the next [plane] smoking,” Izenberg said, and just about everyone in Manila could hear her raging at Ali in his hotel room. As she was flying back, her plane stopped in Hawaii. There, according to Izenberg, she received a message sent by Ali’s handlers within the Nation of Islam.
“They told her, ‘We cannot afford this publicity. We will see you get everything you need and want. Keep your mouth shut,’” Izenberg said. “And that’s when she came out with the statement that Islam allowed you to have more than one wife.”
Ali later said that both he and Frazier went to Manila as champions, and came back as old men. Frazier fought twice more but never won another fight. Those in Ali’s camp remember him running his fingers over the bumps in his skull and asking himself why he’d keep doing a thing like this.
Frazier, just as he’d said, never did reach a point where he was willing to look back and laugh at how Ali had treated him. Some 25 years after the fight, Izenberg was working on a retrospective that included interviews with both men. Ali expressed surprise at the fact that Frazier was still holding that grudge. Tell him I didn’t mean any of it, he told Izenberg. Tell him it was just to sell the fights, and I’m sorry. So Izenberg called Frazier up and told him.
“He asked me, ‘What did he say?’ He would never use his name, always just referred to Ali as ‘him,’” Izenberg said. “I told him he’d said he was sorry. He said, ‘No, tell me exactly what he said.' So I told him everything that Ali had said and he said, ‘OK, here’s what I want you to do. When you’re done talking to me, call him back. Tell him you told me exactly what he said. And tell him I said he can take sorry and shove it all the way up his ass.’”
Frazier’s bitterness toward Ali did not relent even when it became clear that Ali was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
“God has shut him down,” Frazier said in 2005. “He can't talk no more because he was saying the wrong things. He was always making fun of me. I'm the dummy; I'm the one getting hit in the head. Tell me now. Him or me; which one talks worse now?”
In the end, both seemed to resent the other’s place in their lore. Frazier felt that Ali had defined him, negatively and unfairly, against his will. Ali felt that Frazier was only notable for the role he played in the Ali story. To the extent he’d ever hated Frazier, who had been a friend to him and even loaned him money during his boxing exile, it was because Frazier thought he was “my equal,” Ali said.
“Without me, Joe’s nothing,” Ali told Kram after he’d retired. “He should stop using me, them fights for his fame. It’s all over. Look at me, I’m not right, sick. He should be sick too, all them punches I lay on his dumb head.”
Here, Kram wrote, Ali paused to consider the state of things. What the wins had cost him. The places both men had gone to just to beat the other. The current state of things for both of them.
“Nothing lasts,” Ali said finally. “We just flies, ain’t we?”
Category: General Sports
