Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought the "Thrilla in Manila" 50 years ago. It's still viewed as the greatest and most brutal boxing match ever.
Once all the papers were signed and the fight was officially on, Muhammad Ali knew exactly what to do.
The master quipster, fight-promoting wizard and most famous and outrageous boxer in the world — the longtime heavyweight champion who had trumpeted his boxing style as one to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee” — told the media what would happen on Oct. 1, 1975.
“It will be,” he bellowed, “A killa and a thrilla and a chilla when I get to the gorilla in Manila.”
It turned out to be all of that 50 years ago, as well as being offensive, when he called his fight opponent, Joe Frazier, a gorilla. The shortened “Thrilla in Manila” stuck and became the label and the headline for what was to become one of the greatest boxing matches of all time.
The background
Bob Arum will turn 94 in December, and he is still going strong.
In the '60s, he was a Harvard-educated lawyer who ended up working for Bobby Kennedy’s justice department. Kennedy assigned him to confiscate closed-circuit TV revenue from the 1962 Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight because information had been leaked to the U.S. government that the promoter, Roy Cohn, was planning to skirt some tax responsibilities by illegally paying Patterson in Sweden.
That’s the same Roy Cohn who eventually became the lawyer and confidant of a young Donald Trump.
Arum confiscated millions, but didn’t care for boxing and thought little of it until a friend who was also a boxing promoter asked him for advice on a fight because the closed-circuit TV was selling poorly. Arum’s idea was to have pro football star Jim Brown do the broadcast analysis, because no black person had ever handled such a high-profile role before. Ticket sales improved, Brown did well, but Arum, still mostly disinterested in boxing, watched the entire fight from the broadcast trailer.
Arum and Brown became friends. Brown told him he ought to become a boxing promoter. Arum laughed and said the only boxer worth even thinking about promoting was Ali, who had won the Olympic gold medal in 1960 and was unbeaten as a pro. Arum assumed Ali was untouchable. It turned out he wasn’t, and soon Arum was promoting the best and highest-profile heavyweight fighter in a sport he didn’t even like.
In 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion and generally banned from the sport in the United States. It was during the Vietnam War and he had refused to serve. “I got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he famously said.
Few arenas in the country would even consider letting him fight. The lawyer in Arum kicked in. He kept Ali out of prison, got him a fight in Canada and sweet-talked a few other venues into staging Ali fights. In 1971, the Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction.
By the time Ali was exonerated and returned, a heavyweight named Joe Frazier, another Olympic gold medalist, had taken over. He was the champion known as “Smoking Joe.” Ali was the former champion and self-proclaimed “The Greatest.” A showdown was inevitable and much anticipated. So was the scramble to make money off this.
Ali and Frazier fought for the first time on March 8, 1971. It was labeled the “Fight of the Century.” It would be in New York’s Madison Square Garden, a boxing mecca, and a new player named Jerry Perenchio, a Californian getting some financial help from Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke, won the promotion rights by saying he would pay each fighter $2.5 million. He said he would cover those costs by charging $25 a ticket for the closed-circuit telecasts. In those days, movie theaters carried the fights on their big screens and produced a lion’s share of the profits.
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Arum, who had done this for years and thought even a $10 closed-circuit ticket would be a stretch, remembers laughing and saying “nobody would ever pay $25 for a closed circuit telecast.” Arum, certain that Perenchio would take a bath, bowed out. Most theaters sold out, the closed-circuit revenue was $45 million, and Arum still considers it one of his biggest mistakes.
“I think Perenchio died a billionaire,” Arum says now.
The fight was competitive. Frazier knocked Ali down in the 15th round and got the decision. Ali called it “a white man’s decision.”
Arum, sitting ringside, said he was shocked.
“I never thought he could lose,” he says.
Ali-Frazier II was also in Madison Square Garden. It was held Jan. 28, 1974. Two days before, in a "Wide World of Sports" studio, a filming was planned to review the first fight, with the two fighters there to comment. Soon, Ali called Frazier “ignorant” and fists flew. Announcer Howard Cosell, known for his love of boxing and of himself, alternately tried to intervene and calm things down while doing a sort of play-by-play. Neither punched Cosell, although both said later they wanted to.
Ali won the fight on points. It was a non-title fight and by far the least compelling of the trilogy, despite its promotional label of "Super Fight II." There was no title at stake because a big, strong fighter named George Foreman, another Olympic gold medalist, had taken over the division and appeared invincible. Foreman was now the champion, and after he beat Frazier easily, knocking him down repeatedly in the first few rounds, he agreed to a fight with Ali in Zaire. That became the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle.” On Oct. 30, 1974, after monthlong delays, Foreman stepped into the ring with Ali and dominated for the first half of the fight, as Ali danced and held and did his rope-a-dope. In the seventh round, as Foreman so famously told it, Ali leaned in during a clinch and whispered in Foreman’s ear: “George, is that all you got?”
Foreman said he pondered that and quickly realized that, yes indeed, it was. In the eighth round, Ali knocked out the exhausted Foreman. Suddenly, an Ali-Frazier III, the ultimate rubber match, was back on the board.
And boxing was to never see anything like it.
The fight
The run-up to the fight stressed the clashing characteristics of the fighters. Ali was the pretty boy, too fast to have his face damaged. Frazier was the street fighter, willing to wade into the action and take whatever damage that might bring so he could get close enough to inflict his own. The images fit the hype.
Jerry Izenberg, still churning out columns for the Newark Star-Ledger at 95, was there, and recalls the contrast.
“One was a sledgehammer,” he says, “and the other was [ballet dancer Vaslav] Nijinsky .”
The late Mark Kram Sr., of Sports Illustrated, characterized the pre-fight imagery, as promoted by Ali: “Frazier was made to be an affront to beauty, not pretty as a man, without any semblance of style as a fighter.”
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And the ultimate fighting words, Ali saying them and Kram reporting: “Frazier was a dumb, ugly Uncle Tom.”
Arum was part of the promotion team. As he tells it, on his flight to the Philippines, he sat next to Ali’s wife, Belinda Boyd. He was reading the newspaper and in it was a story about Ali meeting Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the Philippine president and his wife, and Ali introducing Veronica Porch, his mistress, as his wife.
“As soon as I saw the story, I tried to push it down into my briefcase and hide it,” he says. “But she caught a glimpse of it and went crazy.”
Once she arrived, she marched into Ali’s hotel room, turned over several tables and chairs, marched back to the airport and flew home.
The fight — the one in the ring, not the hotel room — began at 10 a.m., 50 years ago on Oct. 1, in a dusty, creaky place called the Araneta Coliseum, six miles outside of Manila. The start time was dictated by television. Some things never change.
Kram wrote that there was no air conditioning and “not a whisper of wind coming off the South China Sea.” Several reports from that day put the temperature at 107 degrees. Araneta Coliseum had opened in 1960, with a seating capacity of 36,000. That day, it held an estimated 50,000.
Ali started fast with his usual energy, dancing and jabbing. But Frazier kept plodding forward in the middle rounds, giving more than he was taking. Then, just as it seemed Ali would crumble, he staged a stunning rally. These were the days when title fights were 15-rounders, and the eventual assessment of the damage done in this one likely had something to do with the sport’s reduction to 12 rounds.
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Izenberg says he was stunned by the ebb and flow.
“It looked like a chart of the current U.S. economy,” he says. “Up and down.”
The brutality quickly became frightening to all who watched. Kevin Mitchell of the Guardian, in a 40-year anniversary story, called it “the closest thing to unsanctioned manslaughter.”
Arum, who by that time had seen Ali fight thousands of rounds, says, “It was the most incredible fight I’ve ever seen.”
He also said that two misconceptions were revealed that day: That Ali couldn’t take a punch and that he still had the speed and quickness of the days he was beating the likes of Sonny Liston, the fight that put him on the map.
“He was slower and was taking a beating,” Arum says. “But suddenly, somehow, he was back, dishing it out. It was shocking.”
One deep analysis of the fight comes from somebody who wasn’t there, who was 19 when it took place. Teddy Atlas, well-known ESPN fight commentator and trainer for champions Michael Moorer and Tim Bradley, has watched film of the fight many times and says, “It was undisciplined brutality. They weren’t fighting with athleticism. They were fighting purely on character. And that led to two things: It was a great fight and it caused great damage. Both left parts of themselves in the ring that day.”
By the end of the 14th round, Frazier had been hit so much that he could barely see. His trainer, Eddie Futch, knew it was over for his fighter. He told the referee he would not allow Frazier to come out for the 15th round. Frazier heard it and yelled toward Futch, “No, no. I’ll kill you.”
Across the ring, Ali, also sitting in his corner a destroyed fighter, was asking to have his gloves cut off. He later said of that moment, “It’s the closest I ever came to dying.” Unlike Futch, Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, was having nothing to do with quitting. He maintained, to his death in 2012, that he never heard that request and he wouldn’t have allowed it.
Years later, Ali told his biographer, Thomas Hauser, that Frazier had quit just seconds before he could.
When it ended, Ali was ahead on all the cards. The official result was listed as Ali winning by “corner retirement.”
Neither had been knocked down, yet most who saw this called it the greatest boxing match of all time. The desire to win was beyond description. It was, in the minds of many, the closest thing to bare-knuckle street fighting. Atlas even speculates that the horse-hair boxing gloves used by each had worn down so much during the fight that they were basically hitting each other with bare fists.
The aftermath
Every time this fight is discussed or written about, the conclusions are the same.
Atlas: “They made each other and they broke each other. They brought out the best in each other and helped destroy each other. They forced each other to go places neither would have gone without the other.”
Izenberg: “They weren’t fighting for the championship of boxing. They were fighting for the championship of each other.”
Naturally, the best summary came from Ali: ‘‘Joe and I went to Manila as champions and left as old men.”
Ali was 33, Frazier 31.
Over the years, Ali tried to reverse the damage of all the Uncle Tom and Ugly Gorilla insults.
“If God ever calls me to a holy war,” he said, “I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.”
Frazier’s bitterness softened a bit, but not quickly. Once, noting Ali’s deterioration from Parkinson’s Disease, he said, “I did it to him. Now I will outlive him.”
He didn’t. “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier died of liver cancer in November 2011, at age 67. Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest,” was ravaged by the disease that doctors theorized was the result of blows to the head, many from Frazier. Ali died at age 74, in June 2016.
Ali, with great physical difficulty, attended Frazier’s funeral and called him “a great champion.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Category: General Sports
