Mark Kram - Smokin Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier

Joe Frazier, 1968. AP Images

H is straw fedora tipped at a jaunty angle, Joe Frazier shuffled through the door of his upscale apartment with a pocketful of lottery tickets and something for Denise, his loyal companion of forty-one sporadically stormy years. Whenever he would go out to play a number at a convenience storetypically ten dollars a throw, now and then more if he had a hunch the stars were favorably alignedhe would spot an item as he strolled through the aisles, impulsively buy it in bulk, and bring it back for her as a small acknowledgment, the way an appreciative house cat drops an expired mouse at the feet of its owner. A week before, he had exited the elevator behind a handcart bearing eight cases of soda pop. Today, he showed up with enough paper towels under his arm to sop up an oil spill. Look what I got for you! he said, his weathered face unfolding into a wide smile. Forever amused by these impromptu deliveries, Denise Menz would think of how she and Joe always had paper towels with them whenever they crisscrossed America by car. Afraid of planes but not of weaving in and out of tractor trailers on the highway at upwards of 110 mph, he would use them to swab himself down with rubbing alcohol instead of stopping at a hotel to take a shower. Denise would later say, Funny what you would remember.

The apartment was on the twentieth floor of a building that overlooked the Ben Franklin Parkway, at the far end of which the Rocky statue stood sentry at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With her background as an interior designer, Denise had given the space an eclectic look that embraced a masculine color scheme. While Joe found it amenable enough, he yearned for the five-thousand-square-foot loft above his North Philadelphia gym, which Denise had decorated in the style of a 1970s bachelor pad and had outfitted with accents that included a leopard-spotted chaise lounge in the bathroom. For the better part of three decades, he had holed up amid the consoling shadows of 2917 North Broad Street, the very place where he had whipped his body into shape for his epic showdowns with Muhammad Ali and where years later he would still don an old robe and pad downstairs to paw at the heavy bag. But Joe was in uncertain health, the abode was cold and damp, and Denise and others were concerned that he could no longer climb the steep stairs to his quarters without falling. Plus, there were unending tax hassles. So Denise had procured the spot in Center City where the two now lived.

By virtue of a reportorial acquaintance with Joe that dated back to my father, Mark Kram, who covered him for Sports Illustrated from the early days of his career, I stopped in to see him one day in June 2009 for a piece I was thinking of doing for an overseas magazine. At sixty-five, his handshake was still firm, scarcely the grip of a man rumored to be in declining health. Word was that he was battling diabetes and high blood pressure, and that he still had not recovered physically from a car crash in 2002. Surgeries had followed on his back and neck, yet he remained in some degree of pain, which his eyes betrayed as he lowered himself to sit. Even so, he appeared full of cheerful contentment, far removed from the enduring portrayal of him as an angry and unforgiving man so incapable of letting go of the hatred he harbored for Ali. That Joe was elsewhere on this spring day.

Joe relaxed at his dining room table and picked at a bowl of cherries. As Denise checked on the ribs she had in the oven, Joe and I found ourselves on the subject of his old R&B group. With Joe as the lead vocalist and principle financier, Smokin Joe and the Knockouts played the club circuit back in the 1970s. Overhearing this turn in the conversation, Denise chimed in: Joe had a deal with Capitol. He cut some forty-fives. We have a stack of them around here somewhere. The act never climbed to the heights Joe had hoped, yet the songbird in him was still apt to soar with unbidden spontaneity, even given the presence of an audience of just himself. With a raspy voice, he launched into a rendition of My Way, the lyrics of which had been personalized for him.

Ive come a long, long ways

And like they say

It took some doin...

I fought them fair

I fought them square

I fought them my way....

Remember that oneMy Way? Joe asked, his eyes crinkled with merriment. Paul Anka rewrote some of the words to it just for me.

His way was the hard way. In the ring, he lived and died by the simple yet daring principle of engagement that in order to deliver one bone-crunching blow, it was frequently necessary to absorb three in exchange. With a left hook that was by acclamation an instrument of doom, he would leave behind a crimson trail of swollen eyes and broken jaws in his quest for his place in history. One opponent would say that the volume of punches Frazier had battered him with was so unrelenting that it was like getting hit by four hands. When another was revived back in his dressing room, he began tying his shoes on again until one of his handlers had to break it to him that he had already been knocked flat. Even Ali would say of his war with Frazier in Manila: It was like death. Closest thing to dying I know of. For his legions of fans, he possessed the raw power of Rocky Marcianothe Rockwho had set the standard for perfection when he retired with a 49-0 record in 1956; others claimed he swarmed his opponents with the intensity of Henry Armstrong, who fought 181 bouts in the 1930s and 40s and won championships as a featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight. Whoever one supposed his antecedents were, Joe exuded an atavistic joy inside the velvet ropes that was his and his alone. Only one outcome seemed certain whenever Joe charged into action: someone would end up in the emergency room.

On his excursions across Philadelphia in later years, he had a prepared answer for anyone who asked how he was doing. With an air of playful exasperation, he would shake his head sadly and reply with a shrug, Theyre tryin to get me! No one ever knew to whom he was referring, but it could have been anyonethe taxman, a woman he had been with the evening before, or perhaps some phantom of a bigoted world that was never far away. He had grown up in Jim Crow South Carolina, where African Americans remained entrapped in a plantation culture that subjected them to indignities not so far removed from the experience of their enslaved ancestors. When he came to the North as a young teenager, he endured degradations no less oppressive than the ones he had encountered back home in Beaufort. Even as he came into his own as a professional athlete in the 1960s and 70s, which afforded him the proximity to white money and the sanctuary it provided, he came face-to-face with black-on-black hate language in his exchanges with Ali. From cradle to grave, it would be a journey galvanized by conflict.

Unimposing for a heavyweight, at just under six feet tall, he was a beloved overachiever who once said of himself, Im a small piece of leather, but Im well put together. In an era that would come to be looked upon as the golden age of the heavyweights, Joe did not back up an inch as he battled his way toward a place at the top. Even as his opponents pummeled his head again and again, he advanced upon them with a gallantry that thrilled crowds. Fans could see themselves in his clock-in-early, leave-late work ethic. While he did not possess the height or personality of some of his peers, no one would ever have cause to question the size of his heart or his courage under fire. Few men in the annals of the ring produced moments as indelible.