The feelings I have for Joe Frazier are personal. My grandfather, Uncle Moe, Uncle Herman, and Uncle Milton were all proud men from Mississippi and Alabama. They were dark, scrappy, steel tough, with a dignity and a decorum that got them through unendurable pain. And they were Frazier men. As a fighter, he was their symbol, an embodiment of their ethic to not just work, but to work just as five times hard as the next person.
And lord, what a fighter and worker he was. Joe Frazier wasn’t boxing‘s greatest overachiever as much as he was it‘s greatest force of will. Short, he cornered fighters in the ring like Raton ( a bull) transformed to the body of a man. Stocky, he was the greatest infighter in the history of the division. Short of reach, he made up for it with the greatest left hook in the history of the sport. (Ever. Period. End of discussion.)
All of Joe’s brilliance and class could not compete with two facts: that he was lived in early 70’s and that he wasn’t Muhammad Ali. Joe could never be the lightning rod, revolutionary figure and symbol of an age and time that Ali was, but he was a damm sight close to being his equal as a fighter, and Muhammad knew it. The only psychological Ali felt he could have over him was to break him: calling him an uncle tom in their first fight, ignorant in their second, and a gorillia in their dark, brutal third. When a generation went overboard in praise of Ali( Just as they are going over board in denigrating him now) Frazier was left with a lifetime of wounds, and was well within his rights to howl about them.
The only thing I can say in his passing is that, like many geniuses, it took him to die for the American public to fully get him. Brutalized by Ali’s taunts, ignored by the counter culture, and seen only as what he wasn’t by the reactionary right, Frazier was sports answer to Ellison’s Invisible Man. Go to youtube. Watch his fights Hear his story. See him. Maybe, in the lower frequencies, he speaks for you.
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