Joe Frazier was his own man

JOE FRAZIER and I posed next to the ring apron in our tuxedos and fake smiles, waiting for an outcue from a director.

As soon as the director's hand dropped, a man in a baseball cap emerged from behind the camera and brushed past me to get to get to his hero.

"Joe Frazier," he said. "Let me shake the hand of the man who knocked that draft-dodger Clay on his butt."

The guy went on about how "Clay," as he called Muhammad Ali, was a draft dodger and a coward for refusing to fight for his country. He called Frazier a true American and heaped praise on him for giving Ali a whipping for the whole world to see.

Joe shook the man's hand and even posed for a picture with him before sending him off with an autograph and a kind word or two.

But he never rose to the bait. He didn't respond to the suggestion that beating Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, had suddenly made him a patriot.

This was in the late '80s. We had taped the opening before a live BET cablecast of a fight card in Birmingham, Ala. It had been at least 15 years since Ali had refused induction into the Army. But you could still feel the raw emotions in that man's voice as he talked about it.

What struck me even more than the man's emotional outburst was Joe's reserved reaction. He refused to be drawn into a discussion of Ali's politics or religion. That might have been an issue for the guy in the baseball cap. But it wasn't Joe's issue, and he wouldn't pretend that it was.

I had always respected Joe Frazier. But I gained new respect for him that day. It would have been easy for a lot of guys to grin and nod with the man in the baseball cap. But it would have been beneath Joe Frazier's dignity to play that game.

To be sure, he had settled an old score with Muhammad Ali that night in March 1971. But it wasn't America's score. This was personal.

America didn't climb those three steps into the ring that night. There was no Muslim corner or Christian corner. Joe Frazier wasn't fighting for God or country.

He had been debased and demeaned and disrespected. Ali had burnished his own legend at his expense, calling Frazier everything but a child of God. Ali had portrayed him as an "Uncle Tom," the fake white hope who had been installed as the pretender to the throne as Ali waited out a forced exile for daring to defy America.

Never mind that Frazier had worked to get Ali's license renewed or that Ali had accepted money from Frazier when he was having trouble paying his bills. That night in March was to be Ali's triumphant return and Joe Frazier was just the red carpet spread before him.

But Frazier was working from a different script. Their story lines ran parallel until the 11th round, when Joe buckled Ali's knees with a shot that turned the fight around. Then, in the 15th, Frazier toppled Ali like a bowling pin with a whistling left hook that answered any lingering questions in the judges' minds.

It would have been a fitting final chapter in Frazier's biography. Instead, the rivalry dragged on for two more fights, both Ali wins. The last of the three, the "Thrilla in Manila," was one of the greatest fights in ring history.

If the first fight was vindication for Frazier, the series was validation for Ali. Frazier's big night became a prosaic footnote in the soaring narrative that is the Muhammad Ali story.

Joe deeply resented that. Even on the night of his victory, Ali continued to vilify him as an interloper in a borrowed crown. It was Ali who stole the spotlight the next day, literally adding insult to injury by boasting that he had sent Frazier to the hospital.

It was a hurt Joe carried for years, perhaps even to the grave. He deserved better. He was that everyman who should have been revered, especially by anyone who ever labored in the shadow of people who looked down their noses at them.

He struggled with that. But it was a personal struggle. He was too much his own man to get caught up in someone else's issue.