"Fight One More Round"

By Tom Callahan

Ali and Frazier, a breed apart, end up at the same sad place

Sometimes two fighters come together in a clinch, and no one can break them. They are connected forever, hyphenated. Dempsey-Tunney. Graziano-Zale. They end up with one name. They end up, pretty much, with each other. Back in gyms and rings last week, refusing to go away--that is, stay away--Ali-Frazier is having a hard time ending up.

It astounds Joe Frazier that anyone has to ask why he fights. "This is what I do. I am a fighter," he says. "It's my job. I'm just doing my job." Joe doesn't deny the attractiveness of money. "Who wants to work for nothing?" But there are things more important than money. "I don't need to be a star, because I don't need to shine. But I do need to be a boxer, because that's what I am. It's as simple as that."

While it is true that he was out of the arena for 5 1/2 years, he was never out of the gym. All along, he has worked with his boys, two sons and two nephews. Brags the father: "I'm so much a boxer, I sire boxers." For 18 years, Joe, now 37, has never been able to sleep past the 4 a.m. hour of roadwork, whether or not he did the roadwork. "I keep boxing time in my head," he says, "and in my music." (He sings, badly.)

In his North Philadelphia gym he hauls a stereo tape player from the ring to the heavy bag, keeping time to his music. "Don't no trainer ever have to shout 'time' for me," says Joe proudly. "Don't nobody ever have to tell me how much time has gone by."

For trying to tell him how much time has gone by, Joe's old trainer, Eddie Futch, is no longer his trainer. Futch--not Frazier, not the referee, not Muhammad Ali--stopped the "Thrilla in Manila" in 1975 with a round to go. "Sit down, son; it's all over," Eddie said softly after the devastating 14th round, and put his hand on Joe's shoulder. "No one will ever forget what you did here today."

On this day, Joe is late arriving for work at the gym. He is wrapping his own hands hurriedly. "Eddie? I don't miss Eddie. I don't miss anybody who don't miss me," says Frazier, not unkindly, not really. "Yank died [Yank Durham, Frazier's first trainer as a pro]. I didn't miss Yank. I had to do my job."

His hands properly swaddled, he pulls on a pair of cutoff bib overalls that bring back both the sharecropper's son and the slaughterhouse boy, and he picks up the tape player. Out on the gym floor, he throws his first punch at the wall, knocking down a framed quotation by former Heavyweight Champion of the World Gentleman Jim Corbett. Joe does not bend to pick it up or to read the first line.

Fight one more round.

"Why do you think I'm fighting?" says Ali, looking up from a dressing-room cot after working out in the Bahamas for his own comeback this week against Trevor Berbick. (If it comes off, that is; even Ali has trouble believing it.) For the spotlight, comes the reply. He is fighting again because he needs to be a star, needs to shine.

"If I just wanted that, wouldn't I take the 125 college lectures offered me? Wouldn't I just go to Times Square and walk a block and stop traffic? Ain't worried about the spotlight. Ain't worried about money. Ain't worried about all the heavyweights today who can't fight. Ain't worried about nothin' but being immortal."

A full-bellied 232 lbs. and a month from 40, he looks eminently mortal, not just paunchy but puffy, not only old but tired. "But, see, still smooth," he says, petting his face. "Nose in place, eyebrows untwisted. Show me a scratch anywhere."

In the voice there is a scratch that shows clearly. "Speech is the most recognizable sign," says Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, once Muhammad's personal physician, no longer in his corner. "Does Muhammad Ali speak today as he spoke in 1971 [the year of the first of the three Ali-Frazier wars]? Listen to Ali yourself and hear the dramatic and sad slowing of Ali's speech, slurring of his words, slowing of his mental processes."

Ali curls up on the cot, closes his eyes and, in that husky rasp of a voice, whispers, "The secret to my continuing the way I do is my consciousness of a continuing assault upon my own greatness and ability. Read that back to me." Twice it is read back to him. "There. That just came to me," he says. "Do I sound like I have brain damage?"

When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring, fight one more round . . .

Frazier can still shake the building. When he spars with his sons, Marvis and Hector, he looks old and slow. Like a gingerbread man, he has plumped out (to 229 lbs.). But the whomp he fetches the big bag can still tingle a spine. "At all times," he instructs the boys gently, "try to take their heads off."

Gentleness and cruelty get mixed up easily in boxing. Frazier has always been a primitive, without a great deal of art, just a great deal of courage. He fought, as they say, with his face. But he is not insensitive to all pain, only to physical pain.

Muhammad Ali's reaction to losing the first "Fight of the Century" to Frazier in 1971 was to stitch PEOPLE'S CHAMPION on his robe and go about maligning Joe in the black community. That hurt Frazier more than any punch. Ali called Joe "Uncle Tom" for visiting the White House, though that was his own first stop after he retrieved the title from George Foreman in 1974. Whether punishing Floyd Patterson or taunting Ernie Terrell, Ali was never so cruel to anyone as he was to Frazier, whom he termed "ignorant." Frazier simply offended him aesthetically. It required all of Ali's art to defeat a man with no art of his own, and that galled "the Greatest."

"I can't forget how cruel and rude Clay was," says Frazier, who, as a result, never stopped calling his adversary Cassius Clay. "But I think, now, I can forgive him. Oh, I always respected him as a fighter. Our ways were so different, and we were so different, but here we are at the same place." The same place? "We're fighting without any championships." Once won, is a championship ever completely lost? "A champion would be a champion if he's a champion," Frazier says thoughtfully, a deep thought for him. "Do you know who said that? God."

"The same place?" Ali murmurs. He does not like that, and momentarily his voice clears. "We're different still. I fight to motivate people. Think of the people who would give up in life who are watching me now. Four-time champion. Think of it. Biggest in all boxing. Isn't that enough to keep anyone going?"

He can go on with that patter, but he is tired now. "When you're 40, you'll find you get tired," he says. A few silent minutes pass. "Every so often," and his voice diminishes again, "a certain breed comes along. History might produce something better than Joe Frazier and me later, but not now. You can't make me believe Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns is as big as me and Joe Frazier in the Garden. Joe was great. I'll say it now."

When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired you wish your opponent would crack you on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round . . .

Last week in the decrepit Chicago Amphitheater, in the middle of the stockyards, Joe and Floyd ("Jumbo") Cummings fought to a melancholy ten-round draw. Frazier may still shake buildings, but what once would have been lethal lefts did not move Jumbo, a muscle-bound 30-year-old ex-convict, who almost knocked Joe out three different times. Joe's left eye was blackened, his lower lip was frayed, his face was starting to lose definition just like in the old days, and he felt wonderful. "It was worth it to me," he said. "When I got shook, I knew I had to survive. I proved myself. I don't see no reason to stop fighting now." Ali can see no reason either. . . . remembering that the man who fights one more round is never whipped."

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