“We’re just two colored boys from the ghetto and we have the whole world watching us in the greatest event of all time!”
Thus did Muhammad Ali describe himself and Joe Frazier hours before they faced off at Madison Square Garden 50 years ago this week in a highly-anticipated rematch, the second in a trilogy of iconic slugfests between the pair of champion boxers.
Promoters dubbed the contest “Super Fight II,” a title that never stuck.
Seldom does the second Ali-Frazier fight make it onto boxing historians’ rankings of history’s greatest heavyweight title bouts, or of Ali’s best performances—an honor routinely accorded the first and third matches.
It’s time that changed.
The previous Ali-Frazier meeting, hailed as “The Fight of the Century,” also held in the Garden, in March 1971, had been an event of global significance: The first fight between two undefeated heavyweight champions, fraught with the fiery politics of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Ali was pretty-faced and fleet-footed, a rhyming-and-jiving convert to Islam attempting to regain the belt after three-and-a-half years of exile, imposed after he resisted military induction into the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector.
Plodding and poorly spoken, Frazier was the hard-luck son of a South Carolina sharecropper who had captured Olympic gold back in 1964.
A decade later, Frazier was now a favorite of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, which viewed the conflict in Vietnam more favorably.
For 15 grueling rounds, Ali worked his left jab during that first match, firing off blinding combinations to his opponent’s face, while Frazier, bobbing and weaving, a hard target, moved in relentlessly, punishing Ali’s head and midsection.
Less than a minute into the final round, Frazier uncorked a left hook to Ali’s jaw that briefly floored The Greatest.
The Garden erupted.
Frazier drew the unanimous decision — and a three-week stay in the hospital.
Now, as the Age of Sequels dawned— “The Godfather Part II” was soon to debut — Ali and Frazier agreed to meet, on Jan. 23, in the Manhattan studios of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” to review the videotape of that first match alongside host Howard Cosell.
As usual, Ali taunted Frazier cruelly about his looks and education, and the latter, three-and-a-half inches shorter than Ali — his reach a full six-and-a-half inches shorter — had enough.
Boy, how you figure I’m ignorant? asked the casually-clad Frazier, standing menacingly over his rival.
In an instant, Ali, in a dark three-piece suit, rose to pre-empt Frazier’s aggression with a headlock — Sit down quick, Joe! — as producers, technicians, and flunkies dove onto them, muffled microphones scraping and scratching as the duo tumbled from the foot-high riser to the concrete floor, wrestling like school kids.
Citing “deplorable conduct” that “demeaned the sport of boxing,” the New York State Athletic Commission later fined them each $5,000.
So when the bell sounded to open Super Fight II a few days later, there was already bad blood and the Garden audience — 20,748 strong, larger than the first Ali-Frazier bout, celebrities shimmering in extravagant Soul Chic threads — expected war.
But of what intensity?
Super-Fight II was to be a 12-round match.
Frazier, then 30, had lost the heavyweight championship in Jamaica a year earlier, when George Foreman pummeled him to the canvas six times in two rounds, prompting Cosell’s legendary call: Down goes FRAY-zhuh! Down goes FRAY-zhuh!
Ali, at 32, had fought 139 rounds since the first Frazier fight in 1971, including two matches with a young ex-Marine named Ken Norton, who broke Ali’s jaw in March 1973.
Moreover, Ali’s right hand was injured and weak, requiring cortisone shots.
Of the third man in the ring, referee Tony Perez, Cosell said he possessed “the youth, the know-how, the swiftness, and the strength to execute his job.”
Lithe and limber, Ali danced like the Ali of old: a balletic, backward-circling motion from which he struck like a cobra.
He was first to connect, 35 seconds in, with a right-left-left combo that thrilled the crowd.
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