One fighter wore crushed red velvet. The other, green-and-gold satin. Frank Sinatra snapped pictures ringside for Life magazine and Norman Mailer added the words. More than 300 million people watched in real time around the globe. It was the greatest sporting event in the history of the world.
The two combatants for the world heavyweight title, both undefeated, could not have been more divergent. Muhammad Ali could have been Kurosawa’s muse, so Rashomon-like, so subjective, so self-serving and contradictory. Something to all, everything to others. Joe Frazier, on the other hand, was blue-collar specific. South Carolina humble, South Philadelphia smoke. Their symbiotic relationship is timeless — Ali robust with shuffles and dance, Frazier ever advancing, repeating with left hooks.
One could legitimately argue that the true and fair starting date for professional sports in America is 1947, the year that Jackie Robinson starred on Major League Baseball diamonds, which up to then, prejudice and hatred had decided he would not. Olympian Jesse Owens, with magnificent athleticism, and boxer Joe Louis, employing controlled fury, both spat in the face of white supremacy, but it would be more than a decade later before Jackie (and shortly thereafter, Larry Doby) would flush Jim Crow back to the bowels of Dixie and away from America’s ballparks. (That’s the thing about white supremacy: it remains a disgustingly resilient scourge).
But March 8, 1971, stands as the lodestar for sports in America, the day competition transcended its man-made boundaries and indelibly rubbed up against society’s soul. The epic fight touched everyone, even those who had no clue what was going on in the middle of the Madison Square Garden ring.
And much of what remains from the lessons of that historic night remains today in one form or another.
Rooting interests in the fight divided along racial lines. Most white people backed Frazier, most Blacks, Ali, even though any examination of Joe’s personal life story would yield a tale much more closely hewed from the African-American experience in this country than that of Ali. Southern sharecropper poor, migrant to the promising North alone at fifteen, Frazier was the Black Joad. Ali was raised middle class all the way, labeled uppity, became a Black Muslim. Fifty years later, the yoke of race is still easily adjusted and manipulated in America. Up until weeks ago, white supremacists were more welcome in the White House than journalists.
Ali’s anti-Vietnam war stance made him the darling of the left. It was more than a stance — he was so dug in, bursting with conviction, and fervently willing to forfeit the money and baubles of his profession, that it remains one of the single most courageous positions ever taken by a private citizen in American history. Frazier — conservative, quiet — was the darling of the right. Today, would tough guy Frazier be leeched onto by paper tough guys like Sean Hannity for the purpose of further dividing this country? Would the right have become “patriots” the second Joe landed that left hook in round 15? And would Ali still deny he lost (calling it a “white man’s decision”), proving that delusion is not only a Republican thing?
Ali’s cruelty to Frazier — the name-calling, the verbal abuse, the mocking that went beyond mere ticket salesmanship and promotion — was a through-line to the fight. It was wrong and below him and hurtful. I know that Joe forgave him, because I asked him about it many years later on the sports and entertainment radio show I used to host. “If you were stuck on an elevator, alone with Ali, just the two of you, what would you say to him?” I asked.
“I would say, hop on my back, I’ll take you out of here, you don’t keep hate in your heart forever,” Joe replied. Dignity and forgiveness personified. America, pay attention to that smiling, fedora-wearing left hook-thrower.
Ali’s activism still resonates today. Black professional athletes are steeled to use their public forum for fighting wrong wherever they see it. Strides made in Black voter registration prove that their voices are heard. Black athletes have turned Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s order to “shut up and dribble” into a command more relevant for the last president than to basketball great LeBron James.
It’s been 50 years since the world stopped to watch a prizefight. Who would say that America is more civil, more upright, more kind today than in 1971? The same ills and problems — racism, intolerance, political warring — exponentially cleave a punch-drunk America five decades later. It’s fair to ask where we are as a country. The answer may lie in an echo of the despair of boxer Mountain Rivera in the film “Requiem for a Heavyweight”: I’m in America and it’s raining.
Marotta is a filmmaker.
