Fifty years ago tonight, March 8, 1971, some 20,000 extraordinarily lucky people convened in Madison Square Garden for the Fight of the Century by which all other Fights of the Century before or since shrivel in comparison.
When heavyweights Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in the same ring after years of anticipation, they were a combined 57-0, but it was not merely the first time in the boxing’s not-always-glorious history that two unbeatens fought for the heavyweight title, it was an event so overwrought with social, cultural, political, and historical allegories that, to mangle a revered John Prine lyric, “if dreams were lightning, thunder were desire, (that) old house would have burnt down.”
“Another writer called the other day,” International Boxing Hall of Famer Russell Peltz told me on the phone from Philadelphia this week. “He said, ‘It was probably the same as Pacquiao-Mayweather.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It could never have been as big. Muhammad Ali was the most famous person on earth for much of his life.”
Peltz, the legendary fight promoter, was among the remaining eyewitnesses, owner of a $20 balcony seat he stood overnight in the Manhattan snow to attain. And he didn’t have to. That’s another story that simply must be told again.
“Frazier went to the Catskills to train, but the weather was so bad and the snow so deep he couldn’t run,” said Peltz, who was then 24 and had begun promoting fights in Philadelphia less than two years earlier. “So he came back to Philly to train at his gym, and his son Marvis was collecting money at the door — $2 a pop — to watch him, so I went in there one day and paid my two bucks, and Yank Durham (Joe’s trainer) pulled me aside and he had about 20 comps for the fight, 23 tickets and he wanted to make some extra money selling them but he could get caught doing it himself. He asked me to sell them for him and whatever I sold on top of the face value we would split.
“But I was young and I wasn’t street smart, so I sold all the tickets at face value, but one was for $150. At the time I was probably making $4,000 promoting fights, a year. So that was worth a lot I wrestled with it. I didn’t know what to do. I finally sold it to a guy who ran a bar in Center City that had sold tickets for my fights.
“The night of the fight, I was in the first row of the top tier of the Garden with my binoculars, and I’m looking for my friend from the bar, and there he is, in the front row with Frank Sinatra and Diana Ross and Burt Lancaster and I thought, ‘that could have been you, you jerk.’”
Anybody who was anybody, as that weary saying goes, roared as one at the opening bell of a 15-round ballet of welts and blood, swelling and yelling, endless heart and bottomless soul.
A flood of writing brilliance got poured into defining the magnitude of the moment — Norman Mailer was at ringside for Life Magazine for God’s sake — but a good summary can be found in “Once There Were Giants,” a book on that era by the redoubtable New Jersey sports columnist Jerry Izenberg.
“America was being divided by the Vietnam War as never before,” he wrote of the years after Ali refused to be drafted. “Hippies were against it — and thus Ali supporters — were pitted against the hard hats who were for it. African Americans who were heavily for Ali as their black hero didn’t stop to realize that Ali at the time was opposed to the racial integration that most of them prized, while Frazier was for it. At the same time, many whites who disliked Ali on racial grounds treated Frazier as their black representative. Finally, misdirected white people seemed to be split generationally: most of the older ones supported Frazier, and the younger ones of military age supported Ali. Each of these groups seemed to forget that, as dramatic as the story was, this was still just a prize fight between two very good heavyweight boxers.”
Ali was four inches taller than Frazier and, that night, about 10 pounds heavier. He had a seven-inch reach advantage and his incomparable jab stung every inch of Frazier’s face in the early rounds. Ali’s ring-mastery and showmanship were at play as well, particularly on the occasions that Frazier’s calamitous left hook ripped into his ribs in the middle rounds. Ali smiled and wobbled his knees to mock his opponent. Frazier, according to Izenberg, thought Ali was trying to lure him into a trap, and backed away. Reality was that Ali was truly hurt. Had Frazier attacked in those moments, the fight might have been a lot shorter.
But the banging continued long into the night. The Garden audience was boiling. Closed circuit theater audiences around the world were transfixed. Mutual Radio broadcast round-by-round summaries ripped from the AP and UPI wires. Nelson Mandela, from an African jail, pleaded for details.
Frazier, then 27, the 12th child of a one-armed South Carolina farmer, began to take control. By the 15th round, he led on all three judges’ cards, and the left hook had one more appointment. It crashed into Ali’s jaw a half second after The Greatest missed with the murderous right he’d intended to end it.
Ali went down hard, got up fast, and no doubt started to think about how he’d spin this to his favor, as he’d done time and again and would for most of the next decade.
“The knockdown was perfect; it was the perfect ending, you couldn’t have scripted it any better,” said Peltz. “It was just the whole thing, the liberals, the conservatives, Frazier being unjustly labeled an Uncle Tom by Ali, which was just unconscionable. All of it was wrapped up in that knockdown.”
They’d fight twice more, with Ali winning both, and Ali would win the title twice more, against George Foreman and Leon Spinks. And while all those moments packed suitable drama, there was never again a night remotely resembling March 8, 1971.
