The Foreman-Frazier fight

(Excerpt from “Cosell by Cosell”)

By Howard Cosell (1973)

Contributed by Mark Dodge

The two richest money fights in boxing history never came off. After all the talk and all the excuses and all the postmortems, that’s what it boiled down to for Ali, Frazier and Foreman. What the business boys call the bottom line.

I want to take you back to January 1972. The place: New Orleans, Louisiana. Dallas was to face Miami in the Super Bowl. But the night before the game, Joe Frazier was to fight a college student named Terry Daniels. Like so many fights of this ilk, it was hard for me to believe that this fight could be licensed. It was a disgraceful mismatch. But the promoters were hungry, the whole state was hungry to make it a big time sports weekend and to reap the rewards that were in the offing.

It was, in a boxing sense, a time when people were clamoring for a Frazier-Ali rematch. Everyone seemed to want it but Frazier. He had some coming back to do, after the physical punishment he had taken from Ali. Yancey Durham thought the best way to do it was slowly, carefully, by matching Joe with setups almost as if he were beginning his career all over again.

Nobody was even giving George Foreman a serious thought. Foreman had been building a long victory string against soft touches, also-rans, washed-up fighters, and youngsters even less ready than he appeared to be. Still, the general notion was that Foreman was anything but a polished fighter and he wasn’t considered to be in the same league with Frazier and Ali. One man thought otherwise – his manager, Dick Saddler. I know. Saddler came to me two days before the Super Bowl game. I was lunching at the Royal Orleans Hotel when Dick arrived with Foreman in tow. He got me aside and said, “George is ready and I’ve got him a big fight. We can’t keep going the way we’re going. Assuming I could get either Ali or Frazier, which do you think we should fight?”

“Without question,” I told him, “Joe Frazier. His style is exactly right for George. George will kill him. He might have trouble even finding Ali in the ring.”

Saddler looked at me and said, “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear you say. I agree with you one hundred percent.”

That was our conversation in a nutshell. George and Dick took off, and I thought no more about it. I couldn’t believe that there wouldn’t be an Ali-Frazier rematch before anybody even thought of George Foreman. This was my mistake. I underrated the deep dislike that Frazier has for Ali, a dislike that ultimately cost him multimillions of dollars.

Frazier went his own way. He did away with poor young Daniels. He even fought a pitiful stiff named Ron Stander in Omaha, another fight that should not have been licensed. This one reminded me of the rape of Shelby, Montana, when Jack Kearns and Jack Dempsey took 100,000 silver dollars out of that tiny town after Dempsey had done away with a man named Gibbons. Only this time it was the rape of Omaha and Council Bluffs.

Joe Frazier is not a difficult man to understand. He is a decent, honest man, one who wants to be liked. No—put it another way: He is a man who wanted to be popular and yet never achieved great popularity as the heavyweight champion of the world. He was deeply hurt by all this and, quite understandably, he blamed Ali for it. In my lifetime, I have never seen a man work harder, train harder for a fight than Joe Frazier did for Muhammad Ali. Next to Ali, Frazier is a small man, though his biceps are huge.

His manager, his handlers, even his attorney all knew what a difficult job Frazier had before him. Nobody knew it better than Frazier. But for Joe, beating Ali became a matter of fierce necessity. He had spent all his years in Ali’s shadow. While he had knocked out the Quarrys and the Ellises of the world to achieve championship eminence, he lived with the knowledge that the public still viewed the idle Ali as the real champion. It became an ugly, festering sore within him.

In a way I had helped foster that notion – both in the public mind and in Frazier’s. During Ali’s exile, I had cut a network-radio promotional spot that went: “This is Howard Cosell … if you don’t believe Muhammad Ali is the heavyweight champion of the world then you get in the ring with him.” Ali loved it. He at it up. Everywhere he went, he began to mimic me saying that. But for Joe Frazier it was just one more twist of the knife. Joe also felt that I favored Ali over him, despite the fact that I picked Joe to knock Ali out. But Joe is a direct man. It is one of the things I admire most about him. He came up to me one day and said, “I’ve got all the respect in the world for you, and for all you’ve done. But I think that sometimes you mislead the public about Ali.”

I told him that I thought he was dead wrong. I added that I had a vast personal respect for him, Joe Frazier. But the wound was deep in Joe. After he beat Ali, as I have pointed out already, Ali actually convinced much of the public that he had won the fight and been robbed by the decision against him. This was unbearable medicine for Frazier to take. He would go on tour with his rock group and there would be nothing but empty seats. This clean, decent man, who had never invited public disfavor by any action of his, simply was not being accepted by the public in anything like the manner to which he was truly entitled. Little wonder that he could not bear Ali, and this had to be a primary reason for the long negotiations for a rematch – negotiations that were never consummated.

Instead, Frazier signed to fight George Foreman in Kingston, Jamaica. His manager Yancey Durham, did not want that fight. He made that clear before the fight took place. Frazier wanted it. First, he regarded Foreman lightly, and second and more important, he wanted Ali to wait and wait and wait, though his public cry was always to the effect that he would fight Ali anytime, if he got the right money deal. There may have been some truth to this, but, in my opinion, not a lot.

Kingston, Jamaica, was an extraordinary experience. It was a whole new and utterly illogical scene set for a heavyweight championship fight. Kingston is as poverty-stricken, as ghetto-like a city as I have ever seen. There is enormous tension between black and white in the currently restive political situation that exists there, clearly the result of years of exploitation of the natives by the British. One rarely sees a white out alone at night.

Into this situation came two black fighters and a horde of white sportswriters and tourists. One of the remarkable things the Jamaican government did was set up a wall of security the night of the fight that gave everybody a feeling of relief upon arrival at the stadium.

In the days before the fight I spent much time with both fighters. I was frankly shocked by Joe Frazier. I went down there picking Foreman to win, to knock Joe Frazier out, because I had meant what I said to Dick Saddler. My faith in Foreman was very secure. I had believed in him since the 1968 Olympics. I had been with him often since and indeed for a brief spell he sat next to me and added comments during the boxing competition in the Munich Olympics.

Foreman is the American Dream. He lives clean and he thinks clean and he has a sense of values. He has a true, deep, abiding concern for young people. He’s a man of strong religious bent. He is also one of the most powerfully built young men I have ever seen and quite possibly the strongest puncher I have ever seen, including even Joe Louis. He is not a polished boxer and probably never will be, but you don’t have to be a polished boxer to fight Joe Frazier.

I was shocked by Frazier because he seemed to have taken none of this into account. I visited him at length in his suite and found him almost contemptuous of Foreman as an opponent. Also – and he was quite ready to talk about it – Frazier didn’t like some of the things that Foreman was saying. This is not unusual in boxing buildup. Frazier thought that Foreman was being personally insulting in the way he characterized Frazier himself. And Joe spoke to me about it openly in the preflight interview I did with him.

Another thing surprised me. Even though it was clear that Frazier thought he could beat Foreman almost at will, he was very edgy. Ali was still on his mind. And if he wasn’t, the writers would put him right back there by questioning Frazier about the rematch. Once while I was with Joe in his suite he got a call from Mel Durslag in Los Angeles. Mel asked him how soon there would be a rematch with Ali after he was done with Foreman. This was representative of what Frazier was facing every day in Kingston.

I remember leaving Frazier’s suite with Harold Conrad, the press agent, and saying to Conrad, “I feel sorry for Joe. He doesn’t even know that he’s going to get murdered.”

One morning I walked with George Foreman for the better part of an hour. Nobody was paying any attention to George, and it didn’t seem to matter to him at all. He just went on his cheery way, totally confident that he would surprise the world, but not himself.

When I finally left George, I bumped into Red Smith, the famed columnist. I asked Red how he thought the fight would be. “Might be pretty good,” he said, “for seven rounds or so.” The inference was that Frazier would clearly have his way with Foreman. Then he asked, “What do you think?”

I grinned broadly. “I think Foreman may kill him,” I said. “Literally, may kill him.”

During the fight, as brief as it was, that thought surfaced as a very real fear—that Foreman might kill him. He manhandled Frazier with astonishing ease. His punches had all the power I suspected they had, and more. One actually lifted Frazier off the floor. When the fight was stopped, I jumped into the incredibly wild ring scene. In that ring George Foreman came to me and said, “I won this fight for Howard Cosell, and for all the others like him who believed in me. I knew I would win it when you told me I could.”

What was happening at ringside, and on the periphery of the fight, heightened the drama. Bob Arum, Ali’s attorney, was there to press Durham on the rematch. Angelo Dundee, Ali’s trainer, sat at my elbow as the night unfolded. Dundee, in fact, had a portent of what would happen. He even picked Foreman to win. When Frazier went down again and again, for the fifth and sixth time in the second round, Dundee was on his feet, screaming at the referee to stop it.

Bob Arum and Dundee were pale when it ended. They knew that Frazier was not the only loser; millions of dollars had vanished in the night. Arum was a dazed, stunned figure, wandering aimlessly through the crowd, seeking to salvage what he could. He and Dundee were consoled by one thought: Another potential bonanza might be created by an Ali-Foreman confrontation. The Frazier riches were gone forever. This is the nature of boxing; it feeds off its own energy. Another deal, another angle, is always around the corner.

Their concern at that point was keeping Foreman alive and unbeaten until a match with Ali could be arranged. It was clear that Foreman’s handlers wouldn’t rush into it. And no one could possible anticipate that the clinker would not come from Foreman but from Ali’s carelessness in preparing for Ken Norton, and the debacle that followed.

George handled himself superbly, with grace and modesty and cool assurance. At last the American boxing public had a way to go: Those who could never tolerate the attitudes of Ali – who could never understand him, actually – and those who could never get excited over stolid Joe Frazier now had a place to turn, a hero out of the classic mold. A kid from the streets, out of the Job Corps, who isn’t a thug, who likes youngsters, who feels a genuine debt to his country, to his sport, to the people who helped along the way.

Yet even in the case of wholesome, appealing, storybook George Foreman, a question exists: Can he avoid being obscured by the sheer personality of Ali? It may be that in public view Foreman doesn’t have, and isn’t likely to acquire, that mystical quality called “charisma.”

Ali, for one, doesn’t think he can. He delights in telling how he had to introduce George to the people in San Diego when the young champion appeared at the scene of the first Norton fight. Ali paraded him around, testing strangers’ recognition of him, creating a scene wherever they stood. “See,” he would bellow, “nobody knows who you are, George. They think I’m still the champ.” Foreman watched Ali do his act and walked away, laughing.

That’s Ali’s problem. Where Joe Frazier cared, George Foreman doesn’t give a damn … And I remain convinced that Ali will never touch George Foreman, vocally or otherwise.

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