Joe Frazier competes in weight lifting contest

It was the superstars show and it was about different proofs .frazier could not swim and the people laughed

 

Well, Frazier lived during the time of segregated swimming pools.

 

In fairness he goes about the last lift all wrong. If he didn't he might have made it.

 

In all fairness to Joe his left arm was bent after he broke it on a plantation
as a kid . He could never straighten his left arm again as it healed
without a cast. Boxing involves functional strength and in the ring he
bullied Chuvalo and Norton in sparring both who would have outlifted
Joe in the gym comfortably .

 

We had this show in Britain back in the day. John Conteh was a good all rounder and did well on it.

 

Look at Conteh here at 12 minutes. John H Stracey was in this as well.

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Surprised how small Joe looked there. The fella he was up against done them lifts piece of **** too, he could've done 180 190

 

Conteh lifted 50lb heavier than Frazier and was more than 2 stone lighter. Definitely not Joe's forte lifting

 

Some great fighters are also great athletes, and some are not.

I guess that Frazier just wasn't.

 

With the exception of Seagren, they all had pretty terrible technique; you can tell that, back in the early 70s, weight lifting hadn't quite made it into training regimes of many athletes outside of track and field. Frazier had brute strength in his favor, but after a certain point you need more than strength. Interesting that 170 lbs won it that year; three years later, Brian Oldfield (again, track and field athlete) put up 310. A higher level of competition, and a sign that weights were getting greater acceptance in sports training.

 

Not one of Joe's finest moments

 

Frazier's body fat was something like 1%. He went straight to the bottom of the pool.

 

I really felt for Joe during that Superstars competition. Just a few short weeks earlier he had been the undefeated heavyweight boxing champion with an aura of invincibility. He lost the title in such a devastating way to George Foreman and now he's not doing so well against these other athletes.

In fairness to Joe, he is really out of his element in many of these events. Weightlifting is as much technique as it is strength, and Joe was doing it on raw strength alone. His feet were in a boxing position and as mentioned above, he could not straighten his left arm, a recipe for disaster in lifting. It seemed clear that he had not done much lifting previously and for a novice what he did was more than respectable. It wasn't shown in this video clip, but he also come in last in the 100 yard dash, and it looked like his time was 11 seconds. Now in my high school gym class if anyone did it in 11 seconds that would have been considered very good. But these were pro athletes, he was Joe Frazier, and he came in last. It's always been a mystery to me why he took part in the Superstars competition at all, as this had to be a real downer for him. Still, it demonstrated his heart and gameness, as well as the fact that he was a mortal human being. To my knowledge neither Ali nor Foreman participated in the Superstars at any time and I've often wondered how they might have done if they had.

 

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