Just finished Joe Frazier's autobiography

Yes Sir but for years they were falling in & out of love lol!
You know the video that one of Frazier's son posted with him-rather playing the audio from Frazier's voice mail where he bitterly gloats about ALi's condition? Joe is living in the back of his gym, older, it is very likely after that.
And Foreman & Holmes taking turns staying between Ali & Frazier when the latter berates him...

It is just very possible that second hand information is wrong-or right-that Ali made these public & private Mea culpas.
Early on when Ali sent someone very close to him to apologize to Frazier & Frazier very reasonably said Ali should come himself, he did noit follow up then.
And he still sometimes provoked old Joe...

Now I would be surprised if Ali offered NO kind of apology forever, although possible.
But people tend to avoid full responsibility, justify &/or minimize their sins.
Ali as late as the 1975 Playboy interview was talking about justifying murder for race mising-I mean other black people being killed-he had many virtues & treated people wonderfully & quite charitably often & was a principled inspiration...

But I do not think he was completely well-intergarted himself-psychologically.
And I am not just that surreal video of him & the KKK respectfully speaking at the same rally in favor of segregation lol!

I wonder if'n he ever apologized for any of these crackpot idea(l)s?

 

Muhammad has quite often stated that his religious/social/political philosophies have evolved through the years.

 

But Stevie; that does not show what has changed.
Without condemning things like murdering folks for dating interracially or saying I was completely wrong & I am very sorry, we cannot tell how & what may have changed.

 

He left the NOI in 1977 and with it its separatist ideology . He said he came to learn the white man isn't the devil and that we are all responsible for our own actions. Two of his daughters are married to white men. He even went to his grandson's Bar Mitzvah. BTW he sent Marvis to apologize to Joe for him. That's when Joe said if he wants to apologize he can apologize himself. Marvis seemed to have a good relationship with Ali.

 

That's right.

 

Yes thanks but I am saying that I do not know ifr he ever realy repented for his sins.Probably gets partial credit-I long knew about him sending Marvis to apologize but he should have then done so himself: & literally be willing to do what he promised & betrayed his word about after FOTC: crawl across the ring & declare Frazier was the Greatest, whether kissing his feet or not.

I mean that is how repentant & humble as he should have been-immediately.
Likewise such an active/activist public figure should have specifically condemned his bat-bleep crazy, hate-suffused idea(l)s like sayi8ng people or mobs presumably can & should murder say a black woman for getting with a white man.

BUT also even when Ali believed Monstrous things on an ieological & group level, he was mostly not seemingly animated by hate on that level-AND I would say treated individual white people well & not as sterotypes.
Even when he lied & said Joe Bugner called me a ni**er that was-unlike with Frazier-not mean nor something deeply hurtful-Ali had a trinkle in his eye or winked at Joe, doing so to promote the fight...

This cognitive dissonance between his fundamantal decency & what he putatively believed & spouted is a large part of why I say he was not so well-intergrated as a personality in some ways.

HOWEVER also people are not merely a collection of pathologies + checking off virtue boxes-on a human level he was both extraordinary, highly charismatic, very generous including with his time, & kind to people of all races, especially children...
Called the boys "champ" & the girls "princess", these gays that unfortunately could get him in trouble lol!

 

Yeah, well, Ali never had to take the public sh-t that Frazier did from him, so I give Joe a free pass. F-ck Muhammad's "twinkle".

 

I do not know if you are paying attention to what I actually wrote.
Please re-read the post.
I am deeply critical of Ali's Cruelty to Frazier, always have been.
Ali was also leveraging racist stereotypes against Frazier, who grew up much harder than him AND personally intervened at the highest level to get his license back (if also self-interested in that) & gacve him money when he could not box.
It was a deep betrayal.

Although Frazier's disrespect of saying "Clay" instead preceeded Ali's years of abuse, it was a dramatically lesser offense.

But we still must give credit where it is due; Ali was great in many ways, including to others of all persuasions on an individual level.
I was saying that he was just being mischievous with accusing Bugner of the N word, Joe was not resentful there, & nobody thought the Englishman had deployed the N-Bomb.

 

Good morning/afternoon Entaowed - depending upon where you are. A lot of Muhammad's later writings will illustrate how his thoughts evolved on a lot of things.

 

there is no denying Ali was swept up in the heat of black extremism to the extent requiring government surveillance, a lot of the "bad" stuff he said was when his head was full of that crap, which I think Frazier may be alluding to when he pokes at the name "Muhammad" or calling him Clay, it's like why couldn't he just change his name and go on with it instead of making some big spectacle out of it, he never knew how to just shut the f*ck up, which is the same thing he did with Frazier he ran his mouth and made a spectacle of it

 

Hardly a fair comparison though is it? Calling him the Acorn because of a shaved head and then with Frasier the racial insults, attacking his intelligence and speech, misrepresenting him, positioning him as a traitor to his race, turning him into a hate figure for many, etc. I think part of the issue is about how all this is perceived and how for may it continues to be perceived - it was not about just adding 'pizzaz' to the promotions. It was more than that, it had a real point and purpose to it.

It represents a part of Ali's life and not the whole man but there was a period in which he held so appalling views and did some vile things. I think ignoring that and downplaying it does a disservice to the man and the overall times. It was a period of immense cultural and political upheaval - Ali was a major figure in that. Remembering the whole picture accurately (and the pressures he was up against too) seems more appropriate. That applies to everyone and does not mean others did not have their flaws too.

 

I think Frazier wanted ... and I think from the tone of the conversation here, some people subliminally and retroactively would like to have seen ... Ali groveling like a dog.

I don't think Ali should've groveled like a dog.

I do think he should've apologized to Joe personally.

As far as his beliefs, every solitary bit of reporting that was ever done reflected that in the last part of his life, the man was a serious, observant, faithful, dedicated and quite conventional practitioner of Islam. He lived it.

Should he have called a press conference and reputed ever single solitary thing that ever came out of his mouth in relation to the perversion of Islam that he once was connected with?

Remember, such talk got Malcolm X killed ... IMO, better just to move on and do his thing.

 

He left the Nation. That was enough. He didn't need to trash it on the way out. He spent a lot more of his life outside of it and not in it. He spent a lot more of his life practicing racial reconciliation than racial separatism.

 

You may be right, but it's not like he singled Joe out with insults. He was quite the equal-opportunity gadfly. He called Liston the big ugly bear. He called Chuvalo the washerwoman. He called Spinks Dracula. He called Foreman the mummy. He called Patterson the rabbitt. And I can't remember which one, but he called either Wepner or Dunn Frankenstein. So why was anybody surprised that the insults were going to fly when he fought Frazier? Did he think he was exempt? Why didn't we hear from the others on how insensitive Ali was? Maybe because they all made their biggest purses for an Ali fight? It was all a part of the Ali show and I just think it came down to Joe being the most thin-skinned.

 

I think it’s more important to judge them as fighters. They paid their dues in the ring and are entitled to their opinions after it.

However, it is interesting to look at the personality clash from Joes standpoint.

Joe was a tough man. I read his book and whilst I have no doubt he was a straight shooting guy, a real unapologetic, get what you see kind of guy, the stuff about Ali has to be taken into context in relation to how he regarded the rest of his opponents too. It’s only bad what he says about Ali if he had nice things to say about other opponents…but I don’t remember that he did.

it’s a while since I read it, but I still have the book so I can go and check if I have remembered it wrong, but I remember it striking me at the time that recalling any of his opponents Joe was far less complementary than any of the other champions I have read. And that’s not a knock on him. I think he was taken to a place each time he fought that he was just unable to really be that positive about any of the guys he fought. Or anyone in the way of where he needs to get to. Some champions are able to think fondly about at least some old opponents. Joe wasn’t one of them.

To us it just seems like once the dust has settled and the money has been made there’s no harm in saying something nice about a guy you made money fighting against. But these champions, some of them are wired to remain forever competitive and feisty.