If Ali had kept his mouth shut and been gracious to Frazier in Manila …

Just because the Clays had a stable family unit doesn’t mean they didn’t face what all African Americans faced in the bad old days.

And the Frazier family wasn’t completely destitute, they had a TV which is how Joe was introduced to boxing.

I actually have visited Beaufort, S.C., which is listed as Joe’s hometown although he actually grew up in a Gullah community outside town. There’s a road there named after Joe and supposedly he visited relatives in the area very often and relatively privately.

It’s a nice place for a day trip if anyone is ever in that part of the country, it’s about 40 miles from Savannah and 70 miles from Charleston, and the Parris Island Marine base is about 10 miles away. Great shops and restaurants, the bridge that Forrest Gump ran over is there in town and Jenny’s Tree is right outside of town, and there’s as much Revolutionary War-era architecture as there is in any place in the US. It survived the Civil War because Beaufort didn’t get ravaged like the rest of South Carolina because about 1863 they said, “We’re done,” and basically tapped out of the war.

 

I was looking on my Newspapers dot com subscription at New York Daily News (Phil Pepe and Dick Young) coverage of Ali-Frazier II, and the photos of Joe after that fight … I haven’t watched that fight start to finish in a while, I may do that tonight, but I didn’t remember them doing that significant an amount of damage to each other but Joe’s face looked like a friggin’ gargoyle, his right eye was getting close to “Basilio after Robinson” territory. Ali beat him up that night too.

And reading the coverage, Ali’s camp came right out and said their game plan was to clinch often to keep Joe from doing his thing, and Joe’s camp was whining that it was illegal and unmanly like Joe had some kind of innate right to do his thing and pressure Ali and if not for that he’d have won easily. Although the Daily News scorecard was 8-4 Ali and the coverage said the difference was Ali out worked Frazier significantly, finished strong and didn’t give away rounds screwing around.