Who picked who to win! Ali vs Frazier, March 8, 1971!

The counterpoint was Ali fought Quarry and Bonavena, two quality contenders and went 15 rounds knocking Bonavena out, which is something Frazier could not do in two fights.

These aren't warm up fights, they are fights vs good compeition.

Ali just lost the FOTC Plain and simple, and Frazier to this day does not get enough credit for his performance.

Ali was in his prime and in shape. His main problem is he had not had the need to clinch, or learned how to, but did for the re-matches when Frazier was even more past his prime than Ali was.

 

"Two unbeaten fighters with claims to the heavyweight championship," Markson said. "And each at the peak of his career."

But it was more than a boxing show. As the 20th anniversary of this Monday March 8, 1971, event approaches, it is remembered mostly as a morality play: Ali the Black Muslim braggart who had emerged as the symbol of protest against the Vietnam War during his three-and-a-half-year exile from boxing vs. Frazier, who had emerged not only as Ali's successor as champion, but somehow as the symbol of the establishment.

"I got no quarrel," Ali had said in 1967, "with them Viet Cong."

When Ali, then still known to some as Cassius Clay, refused to take the required step forward at his Army induction in 1967, he suddenly had a quarrel with the Federal Government. Three months after Ali-Frazier I, he was cleared by the United States Supreme Court of a charge of refusing induction. And as boxing's only three-time heavyweight champion, Ali is cherished now. But in the months before the Garden fight, much of the nation still resented him.

"Some people don't like me because of the draft," he said. "Some because of my religion. Some because I'm black. Some because of things I don't even know about."

While Ali was a lecturer on college campuses during his boxing exile, the 27-year-old Frazier was constructing a 26-0 record with 23 knockouts. At age 29, Ali, who had stopped Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena late the previous year, had a 31-0 record with 25 knockouts. Ali predicted a sixth-round knockout, but Frazier was the 6-5 betting favorite.

"I'm a small piece of leather," Frazier liked to say, "but I'm well put together."

Billed, like so many other bouts, as the Fight of the Century, it is treasured more as the Fight Night of the Century. When the lights dimmed for the national anthem, Frank Sinatra slipped into a press-row seat as a Life magazine photographer not far from Don Dunphy's microphone. In the glitzy $150 ringside, Diana Ross wore a shimmering gown, men pranced in purple or lemon suits, women preened in mink and diamonds.

At the noontime weigh-in, Frazier had been 203 1/2 pounds before returning to the Pierre Hotel with several New York City detectives guarding him because of death threats. Ali had been 215 pounds but instead of going to his room at the New Yorker hotel, he remained inside the arena. With so many Ali fans gathered outside, it was decided that he would stay in the Garden rather than risk a wild street scene.

"We were trapped," recalled his trainer, Angelo Dundee. "We ate in the Penn Plaza Club there and instead of taking a walk on the street, Muhammad had to walk around counting seats."

When the bell rang for the first round, 20,455 seats in the Garden were filled, as well as an estimated 300 million seats at closed-circuit sites and foreign television sets all over the world. Frazier quickly established the tempo. In his green-and-gold brocade trunks, Frazier bored in, slamming left hooks to the body and head. Ali, in red trunks and with red tassels flopping on his white boxing shoes, was unable to float like a butterfly or sting like a bee.

"My guy started playing around," Dundee has said. "Patting him on the head, hamming it up by looking out at the people at ringside. I told him to stop messing around. But while my guy was playing, Frazier came on strong."

In the 11th round, Frazier had Ali wobbling. Early in the 15th round, Frazier threw a lunging left hook to the already swollen right side of Ali's jaw. Ali fell backwards onto the canvas, the sound of the knockdown resembling a clap of thunder. Quickly gathering his legs and his senses, Ali was up as fast as a boxer can get up. But at the final bell, Frazier smiled through his mouthpiece. He knew he had won, just as Ali knew he had lost. His head bowed, Ali turned to those in his corner.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

In the unanimous decision, Judge Bill Recht scored it 11-4 in rounds, Judge Artie Aidala 9-6 and Referee Arthur Mercante 8-6-1. After a patter of boos, cheers hailed Frazier's deserved triumph. Uncharacteristically, Ali never appeared in the interview area. He hurried to Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital for X-rays of his jaw, which were negative. Eight days after the fight, Frazier entered St. Luke's and Childrens Medical Center in Philadelphia. He remained there about a week for treatment of kidney damage and exhaustion.

Ali quickly proclaimed: "I really won. Joe Frazier had to go to the hospital after the whuppin' I gave him." But the day after the fight, sprawled in his hotel bed, Ali knew who won.

"When a man gets me going, that's a punch," Ali said, meaning Frazier's left hook. "And when a man drops me, that's a hell of a punch. I didn't give the fight to him. He earned it."

The promoters, Cooke and Perenchio, earned about $750,000 after taxes from the $20 million gross but for two decades they have guarded their film, "The Fighters," to be released in videotape by Petersen Communications later this year. And the Garden earned its share of the record $1,352,951 gate.

But more than each's $2.5 million, even more than in their Thrilla in Manila epic in 1975, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali earned their pedestals in sports history by justifying the Fight Night of the Century.


>>Still looking for the experts picks.