Why did Muhammad Ali disrespect Frazier so much?

lets reverse that shall we. joe frazier got banned in 1967 and came back 6 months before the 1971 undefeated title fight and lost. do you think that would be a peak frazier?

 

Frazier helped Ali during the ban loaned him money, and Ali thanked him with the racial slurs and horrible comments.

 

Ali went down to his gym because Frazier invited him down there.That's hardly an example of harassment.

 

My mistake. I may be thinking of George Foreman.

But I recall an incident where Ali whipped up a crowd and told them all that he and Frazier were going to settle it on the street.

 

I'm pretty sure that was the incident, only it was Fairmount park that he suggested.He went there and a huge crowd followed him, and Yank Durham was never going to allow Frazier to follow him down there.

 

If Frazier retired after the FOTC, he would be rated way higher than he currently is. He shouldn't have slacked and underestimated Foreman. He weighed about 10 pounds heavier in the Foreman fight than in the FOTC fight. His FOTC weight was his peak weight.

 

I'm trying to find an article or something to refresh my memory, but I am coming up short.

I'll defer on this.

 

I just watched FOTC again - haven't watched it round by round for a long time. I never recognised how much show boating Frazier did (I mean by Joe's standards).

This included dropping his hands, and deliberate catching punches to smile and laugh at Ali. Stopping to smile and laugh. Talking. Ducking and weaving through punches only to wink or laugh or play.

I mean by today's standards it's not James Toney, or Roy Jones, but nobody ever did that to Ali. The ring side commentators remarked about Joe 'whipping' Ali, laughing at Ali, treating Ali like Ali had treated previous opponents.

You have to put yourself into 1971. By the end of that fight Ali looked like he belonged to a previous era and Frazier was the new wave. He looked unbeatable, absolutely incredible. Again the. Omen taters were talking about him being 'the toughest man that ever lived' (dangerously close to Ali's own pet claims to being 'the greatest of all time').

All Ali had in the wake of that fight was his mouth. He had to do everything he could to make himself look like the more modern man and get himself back in the game - and not accept that he was the lesser fighter.

I can't imagine how hurt Ali was - he had an enormous ego after all. When he got his ass planted, and got to his feet (astonishingly after three seconds) the expression on his face was only akin to when he got his boxing license taken away. Very rare to see that in Ali.

Not long after that the bull**** began. Even in the post fight interview Ali was saying 'Frazier wasn't that strong etc'.

At the end of the day Frazier did what nobody else did ever - he put a beat down on Ali for fifteen solid rounds and made him very much second best. Ali hated that, pure and simple, and it came out in all kinds of awful and unacceptable ways.

 

Frazier put every inch of his body, soul and spirit into FOTC, and really never was the same again... He had a lengthy stay in the hospital, and that war just took a lot out of him. Fighters have THAT certainfight in their career, and they never are able to scale those heights again. Ali had a hard time handling that defeat, and not long after, actually started saying that `they` (judges) had it wrong. And I agrre with a previous posting that said the ugliness started after that...

 

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atsch

:yep

 

Dundee is whispering in Ali's ears what the words on that page say. Brown takes it a step further and explaining to Ali what the words mean.

 

I think it was a little selling the fight, but more of a factor was they were so different that they clashed personally.