Ali's transcendence shouldn't overshadow Frazier's greatness
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| Ali and Frazier (right): Different boxers, divergent personalities, unquestioned contemporaries. (AP) |
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two of America's most important intertwined historical figures, died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826. It was serendipity of the most ethereal sort, as the two friends and combatants went out together into whatever afterlife would have them.
And somehow, it should have been that way with Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali as well. The odds were spectacularly against it, but they were inseparable as historical figures in boxing. Theirs were the three best heavyweight fights of the past 50 years, their personalities clashed so much that they oddly meshed, and they approached and repelled each other to the end.
The end, that is, being Frazier's death Monday after a difficult battle with liver cancer. He was described wrongly as Ali's foil, because Ali was his foil as well. Ali might have been the more important social figure globally, and it is hard to imagine an athlete who commanded the world's attention quite like him, but Frazier was never his subordinate in the ring.
And damn the results. Ali won twice, but they were all battles between genuine titans. Even Ali would say so, after he and Frazier had both stopped fighting and entered their separate and different retirements.
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Frazier was alternately gracious and belligerent about Ali, knowing he would be overshadowed by a world that didn't fully understand him. But Frazier fought an uneven battle brilliantly. He was the boxer, the man whose value was measured mostly in the ring against other men, and he overcame almost all of them. Ali was the modern showman and stylist, the utter antithesis of the hard-faced technician Frazier, who saw his sport and his job in such starkly different ways.
But Adams and Jefferson saw their common worlds differently as well, and their clashes over the years were also their principal commonality. They were enormous figures in American governance in part because of their differences, and their collisions. They were to politics what Ali and Frazier were to boxing.
And sadly, unlike Adams and Jefferson, Ali and Frazier did not go out together -- 20, 30, 40 years from now. Ali was not Sonny Liston's contemporary, or Larry Holmes' at the other end. But he and Frazier were two fists in the same glove, and Frazier's death seems all the more sad because of it.
Boxing aficionados know Frazier's greatness, and so do pundits and storytellers who waxed most poetic when the two men met. The "Thrilla In Manila" is one of sport's most seminal events, with the 1958 NFL championship game that made football a national television phenomenon, the "Miracle on Ice," the 1960 U.S. Open (golf) and perhaps a few others we haven't the time to absorb.
But he didn't get his due from casual fans, who properly saw Ali in social and political terms as well. He wasn't the casual fan's kind of figure, and because he was destined to be Ali's cosmic dance partner, he was caricatured and belittled and hated. Ali contributed to that, and when he tots up his life, he acknowledges he was wrong. Cynical, and effective, but wrong. He shamed the wrong man.
And Frazier didn't accept his shaming. He fought back, against the enormous throw-weight of Ali's skills and his popularity. He was as defiant and brave in his way as Ali was in his, and this should be acknowledged in his passing. By virtue of fists, wit and heart, he was Ali's foil only if you acknowledge that Ali was his. They were crossed swords and shields all at once, but their oneness overcame it all.
Since they could not go out as Adams and Jefferson, perhaps Ali's reaction to Frazier's passing will be most poignant. It will, one hopes and expects, be gracious, generous and free of rancor, and it will elevate Frazier in death as Frazier helped elevate Ali in life.
After all, they could not go out together, but when they do meet, they could acknowledge what we know now. They were necessary to complete each other.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.com
