I saw that Joe Frazier died. He was one of the legendary boxers of the last century, never quite got his full due, just because he had the misfortune to be a heavyweight in the time of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in their prime. His ungainly slugger style and lack of charisma always made him the straight man for Ali's gleeful imp. But he was definitely one of the greats.
Joe Frazier Tribute
Sylvester Stallone effectively stole Frazier's story and turned it into "Rocky," which, I'm sure, had to make Frazier that much more embittered, to see his story turned into a white man's boxing epic.
32 wins (27 by KO), 4 losses, 1 draw.
I always had some fondness for Frazier, just because he was so clearly a great boxer who was forced to stand and fight with some incredible boxers, and who never flinched, never gave up, showed a lot of heart in the face of that.
Bizarrely, I was playing "Knockout Kings" with the boys on the Playstation last night, and I actually picked Frazier for a match against B1, who was playing Ali. I hadn't even known about Frazier's imminent demise until after playing, but that was weird.
I will be genuinely sad when Ali finally dies. Parkinson's has shut him down for decades, but he was an amazing figure in a brutal sport. Frazier's passing is a tolling of the bell. Of course, these greats have actually managed to overshadow the sport, itself, which has fallen to the canvas and will never really get up -- UFC , WWF and the other assorted man-grappling arena stuff has long eclipsed boxing, and boxing's own corruption and what-not has forever tarred the sport. But Frazier and those like him came from a time when boxing was a huge and compelling event. Boxing was always a brutal sport, and Frazier was a brutal boxer, but there was beauty in that brutality, as hard as it might be for non-fans to imagine. Boxing wasn't known as "the sweet science" for nothing -- there was elegance in a perfectly thrown set of combinations, in a boxer's heart, in setting up an opponent and taking them down.
Frazier was one of the last of boxing's true Greats.
Ali on Frazier
