I was listening to Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon talk about the 50th anniversary of the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier on Kornheiser's podcast the other day.
It was one of those odd moments when the world resolves to a higher definition: here I was, at what we hope is the tail end of a global pandemic, walking through Little Rock wearing sunglasses equipped with little speakers, listening to two sportswriters whose work I've followed for decades talk about an event I remembered from 50 years before, when boxing mattered and two undefeated heavyweights endeavored to settle matters among themselves. It was awe and wonder time.
I listened to Ali-Frazier I on the radio as it happened on March 8, 1971, with my father. We sat out on the screened porch of our little house in Rialto, Calif., with a Hitachi as big as a space heater with a built-in cassette player, a precursor to the boom boxes of the MTV era. My father had brought it back with him from southeast Asia, along with my Lion bicycle and a Pachinko machine.
My father knew his boxing; he had won a Golden Gloves title, had sparred with Carmen Basilio, and boxed one fight as a professional, something neither my mother nor I knew until he finally confessed a couple of days before he died.
The Air Force had sent him to Kansas on a temporary duty assignment and somehow he finagled his way onto an undercard. He fought under a pseudonym and lost, leaving open the possibility he had taken a dive. He did it for the money.
I guess my parents sometimes worried about money, though I never thought about that growing up.
Anyway, my father was one of those people who knew a lot about things he cared about, and he taught me a little about boxing. We used to watch the Friday Night Fights together, though all I really remember from that is the jingle for Carling Black Label beer. He was a huge Muhammad Ali fan, though I doubt he approved of his politics. He just thought Ali was a great fighter, probably the best he ever saw after Sugar Ray Robinson.
He didn't pony up to see the fight on closed circuit, but we did see it a few weeks later in a movie theater. I don't think it cost much more than a regular movie ticket to see it that way. After the fight he asked me what I thought, and I told him I thought Ali was robbed. He disagreed; Frazier had won the fight, just like the score cards said. It took me a long time to realize my father was right.
Wilbon and I were born on the same day. He got to see the fight with his father on closed-circuit TV in Chicago, though his mother disapproved of the expenditure. Back then, he also thought Ali won, and it also took him decades to give Joe Frazier full credit. There just seemed something wrong about beating Muhammad Ali, about spoiling his comeback after he'd had his heavyweight title stripped from him.
Wilbon said the fight was the biggest sporting event of his life. I have a better recall of Ali's fight against George Foreman where he reclaimed the heavyweight title ("Rumble in the Jungle") and the third Ali-Frazier fight (the "Thrilla in Manila"), but when you consider the social, cultural and political implications of the initial Ali-Frazier bout--how Ali and others cast Frazier as the champion of an establishment that had snarled the country with Vietnam --it was far more than a heavyweight fight. Frazier was, as Wilbon put it, a later iteration of "the Great White Hope," whose Blackness was suspect.
"I represent the truth," Ali said before the fight. "The world is full of oppressed people, poverty people. They for me. They not for the system. All your Black militants ... all your hippies, all your draft resisters, they want me to be the victor."
My father wanted him to win too. But only because he was great and had his greatness suppressed by bureaucrats.
We can wonder now how much Ali believed in that rhetoric and how much he wanted to sell the fight. Frazier was treated badly by those of us mesmerized by Ali's charisma and wit. We overlooked Ali's cruelty and the cruelty of his practice.
These days I understand boxing is a horror show, and that taking punches to the head turns your brain to jelly, but I did not--and do not--want it to be so. I want it to be sport, physical and somehow improving of the spirit. I want this just as I wanted Ali to win that fight.
But he didn't, and it isn't, and I often think about the dignity we denied Joe Frazier, who came up from nothing, from near starvation, and died broke nearly a decade ago.
Kornheiser is old enough to regret not having found an angle that would have scored one of the 760 press passes that would have put him in Madison Square Garden on the night of the fight. I know exactly what he means; I skipped out on Arkansas a few days after my next-door neighbor Bill Clinton announced he was running for president and only returned a few weeks after he was inaugurated.
I love Tony Kornheiser, whose work I followed religiously when he was columnizing for The Washington Post in the Style and Sports sections. I miss his writing, and while my work keeps me from regularly watching "Pardon the Interruption," the smart sports chat show he hosts with Wilbon, I discovered his podcast soon after we started working from home about a year ago. I make it a point to take a walk or a bike ride each day, and before I leave I download his latest podcast.
It's more work than it sounds like, and there's a lot of professional pride in the production lurking just beneath the insouciant, avuncular mien affected by the guy whose name is in the title. Still, the illusion of intimacy is there, the voices nearly inside my own head. That's the reason radio--and podcasts are radio, in effect if not in form--feels so intimate.
I used to wish Ali had won that fight, but I don't anymore. Frazier deserved it, and my father knew that. Not that you always get what you deserve. It doesn't matter what poetry demands or wishfulness desires; the universe does what it does. That fight was 50 years ago, longer than my father was alive.
They say this lockdown is almost over and that we may go back to the office soon. Some of the habits we've adopted may slough away as we become the people we will be in the future. But we will keep some of this experience with us always, nubs and moments, occasions of heartbreak and hope, the tumult of memory breaking in on our smooth and automatic lives.
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