Frazier steps back out of the shadows

Smokin' Joe, the baddest man and one half of sport's greatest rivalry, is on the 'Audience With' circuit to claw back some of the money his career somehow let slip away. Tom English chews the fat over lunch

A LITTLE corner of a deserted restaurant in a discreet hotel in the suburbs of Aberdeen. That's where we find him; him that once was great, him that stopped the Vietnam War for a day and captivated 300 million people worldwide during the Fight of the Century with Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden in 1971, him that went to the gates of hell with Ali in the Thrilla In Manila in 1975, the most brutal and storied match there has ever been, him now saying grace before lunch with all the quietnes

Joe's full of questions. This is what we heard about him, he takes an interest. He's genuine. Wants to know what he's dealing with. Where were you born, where do you live, you got a lady, you love her? That's good, man.

"You got kids?" he asks.

"Yeah, Joe, I got two."

"You go in the delivery room?"

"I did, champ."

"Hmmm, I never been that far. Might have ended up in jail. Hush now. That damn tape switched on? Have 11 of them, you know. Six boys with six different ladies."

He's laughing. Laughing at the memory of the man he once was. The baddest man. "Nothing but an ass-kicking scamboogah. Ah, hell, they had husbands who couldn't produce. I said, 'come on over here and I'll produce'. From 47-years-old right down to 16. Man, I love all my kids."

He's sitting there, trademark hat, gold chain, rings, walking stick. He's needed the damn cane since his car stalled coming out of a gas station in 2002 and got hit by an oncoming vehicle. His spine was split. The medics said a man of 20 might not have survived but Joe's alive and doing OK. He's had numerous surgeries on his back and neck. In February he went under the knife again for six and a half hours to fix some complications, but he's up and about now. Sixty-four-years old and still on the move. Scotland this week, God-knows-where next week. He's chasing earners, developing the brand, keepin' on as best as he can.

It's Wednesday and he's in Aberdeen for An Audience with Smokin' Joe. There'll be two, three hundred people in the house tonight. Ask the great man what you want. He's here to please. Ain't nothing he hasn't been asked many times before. Ain't nothing you can say that's gonna take him by surprise. He knows what you're gonna ask before you ask it in any case. The blood feud with Ali. That's what people want to know. What was it like in The Garden, how bad was it in Manila, how much did he hate you, how much did you hate him and do you hate him still?

It's complicated, you see. The most fascinating relationship in the history of sport, a rivalry that went beyond the ring, deep into the American psyche, from the ghetto to the White House. In the beginning, Joe was good to Ali. Helped him out when he was banned from boxing, gave him money, gave him support when most of America thought he was no more than a draft dodger, a coward, an 'unwashed punk', as Red Smith, the pre-eminent columnist of the day called him. Joe was no orator but he came out with some immortal lines. "Ain't right to take away a man's pick and shovel," he said of Ali's plight. Different days, those. There was no talk of Uncle Toms while Joe was helping out, no mention of Joe being a gorilla, stupid or too ugly to be world champ. That came later.

"A lot of guys helped Muhammad, a lot of us helped him get back to where he needed to be. He didn't thank us. He called us names. Floyd Patterson was Rabbit. Ernie Terrell was the Washerwoman. Archie Moore was the Old Man. Sonny (Liston] was the Big Ugly Bear. I went to Tricky Dicky (Richard Nixon]. He says, 'come on in Joe, how ya doin', champ?' We're in the White House now. 'Sit down, Joe, what can I do for ya?' I says, 'Mr President, I'd like to ask permission for Muhammad to get his licence back'. Tricky says, 'OK, Joe, how do you feel about that?' I says, 'I feel I can clean him up, I can beat him, no doubt about it'. 'All right, Joe, I tell you what I'm gonna do. First thing tomorrow morning I'll put a call in and have him get his licence back'. But Muhammad didn't thank me. He gave me a name, too. Said I was a gorilla. Well, I act my part. When we fought, I came out scratchin'. 'I'm God' he says in The Garden. 'Well, God, you're in the wrong place tonight,' I said."

Joe says that God sent him to fix Ali. To shut him up. "Ali did a lot of dumb stuff in the sight of the Lord and the Lord didn't like it. See what the Lord did? He sent me to get him. I don't think that, I know that. There are some things you don't say. He called himself Thee Greatest. Not The but Thee. Thee Who? There's only one Thee in this world and that's the Man above. So the Lord God tried to slow him down but he didn't listen. He kept on doing the same old thing, preaching the same old hate. Then you see what the Lord did?"

Now Joe clasps his lips with his fingers and turns an imaginary key and flings it away. "He fixed it so Muhammad can't talk anymore. It ain't my fault or your fault. I haven't seen him in a few years but I don't wish him any bad luck. I wish there was something I could do to help him but when the Lord speaks upon you ain't nobody gonna get a word in, right? Oh yeah, I forgive him. We both forgive each other for all the slurs and the slaps and the wrong-doing. We forgive. But fight-wise? You can't take that away. That's a dead-end. Ain't no way through that. That stays, know what I'm saying? I don't know why he got like that. The Nation of Islam probably. Man, they hated everybody. They taught Muhammad how to hate. Malcolm (X] saw the light with those guys and walked away and you saw what happened to him. They murdered him. So it's said. They shot him down. Muhammad would talk about Martin (Luther King] but Martin never hated nobody. Martin got locked up, beat up, shoved around, pushed down in the dirt but there was no hate in him. Just love, man. Just love."

Joe's talking from the heart now, and it's powerful. Up until 1976 Ali didn't want integration between black and white. His answer to civil rights was for all the coloured folks to set up a new territory of their own. Separation was his solution. This was the doctrine of the Nation as preached by its leader Elijah Muhammad, a religious faker, said the soon-to-be-deceased Malcolm X, but one who had Ali in his grip. This is what Joe remembers most of all. The other side of Ali, the side that people don't talk about much any more because it's ugly, because it's racist and because it's cruel. Cruel on Joe, for sure.

Through the power of his personality Ali turned Joe into the white man's fighter, he alienated him from the black community, spoke of him as an Uncle Tom. With all the charisma in the world, Ali pulled off a great deception, created the biggest smokescreen and hid the truth behind it. "Any black person who's for Joe Frazier is a traitor," he'd say. "The only people rooting for Joe Frazier are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs and members of the Ku Klux Klan. I'm fighting for the little man in the ghetto."

Almost everybody bought Ali's fallacy of Joe as the naive tool of the white establishment. Joe would point out all the white guys in significant positions in Ali's camp but people didn't listen. He would talk about his own upbringing, the poverty of it, and show that if anybody represented the black struggle it was him. That fell on deaf ears too. Ali's rhetoric blew it out of the water. In the ring they were equals. Outside, in the PR war, Ali hammered him every time.

"Muhammad would talk about the ghetto. What did he know about the ghetto? That was my life, not his." Joe talks about the early years in South Carolina, about his mother and father and his 12 brothers and sisters. "When I was a little boy I'd go to church every Sunday and if I didn't sing momma wanted to know why. 'How come you didn't sing this morning?' 'Didn't feel like it, momma'. 'Oh yeah? Go get that switch. I'll take care of this right now'. The switch was a stick made up of three branches from a tree wound tight. She'd give us regular whoopings with that. Momma would half beat you to death and dad would scare you to death. He wasn't a big guy but, man, he'd kick the door down and frighten the life out of you. He was a bootlegger and a ladies man. Women loved him. He'd come home and momma would go over and sniff him. 'You smell of Rita!' That was one of his lady friends. There'd be war. All us children would jump in to save him from a beating. Oh, she'd have killed him. My parents were great. I loved them both. Idolised them. Dad checked out early, in 1961-62. Momma lived to be 100. That's something, right? Raises all of us and lives to be 100. "

Joe had lots of family but he was on his own where boxing was concerned. Life was too hard and too frantic back then. Indulging in fantasy was not the done thing. He carried on regardless, though. When he was a kid he hung a big old bag from a tree and pounded hell out of it every single day. Some times his sister, Flossie, would amble by for a look. "She'd be like, 'what you doin', champ? Champion of nothing, more like'. I'd say, 'Flossie, why you keep talkin' like that, why can't you support me?' 'Support you?' Then she'd laugh. She never thought I had it. Poor Flossie was one of the first of us to die, there's only three left now, and every once in a while when I was world champ I'd go to the graveyard to see her, just to say hi and tell her how I'm doing. 'Here I am, Sis. Here I am. I made it'."

After Manila, Joe only fought two more fights, a five-round knockout by George Foreman in 1976 and a victory in ten rounds over Jumbo Cumming a full six years later. Joe had the sense to bow out then. The tragic irony in all of this is that for all Ali's bullying of Frazier and his decrying of him as stupid, it was Ali who displayed monumental idiocy by staying in the ring far too long, egged on by the bloodsuckers in his midst who he mistook as allies but who merely fleeced him of his money until there was pretty much nothing left to fleece.

I read Joe a quote from Ali, taken from the early 1990s when his Parkinson's had started to wreak its havoc. "I'm sorry Joe Frazier is mad at me," Ali said. "I'm sorry I hurt him. Joe Frazier is a good man. I couldn't have done what I did without him and he couldn't have done what he did without me. And if God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me."

Joe nods at that. Just nods. Says nothing. Doesn't need to say anything. Just nods and looks to the floor. There's a silence that lasts maybe 30 seconds and it's only broken when Joe lifts his head, smiles and says, "what else you got, scamboogah?"

Fighters of that era never planned ahead, never invested wisely. Ali got ripped off on a spectacular scale. He signed contracts like autographs while walking through airports. He sold his film rights for $5,000. He gave it all away and only got it all back a few years ago when a company called CKX bought his image rights for $50m. Ali is secure now. Joe's still working on it. He's got a good man in his corner, a friend and marketing expert by the name of Leslie Wolff. There's a film in train right now, a DVD, some books, a restaurant concept, the rebirth of his band, Joe Frazier and The Knockouts, maybe two dozen ideas to exploit the brand. What's possible, too, is a move out of Philadelphia, Joe's home since 1961.

For 40 years he ran a gym there. It was an institution. More than that, it was home. In April, he shut it down. Without a word he closed the doors for good. It was costing too much dough, he said. It didn't pay its way any more. All those kids he helped over the years? The thousands that went through his hands? Nobody ever got in touch. Nobody ever phoned and offered a hand. "They don't call me. Gym cost me $150,000 a year in electricity. Time to move on."

Philly's been a strange kind of home to him all these years. It never really embraced him, never revelled in his success the way you'd think. Maybe it was because Joe usually took his fights to Los Angeles and New York, maybe because he stayed in a secluded part of town, maybe because he wasn't the smooth, suave operator Ali was. Whatever the reason, they've done wrong by him. There's a statue of a boxer in Philly but it's not Joe. It's Rocky Balboa, Sly Stallone's movie hero of the 1980s. Stallone interviewed Joe when making the first film, heard about how Joe pounded meat in the slaughterhouse to keep fit, how he would finish his daily runs by sprinting up the steps of the art museum. Those scenes were taken from Joe's life and put on to the big screen. Nothing attributed, just lifted, without acknowledgement.

There's talk of a tribute now, word of something going up that will honour his achievements. A statue, it's rumoured. Three times the size of Rocky's, it's alleged. In the meantime he's ploughing on. He's done Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh. Tonight it's the Hilton in Glasgow and then home. Home to plot the next stage of his life, to work on plans to make the kind of jingle he once took for granted, when he was Smokin' Joe, all-round bad ass and undisputed king of the world. Money-wise, the millions have gone but may someday return. Fan-wise, nobody's gone anywhere. His name lives on. Joe Frazier – ass-kicking scamboogah.