The Sharp-Dressed Man

This story originally appeared in The State newspaper in February, 2007. It has been lightly edited to reflect current AP style. The picture above was given to me by Joe Frazier following the story's publication. Frazier passed away on Nov. 7, 2011.

PHILADELPHIA – A street corner in Philly. You know, the street corner everyone from Philly thinks of when they ask, “Are you from Philly?”

Snow flurries dance on a bone-chilling wind. A sharp-dressed man pushes through the clouded glass door of a concrete building hunched between a gas station and elevated train tracks.

The flurries don’t land on this man's broad shoulders. They know better.

You know this guy. The slick, dark fedora. Looking dapper in dark brown from head to toe. Those impeccable orange and white leather dress shoes your rent check couldn’t buy.

Yeah.

Got to be someone famous. Look at that face. That confidence. A man’s man, the kind your Momma dreamed about before marrying your Pops.

From TV? No way ... has to be someone from the sports pages. Right?

Then it’s over. He dives into a snow white 1996 Crown Vic and he’s gone.

A train passes. So, too, does your interest

Your loss.

Nobody has carried more labels in life than the man who just drove away: Seducer of many, husband to one. Loving father, car thief. Home builder, booze runner. Teacher, preacher, rock star, man of the people, root of all evil. Destroyer of the dream. Tool of the Man. Slayer of Ali. Heavyweight Champion of the World.

You stop, look back, and there it is. Etched into the granite-gray facade above that tired glass door: JOE FRAZIER’S GYM.

Yeah, now you know.

No, you don't. If only you had been there a few hours earlier …

 

 ***

 

New York City, March 7, 1971. This is the nexus where the man Joe Frazier began the transition to the man he would be.

But that is getting ahead of things. Back to the scene:

Joe kicked back in a plush hotel recliner, clad in a terry-cloth robe, ready to watch a rerun of his favorite TV show, “The Naked City.” Nary a drop of restlessness could be found in his chiseled, 5-foot-11, 205-pound frame. No hint of what awaited him tomorrow.

The phone rang. Doggone.

“Joe Frazier, you ready?”

I’m ready brother

“I’m ready too, Joe Frazier. And you can’t beat me 'cause I’m the greatest.”

You know what? You preach that you’re one of God’s men. Well, we’ll see whose corner the Lord will be in.

“You sure you’re not scared, Joe Frazier?”

Scared of what I’m going to do to you.

“Ain’t nothing you can do, ’cause I'll be peckin’ and pokin’ and pouring water on your smokin’.”

Uh-huh.

“Bye, Joe Frazier. See you tomorrow night.”

I’ll be there. Don’t be late.

So much already had been said, so many insults, so many attempts at intimidation. Yet that bug-eyed nutball had to get in one more shot.

A familiar fury rose within, but before it manifested itself in the form of a phone flying across the room, the fluid baritone of Lawrence Dobkin yanked him back to reality.

“ ... There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them. ...”

End credits rolled across the TV screen.

That scamboogah just cheated me again. Well ...... tomorrow I’ll let my fists tell the story.

 

***

 

The sharp-dressed man is eager to tell you his story. He’s calling to you now.

Step through the front door and inhale the sweat-soaked air, the product of men beating men in the large boxing ring that dominates one half of the vast, open space.

Marvel at the collected spoils of Joe Frazier’s war with the world. Photos of the vanquished speak to his dominance. Yellowed headlines shout his greatness.

Climb the stairs behind the ring. Here stands Joe Frazier. Have a seat. You’re going to be here a while.

The story begins more than six decades ago in a forgotten corner of Beaufort County, South Carolina. Once upon a time, Laurel Bay was a place where life had to be torn from the land. The soil is wounded by eons of storm surges and the salt-encrusted air. To be born in 1944 was to be brought into a world devoid of progress and prosperity.

This is the world that greeted Joe Frazier, the 11th of 12 children for Rubin and Dolly. David would follow, but he would be taken by diphtheria at birth.

He was brought home to a tin-roofed, clapboard house with several added-on rooms. No telephone, no running water and an outhouse that got lost in the inky black of the Lowcountry night, keeping a spooked child in his bed, his legs crossed.

Rubin and Dolly had to get creative to feed and clothe so many with so little. They took what they could from the land to help set the dinner table. The children who were old enough to work did so and were paid with food and farm animals about as often as they were with dollars and cents.

Everyone in Laurel Bay went crabbing or fishing. Everyone tended to their own chickens, hogs and cows. Everyone spent time in the fields, working for White landowners.

There were other revenue streams to be tapped as well.

Kicking back on an overstuffed couch, those darker pursuits bring a chuckle to the sharp-dressed man.

“In the woods out behind our house there was this leafy plant,” Joe says. “Momma called it ‘musk.’ Don’t ask me why.”

Connect the dots. The Frazier children would collect the plant and let it dry in the sun. They would crumble the leaves, and the scent would be strong enough to make a person high.

“It was a cash crop for us,” Joe says.

Dolly sold it to a man from Orangeburg for 20 cents a pound.

Dolly had nothing on Rubin.

 

***

 

The sharp-dressed man wants you to understand that he is his father’s son.

Rubin was a powerful, broad-shouldered ox rendered vulnerable by the bullets of a cuckolded man.

Rubin’s nature – that which made a man a man – and the inability of his brain to overcome its baser instincts cost him his left hand.

Joe explained it this way in his 1996 autobiography:

Now, my momma and daddy loved one another, but Rubin had an eye for the occasional other woman as well. ... One of those women was Arthur Smith’s wife. One night, steeled by his drunkenness, Smith pulled a pistol as the Fraziers got in their truck to head home. One bullet hit Dolly in her foot. Several others rained down on Rubin’s arm as it dangled out the driver’s side window.

Today, such an incident would have landed Smith behind bars. In rural South Carolina, Smith received a slap on the wrist.

The reason: If you were a good Black workman, there always was a White farmer who could put you to work. Rubin might have lost his hand, but he would never slow down. Making potent batches of bootleg corn liquor, Rubin would crisscross the Lowcountry selling jugs to any taker. Many of his customers were repeats. Many were women. Many men would give chase, but Rubin, for the most part, stayed a step ahead, thanks to “Billy Boy.”

That was Joe’s nickname, taken from the pet name Rubin bestowed upon his favorite truck, a 1940 Ford. That's what the stout newborn most reminded him of.

The connection between the father and his youngest son, forged in the moment of his birth, would define the child as he grew into a man.

All good fathers pray they will steer their children down the road to success beyond their own. Billy Boy's father was such a man, but as far as he knew, no such road cut through the backwoods of Beaufort County.

Joe would have to seek it on his own.

 

***

 

The sharp-dressed man offers freely his own vulnerabilities.

For example, he had his dad’s charisma but his own sense of right and wrong.

Which is to say, Billy Boy didn’t really know right from wrong.

Dolly did her best to keep her youngest on the righteous path. There was no real church in Laurel Bay, but Dolly often would lead the community in an ad-hoc Baptist revival whenever time allowed.

The lessons of the Bible were not lost on Joe. They were just misplaced somewhere in his scheming mind.

Dolly, corn-cob pipe in hand, made considerable use of her other hand on Joe’s backside. Rubin Jr., the family’s third-oldest child, recalls his mother’s preferred form of punishment.

“My mother beat children. Beat them,” he says with a deep laugh, emphasizing the key word as he spoke. “She’d beat us naked. That’d be abuse today.

“She’d say, ‘Get them clothes off. I can’t beat you with clothes on ’cause I'm liable to tear them up, and I can’t afford to keep buying clothes just to beat them off you.’”

Perhaps it was because he was the youngest. Perhaps it was because he reminded Dolly too much of her husband, whom she loved despite his tendency to stray. Whatever the reason, Rubin Jr. says his little brother Joe often got off easy.

“Billy got his behind cut, too – momma didn’t mind doing that,” Rubin Jr. says. “But not like the rest of us. The little …”

Perhaps like Arthur Smith, the Frazier family couldn’t afford to have any of its children grounded for too long. Work took priority over all else. Joe’s job was to be his father’s lookout during liquor runs. Rubin would ask him to stay in the truck as he visited clients. Those “clients” were often women, and Joe’s “lookout duty” could last hours at a time. As he grew older, Joe began seeing his own clients, so to speak.

But his father’s business would only go as far as its transportation. Rubin’s truck was a Frankenstein of spare parts, cobbled together in a relative's garage.

Those spare parts came from dubious sources.

“I wouldn’t say we stole cars,” Joe says. “We were borrowin’ them … and just not bringing them back.”

The nearby military base was flush with soldiers driving scrap heaps. When those beaters broke down, their owners had to leave the car on the side of the road to seek a tow truck. By the time they returned, the chances of the car being intact – or there at all – were slim.

Most of the money Joe drummed up by selling what he “borrowed” was lavished on the girl – or girls – of the moment. Sometimes on the weekend, he and his friends would hit watering holes up and down the coast, careful to leave whenever it appeared the Whites were getting plucky.

By 14, he had gotten into his fair share of brawls. But keep in mind by then, his genetics and upbringing had manifested themselves into a teenager of uncommon brutishness.

Interlude: Joe knows what this all sounds like. He knows you might doubt the veracity of his claims.

“Yeah, I was 13 or 14 at that time,” he says. “You gotta understand, life was very different down there, back then. Back at that time, you were a man at 15 and you got way more respect than kids today. It’s a different lifestyle, you dig?”

What Joe did not know during those days was that he already was headed down the road to his future. There, on the back streets of Beaufort and Savannah, behind those juke joints that didn't mind serving booze to boys, with his fists raised and head bobbing, Billy Boy was taking the first steps toward becoming Smokin’ Joe.

 

***

 

The sharp-dressed man wants you to know it was Uncle Israel who saw it before anyone else. He was the first in Laurel Bay to buy a television. In the 1950s, boxing was a network mainstay. Wednesday nights belonged to Pabst Blue Ribbon’s CBS showcase. Fridays meant Gillette’s card from Madison Square Garden on NBC.

Israel supplied the TV. Rubin and Dolly provided the meeting place and the corn liquor. There, the extended Laurel Bay family gathered. Shadowboxing, hootin’ and hollerin’ ensued.

Rocky Marciano was the king of the ring in those days, and he had the respect of the Frazier clan. Still, Israel pined for the days of Joe Louis. One night, he put two and two together. He pointed at Joe and hushed those who had gathered.

“Billy Boy, you not gonna be around here much longer,” Israel said. “You gonna be champion one day. You gonna be like Joe Louis.”

Yeah.

“That got stuck in his mind,” Rubin Jr. says, recalling that moment. “‘I’m going to be just like Joe Louis.’”

The next morning, Joe grabbed a burlap sack and stuffed it with rags, corn cobs and bricks.

“He took that out to the mule stable and he’d stay out there all day and all night if momma didn’t call him to dinner,” Rubin Jr. says with a snicker.

That’s not entirely accurate. Joe says he worked the heavy bag in between chores.

His primary chore was slopping the pig. The 300-pound razorback was a nasty thing, rolling in the mud and who knew what else. Secure in its pen, Billy Boy couldn’t help but tease the beast, poking it with a stick, then diving back through the fence.

One day, he administered his usual ribbing only to discover the gate had not been secured.

As Joe talks about that day, he looks at his left arm.

“It busted out of that pen and I started running, but I fell down and that pig busted up my arm,” he says, moving his arm back and forth.

There were no doctors to see, and since he wasn’t going to die, well, the usual remedy would be administered.

“Put some sugar on it,” Joe says with a laugh. “Sugar and a cabbage leaf. We gonna put that remedy on the market, right?”

The arm healed, but Joe was left with a permanent crook at the elbow.

Uncle Israel had been the first to instill the dream to fight. That dang-blasted pile of pork gave Joe his trademark weapon.

“I had to make the best out of it,” Joe says. “Most guys had to wind up that hook and let it go. My arm was already in a hook. I was always cocked. There you go. I just let it fly. Can’t get any quicker than that.”

 

***

 

Mention race to the sharp-dressed man and he will deliver you to the time and place of his departure from South Carolina.

Race was what it was in the Lowcountry during the 1950s. It always had been there, and there was no reason to believe it was going to change.

“White water, colored water. Ride the bus. Get in the back of the bus,” Joe says with a wave of his hand. “I got on the bus one day. The guy told me to get in the back, and I told him I was Jewish. He said, ‘Get off the bus.’”

As he got older, the differences began to wear on him.

“You work together, get money together, but you don’t socialize. I could never figure that out,” Joe says. “Why did it always have to be that way? My money spends just like everybody else’s. I’m not going to touch you, you’re not going to touch me, so why shouldn’t I be able to have a good breakfast?”

Those questions went unanswered in Laurel Bay. For years, Joe worked odd jobs on a farm owned by Jim Bellamy. He had grown accustomed to the subtle slights and awkward conversations typical of exchanges between an old White man and Black children. One incident shook him out of apathy.

“One day, a little Black boy screwed up one of old man Jim’s tractors,” Joe says. “Jim took off his belt and started whupping the child on the spot.”

That was not right. Joe caught up with his friends during a lull and told them about what he saw. Bellamy found out. Joe was finished.

“From that day, I knew it was time to leave,” Joe says, leaning in close. “I was good as gone.”

When the government began building houses for the Marines at Parris Island, Joe fell in with a work detail. Working six hours a day for $140 per week, he lifted rafters into place.

Nine months after Bellamy fired him, Joe hopped a bus and left South Carolina in the rear-view mirror.

Fifteen years in the South had been enough. Time to see where this new road would take him.

 

***

 

New York City was a mistake. The sharp-dressed man says he knew that as soon as he picked up his old bad habit of "borrowing” cars.

Joe was living with his brother Tommy and his wife, Ollie, but he never could land a steady job. Embarrassed about leaning so heavily on his brother, he hoofed it to his Aunt Evelyn’s house in North Philly. He knew it in an instant: He had found a home.

“When I came up here and saw the difference in how Blacks were treated, it was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute,’” Joe says. “Hey, man, I ain’t going back down there. I told momma one day I was gonna get her outta there.”

Joe sort of had the same feelings about a gal named Florence. Shortly after he went north in 1959, Joe learned Flo was pregnant.

Interlude: During his tom-catting days in Beaufort, Joe met Florence. Then he met Rosetta. He couldn’t decide between them, so he kept stringing both of them along.

One day, his two-timing caught up to him. Through a series of unfortunate (for him) events, he wound up in the same car with both girls.

Upon Joe’s arrival at her house, Florence challenged Joe to choose once and for all who he loved the most.

He had no answer. When Rosetta asked the same, he stammered again.

Rubin Frazier once told Joe he probably had “25 or 26 brothers and sisters by who knows how many mommas.”

“I know they say a man can’t love two women at once, but I have never subscribed to that,” Joe wrote in his autobiography. “My feeling is a man can love as many as he can love.

“As far as Florence and Rosetta … I ended up marrying one of them and having children by both.”

Joe landed a good gig at a kosher slaughterhouse and began sending money to Florence. In his spare time, in the freezer, he would practice punch combinations against slabs of beef.

In September, 1960, Florence gave birth to Marvis. The world began to spin faster. Sure, he was still just 16, but he was a man who had to support a family. Florence came north. If he was going to be a boxer, it had to happen now.

 

***

 

The nostalgia adorning every inch of the walls at Joe Frazier’s Gym provide more than enough proof that the sharp-dressed man quenched his thirst for greatness.

But like everything in his life, Easy Street was paved with potholes, real and imagined.

After winning a gold medal at the 1964 Olympics, Joe turned pro with his sights set on reigning heavyweight champion Cassius Clay. The two fell in together and became fast friends.

Then the world interfered. Clay joined the Black Muslim movement and changed his name.

Not long after he became Muhammad Ali, his draft number was called. He refused to serve, was stripped of his heavyweight title and tossed in jail.

Joe stayed at his friend’s side, despite disagreeing with his politics.

“I went to the president for him,” Joe says. “Tricky Dick. Yeah. I asked him to give Clay his license back.”

If Ali appreciated Joe’s help, he had a strange way of showing it. Once he was out of prison, Ali began campaigning for his title to be restored, for it to be stripped from Joe, who had earned the title in Ali’s absence.

The media picked up on Ali’s crusade. Joe was flummoxed at his friend’s seemingly sudden about-face.

Then, somehow, Ali managed to merge the civil rights crusade with his personal campaign to re-gain the title. Joe became the scourge of the working-class Black man.

And why, precisely, had Ali gone to war with Joe? He was more than willing to give Ali a shot at earning back his belt. Apparently, Joe had not gone to bat for Ali in the manner he desired. Joe had a healthy respect for the armed forces and was bothered by what he considered an all-too-convenient religious conversion by Ali.

The gulf between the two former friends continued to widen as the Sixties came to a turbulent close.

Whenever Joe attempted to indulge his passion for music with his band, The Knockouts, Ali and his entourage would crash the party to jeer him.

Ali called Joe a tool of the establishment. He showed up at the door to his gym, demanding they duke it out right there on the sidewalk. Theatrics. Then Ali went too far, calling Joe an Uncle Tom.

Joe had seen too much in his life to allow that shot to go unanswered. He came from the poorest of backgrounds. He was raised in a racially divided South. In those respects, Joe was the Black man’s Black man.

Yet it seemed as if none of his people would stand with him. Ali effectively had bleached Joe’s skin White.

It was just a matter of time after that. Promoters put together a historic $5 million purse to finally put the two undefeated bruisers in the ring.

The pundits began calling it the “Fight of the Century.” As Ali continued to fuel the hype, Joe sequestered himself inside his gym, punishing a heavy bag as if it were Ali's spleen, drilling the speed bag as if it was his pretty-boy face.

Ali received the adoration of the masses. Joe received death threats. Black men were threatening to kill him if he beat the light-skinned Ali.

How had it come to this?

 

***

 

Ali was Joe’s superior in height, weight and reach. He was smooth in everything he did, from his footwork to his jab. Joe was awkward, constantly bobbing, moving in close like a tugboat to a barge. He willingly took a beating in order to create an opening for his vicious left hook.

There was more to the “Fight of the Century” than two boxers in their prime. At Ali’s constant urging, it had become a battle of good vs. evil, of the individual against the establishment, the Black man’s burden vs. the White man’s yoke.

But it would transcend time because of one man’s drive to redeem himself when it shouldn’t have been necessary. That man’s desire to prove anyone could arrive at glory regardless of where the journey had begun.

For 15 rounds, they stood toe-to-toe, faces swelling, organs bruising. Then, with two minutes remaining, Joe’s crooked left landed flush against Ali’s ear for the last time. The massive crowd gasped. Ali foundered. The bell rang and the winner’s identity was obvious.

Unanimous decision, Joe Frazier.

The bad guy had won. For many in the black community, “The Dream” had been deferred, for that’s how thoroughly Ali had bastardized Joe’s persona.

Around Laurel Bay, a scamboogah was a disrespectful, lowdown and foul person.

To Joe, it meant Cassius Clay (he refused to call him 'Ali’).

 

***

 

New York City, March, 1971.

Joe sat before a semicircle of network television cameras waiting for that scamboogah to call. Eventually, the phone did ring.

“Why do I have to talk to Joe Frazier?”

What's this?

“Why do I have to talk to Joe Frazier?”

You mean The Champ. Say that, OK? Go ahead. Say ‘Champ.’

“OK, why do I have to talk to The Champ?”

There. That’s better. Why?

“Do you believe you’re The Champ?”

Sure.

“You know, we’ve got to meet again. You’re not going to duck me, are you?”

I don’t know if you’re going to be able to ...

“Aw, don’t talk like that. You ain’t going to duck me, are you?”

Duck you for what?

“I just want to know that we’re going to meet again.”

You better believe it.

“Cause the whole world is waitin’ for me and you one more time.”

At that, a smile spread across Joe's face. Perhaps he was remembering that night before the fight, when Ali called out of the blue and ruined his evening with "The Naked City.”

A familiar cockiness returned.

One more time. Right. Would you believe it’s going to be a rerun?

With the cameras still rolling, Joe hung up and winked.

Smooth.

There would be many other trials and tribulations for Joe to face in the coming years. Near bankruptcy, George Foreman (“Down goes Frazier!”), two more bloody meetings with Ali, the betrayal of boxers he trained, Marvis’ brief flirtation with the title Joe once held.

But at this moment, none of that mattered. All the insults, all the hate, all the sins of his past had been cleansed with a colossal left hook. Joe Frazier was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

 

***

 

The sharp-dressed man has said his piece. It was time to catch a catnap before heading to good friend Evel Kneivel’s funeral.

Joe clucks and points to Marvis, who had been watching this day’s proceedings with bemusement.

Marvis is a good man. He became a preacher after his boxing days. He runs the day-to-day business of Joe Frazier’s Gym. He has raised his family in the proper way, which mystifies his father.

“I don’t know where I went wrong with him,” Joe says. “I lost him somewhere. Married to the same woman all this time. Man wasn’t meant to be with one woman.”

Marvis asks his father how he was going to get back from the airport when he returned.

“Who knows? I might just find me a woman out there and not come back.”

In time, Joe became the legend he always imagined he would be. For all time, he will remember how and where it all began: Back home in Laurel Bay, where everyone had a role, where you did whatever it took to survive, where no one person was greater than the sum of his family.

“I live in the world of the everyday, you dig?” Joe says as he slips on his overcoat. All around him, in this place, are the collected spoils of a life at the top of his sport.

“I don’t think my time is no better than anybody else’s. Whatever needs to be done, I’m going to do it myself.”

With that, the sharp-dressed man makes his grand exit. Down the steps. Past the ring and out the frosted-over glass door, flurries swirling in his wake.