Table Of ContentG H O S T S
O F M A N I L A
The Fateful Blood Feud Between
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier
MARK KRAM
For Mark, Tracey, Kerry, Raymond, Robert,
and Alix, my children—And my wife, Rene
So in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with
a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of
the shaft,
“With our own feathers, not by
others’ hands,
Are we now smitten.”
—Aeschylus
Contents
Epigraph iii
Introduction 1
Pathologies 5
Passages 33
Thrilla 105
Nocturnes 191
Author’s Note
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
I N T R O D U C T I O N
“W
e went to Manila as champions, Joe and me, and we came back as
old men,” Muhammad Ali once told me. He was standing outside a
South Carolina hospital, well into his forties by this point and years
removed from that unspeakably hot tropical morning in Manila in
1975. Narrowly, he had beaten Joe Frazier that day in the final act of
their heroic trilogy, and yet Ali would look back on it in years to come
with a certain uneasiness, only too aware that it signaled what should
have been the end of his career. The choice that stood before him at that
juncture was a clear one: get out in one piece, or go on in a sport that is
unforgiving to old men, especially those with too much pride, heart, and
unexamined confidence for their own well-being. Had he bolted the
gym door following Manila (as I was certain he was ready to do after
eleven years of covering him for Sports Illustrated), the denouement
might well have been different.
The major thrust of this book is story, not biography; it is a por-
trayal of what each man was and is now. It is the tale of two men,
2 INTRO DUCTION
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, whose early close friendship is
destroyed as their rivalry becomes steeped in ugliness played out dra-
matically on one of the largest stages in the history of sports. Divided
by the heated temper of their times and their colliding views on race,
they find themselves caught in a swirl of public love (Ali) and hate
(Frazier), one left with a ruin of a life, the other battered to his soul.
For five years, from 1971 to 1975, they sucked the life out of each
other over three fights, the first and third of which remain as thrilling
and vivid as they were then.
Secondarily, this book is intended to be a corrective to the years of
stenography that have produced the Ali legend. Cheap myth corrus-
cates the man; the wire scheme for his sculpture is too big. Junk com-
mentary has been slapped on it to the point that a precise appreciation
of just who Ali was (and is) has become obscured. Worse, grandstanding
compassion over his admittedly tragic current situation has only served
to block a clear view of him even more. While myth usually begins in a
place of truth—in this case, uncommon boxing skill—it often ends in a
place of fantasia, and this is where we find Ali. He has been celebrated
for the wrong reasons and has been interpreted by an increasingly unin-
formed generation of media that was barely born at the height of his
career. Ali is already, like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, condemned
to wander television screens for eternity in snippets of file tape, the
visual wallpaper of the mythic.
What was he and what was he not? Important world figure is
commonly the description that travels with him these days.
Unquestionably, he was important to boxing and sports. Of worldly
significance? Well . . . countless hagiographers never tire of trying to
persuade us that he ranked second only to Martin Luther King, but
have no compelling argument with which to support that claim. Ali
was no more a social force than Frank Sinatra. Nor was he especially
complex, unless you happen to view instant contradiction of utter-
INTRO DUCTION 3
ance as deep. The politically fashionable clung to his racial invective
as if it were the wisdom of a seer. Today, such are the times, he would
be looked upon as a contaminant, a chronic user of hate language and
a sexual profligate.
Ideology drove what most writers thought of Ali, especially
Norman Mailer, who settled upon him like a mollusk, and sometimes
in revealing transference seemed to want to merge with the champ.
Ali played big in New York salons, bigger even than the Black
Panthers, who were also viewed as hip avengers for political right-
ness. What was laughable, if you knew anything about Ali at all, was
that the literati was certain that he was a serious voice, that he knew
what he was doing; he didn’t have a clue.
Two ideologists summon up the thinking then and now—Ken
Tynan and R. Emmett Tyrell. Tynan was a superb writer given to large
crushes on certain showmen and insurrectionists. In his recently pub-
lished Journal, he watches Ali beaten by Frazier, and etches bleakly.
Frazier is Nixon’s hatchetman, and Ali’s “flair, audacity” is cut down
by “stubborn, obdurate hard-hat persistence. We may come to look
back on the 60s as the Indian summer of Western imagination, of the
last aristocrats of Western taste.”
To the far right of Tynan is Tyrell, who regards Ali in a 1997 col-
umn as a corrupting rule breaker. Ali tore down the sport by intro-
ducing racial prejudice, and destroyed Frazier with utter nonsense
and false calumny. Frazier was black. Ali remains a figure today
because he is “idolized by the ignorant and by mountebanks still
making money off him.” Bits of truth, minus the politics, fleck to the
surface in both views.
Part 1 of this book, revisionist only to those who will not like
their mythic perception jostled, begins with Ali and Frazier isolated
in retirement. Part 2 deals with the emergence of both men with spe-
cial emphasis on the manipulation of Ali by the Muslims. Part 3
Description:When Muhammad Ali met Joe Frazier in Manila for their third fight, their rivalry had spun out of control. The Ali-Frazier matchup had become a madness, inflamed by the media and the politics of race. When the "Thrilla in Manila" was over, one man was left with a ruin of a life; the other was battere
