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level, would destroy most men. He had won with a fortitude only surpassed by men in war. And he won with left hooks that often seemed, to play loosely with poetic license, capable of dazing a rhino. “Damn evil thing,” Ali said, for a moment throwing out the ad copy. “Underestimated it.” Mostly, now, he spent volumes of breath on turning a funereal end, so carefully constructed with his brag and vow, into a wedding. Aside from that last left from Frazier, he ignored the crucial—a defeat by strategic misstep or gamble. By dropping into farcical pantomime (no points for showy hubris in the ring during a shoot-out) to coax distance from his legs, he had squandered at least two vital rounds. No matter, for even with a loss the irony was that he had undeniably produced the masterpiece that he had sought so long. When he put on gloves, the word inauthentic never again could spill out of a critic’s quiver.

Seven months after the first fight, Bryant Gumbel, the editor of Black Sports, grafted on the temper of the day and stripped some more flesh from Frazier. He was a mediocre writer and thinker, excellent qualifications for the large success he would have on television’s Today Show with a shallow, hard-worked ultra-sophistication, a cool broker of opinion next to Howard Cosell’s weaselly conniving. Gumbel never let a bandwagon pass without jumping on it or trying to blow out its tires, depending on the mood of the day; the ultimate limo liberal. Durham said: “He’s got soft written all over him, a country club black.” Gumbel said he walked home after the fight with tears in his eyes for Ali; a hired, weeping pallbearer for the times and its temporarily stalled hero. Strapping up his backbone, he wrote a piece meant to further Ali’s campaign for victory by proclamation, to blur Frazier’s definitive prize: “Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?”

Talking about other champions, he alludes to Floyd Patterson as the “go-boy” of the whites, blithely sniffs at Joe Louis, and finds that, given the times, he can exonerate him as a model rep. He even manages to put some gloss on Sonny Liston, casts him as a “victim of society…hurt and angry…this was the black man of his day.” Was Sonny laughing, punching a cloud; short of a body, not bad, this behavioral reincarnation. But Frazier catches no slack. To Gumbel, he is pro-establishment, the E. coli bacterium of the sixties. Joe calls Ali by his birth name, Clay. He consorts with an enemy like the South Carolina legislature, where he spoke, saying: “We must save our people, I mean white and black. We need to quit thinking who’s living next door, who’s driving the big car, who’s my little daughter playing with, who is she going to sit next to in school. We don’t have time for that.” He added that he was hurt that “so few blacks had had a chance to speak here in over a century.”

That was far too passive for the likes of Gumbel; guilt by association was the gig, and it is doubtful he even saw or read the fairly long, sincere speech. Gumbel then pulls out some questionable associates. Undiscerning when it came to pictures, Frazier posed with Mayor Frank Rizzo, the Comissar of Philly police known for brutality—and Richard Nixon, the Old Nick of sixties evil. Gumbel would go on to a fat, privileged life in TV, with an ego and ambition that not even a mother could love, let alone colleagues.

Before the fight, Eddie Futch had summed up what was ahead for Frazier if he beat Ali. “Joe’s such a decent guy,” Futch said. “But when he beats him, Joe is going to go down as one of the most unpopular black champions of all time. I’ve seen it before, when Ezzard Charles, an excellent fighter, beat Joe Louis. When Ali’s defeat is a certainty, the bitterness is going to be indescribable.”

Now, two years later, Ali and Frazier were preparing for the middle frame of their trilogy. Yet the 12-round non-title bout floated toward New York like a melancholy fog, aided by the new stomp of marketing that could not mute facts. Though it was still going to be a big night, the edge was gone. The old Ali-killer