Joe Frazier

Joseph William Frazier was born on the twelfth of January 1944 at Beaufort, South Carolina, the youngest of thirteen children of Rubin Frazier — a sharecropper and home distiller — and Dolly Frazier, a homemaker. The Frazier household lived on a six-acre subsistence farm at the Laurel Bay community of Beaufort County. He left school at thirteen after the tenth grade and worked as a labourer on the family farm and in the Beaufort tomato fields. He left South Carolina at fifteen in 1959 to live with his older brother Tommy in Philadelphia. He worked at sixteen at the Cross Brothers Slaughterhouse in North Philadelphia. He used the slaughterhouse meat-room as his early heavy-bag training facility.

He began amateur boxing at sixteen at the Twenty-Third Police Athletic League gym under the trainer Yancy "Yank" Durham. He won the Philadelphia Golden Gloves heavyweight championship in 1962, 1963 and 1964 and the National Amateur Athletic Union heavyweight championship in 1964. He was selected as a substitute for the United States Olympic boxing team after the original heavyweight Buster Mathis broke his hand in training in mid-1964. He defeated three opponents in succession at the Tokyo Olympic Games of October 1964 to win the gold medal in the heavyweight division. He boxed the final with a fractured left thumb.

He turned professional in August 1965. He won twenty-three consecutive professional bouts before defeating Buster Mathis in November 1968 for the New York State Athletic Commission heavyweight championship. He defeated Jimmy Ellis at the Madison Square Garden on the sixteenth of February 1970 to unify the world heavyweight title.

His decisive professional moment was the Fight of the Century against the unbeaten Muhammad Ali (placed in this archive) at Madison Square Garden on the eighth of March 1971. The bout was the first contest between two undefeated reigning heavyweight champions in boxing history. Both fighters were paid two and a half million dollars — the largest single-event prize purse in boxing history at the time. Frazier defeated Ali by unanimous decision after fifteen rounds, knocking Ali down in the fifteenth round with the left hook for which his style had become known.

He fought Ali twice more — losing the rematch at Madison Square Garden in January 1974 by unanimous decision, and losing the third contest at Manila in October 1975 by technical knockout in the fourteenth round, the Thrilla in Manila. He retired in 1976 with a record of thirty-two wins and four losses across thirty-seven professional bouts.

He died of complications of liver cancer at Philadelphia on the seventh of November 2011, at sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the victor of the Fight of the Century.