Pliny comes to Philly

By Tatalo Alamu 13/11/2011 00:00:00

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•Joe Frazier

(Joe Frazier as Trope)

With the death of Joe Frazier last Tuesday, the boxing world has lost one of its greatest icons ever. By the time he succumbed to the cell-splitting blows of cancer, "Smokin Joe" had already passed into boxing legend. Frazier had taken many blows in the ring, but the sledgehammer of cancer is as mortal as it can get.




Perhaps the best and most succinct tribute to the great man came from the normally inarticulate and stuttering Mike Tyson who described him as a great gladiator. This is as poetic as it can get. All great boxers are unacknowledged great poets. At its most rarefied heights, boxing is the personification of poetry. The combinations, the cadences, the fine calibration of blows and the rhythmic violence suggest that boxing is poetry conducted and orchestrated with fists.
For a heavyweight, Joe Frazier was a small man indeed. Physique ought to have been a problem. Smokin Joe lacked the height, the bulk and the intimidating presence of the truly magnificent heavyweight. But what he lacked in heft he made up in sheer heart. It was the heart of an old African lion. It was the heart of a pure prizefighter. Relentlessly advancing and with the predatory precision of the king of all animals, Frazer forced bigger men to back off and to wince and grimace in acute pains.
Built like a compact fighting machine and set for demolition exercise at short notice, Frazier was a robotised contraption primed and packaged to inflict maximum punishment. He was not averse to taking cruel punishment himself, but he gave as much as he got. He packed some dynamite in his punches and his vicious left hook could pole-axed even a five hundred pound gorilla.
It was this formidable left hook that exploded on Mohammed Ali’s jaw and sent him to a shuddering crash in the first of their epic trilogy. Ringside spectators looked on in dazed disbelief. It was only the second time in his professional career that Ali had been so spectacularly up-ended. The first time around, the great Ali rose from the ruins to give Henry Cooper, the British gentleman-boxer, the hiding of his life.
But on that lonely and memorable night at Madison Square in 1971, and before a hostile American audience braying for his blood, there was to be no come back for a ring-rusty Ali. Unwisely enough in that epic encounter, Ali had tried to psyche out Frazier by repeatedly telling him that he was God himself. Frazier had responded by informing "God" that he was in the wrong place that night and he was going to get a terrible whipping. And oh lord, Ali got the shellacking of his life.
In a sense, then, Frazier was the Great White Hope. The American establishment had been looking for a nice, well-behaved black chap who would do the boxing and entertaining beat and leave out the ugly racial politics and the revolutionary rhetoric about the fundamental injustice that underpins and powers the American society.
In Ali and his brilliant bravura, his contrary comeliness, his telegenic tantrums and taunting, there was too much echo of John Authur Johnson, a.k.a Jack Johnson, an earlier Black boxing legend who had beaten the white boys black and blue only to take their women serially and with swashbuckling aplomb.
Once when he was pulled over for speeding, the impudent Johnson handed over a hundred dollar bill for a traffic offence of fifty dollar. When the traffic cop complained that he did not have money for such a refund, Johnson asked him to keep the change since he was going to return at very much the same speed. The American power mafia were not going to have another uppity nigger cock a snook at the establishment. Frazier would seal up the lousy Louisville lip with his scary and scarifying fists.
But if Frazier was the perfect foil for Ali in that regard, he was nobody’s house nigger for that matter. While he hated Ali’s guts, he had a deep respect for his preternatural pugilistic gifts. The troubled and troublesome wizard of the ring was a source of unending fascination for Frazier. He could not bring himself to genuinely hate the mad boy from Kentucky.
Sonny Liston, a former street mugger and partially rehabilitated thug, had entered the ring hatefully bent on sending Ali to his maker. But he was decisioned in two epic encounters by Ali who took his hate-filled mass to the cleaners with his scientific magic. A quiet decent chap of muscular Christianity, Frazier was born in Beaufort in the deep south of South Carolina but was raised in Philadelphia where he ended up a butcher boy.
Surgeons and butchers have one thing in common. They both carve up bodies. But while surgeons carve up human bodies only to sew them back, butchers carve up animal carcasses with professional urgency. Detached almost to the point of stony stoicism as his fists dripped with the blood of his victims, Frazier must have picked one or two things from the butchers’ shop. He was a cool customer.
If boxing is an art or poetry in motion, it is also a precise science demanding phenomenal concentration and ferocious focus. Both Ali and Frazier have these qualities in abundance, and it probably explains the secret of their great success in the ring, The boxing ring is like a nuclear reactor plant. A momentary lapse of focus or concentration could lead to an apocalyptic tragedy. A misdirected punch or a silly error of distance or closeness could bring the whole human edifice toppling like an Iroko tree,
But because Frazier boxed more with his lion heart rather than his head, he was very vulnerable to a more fearsome slugger or the cerebral tactician cunningly and foxily wearing him down in a colossal war of nerves and attrition. Relying on his massive left hook and relentless and remorseless crouching advance, he was like a primitive hunter who did not feel obligated to the wiles of superior strategy. Just keep smoking and going forward and somebody is going to get badly hurt in the long run.
In the event, Frazier’s reign as world heavyweight champion was very brief indeed and it was the Beaufort-born butcher who got badly hurt in the short run. In 1973, Frazier ran into the equivalent of a human hurricane in Jamaica in the guise of an even more brutal slugger named George Foreman. Foreman literally carved Frazier up in two savage rounds and sent him serially to the canvas. A crazed sadist in his prime, Foreman was to later explain that once he entered a ring, his intention was to clear up everything in sight, including the referee if he was foolish enough to wander into the eye of the hurricane.
Thereafter, the more wily and brainy Ali would beat Frazier in two memorable encounters. The 1975 "thrilla in Manila " has been just celebrated for extending the frontiers of endurance and the human capacity to absorb punishing blows. It was a small step for two exceptionally gifted prize fighters but a giant leap for the human race in its confrontation with the beast within. Toe to toe, Ali and Frazier slugged it out with some of the best shots that had ever been landed in boxing. By the end of the fourteenth round, it was obvious that both boxers had arrived at the gates of heaven. Either wanted to throw in the towel but it was Frazier’s camp that moved first, and the rest is boxing history.
They just don’t make heavyweights like these anymore. In the tortured and tormented career of Mike Tyson we see the reason why. Tyson who once boasted that he was privy to certain punches to certain parts of the body which could make even an elephant topple over in delayed reaction may yet be honoured for a signal if inadvertent contribution to the advancement of human civilisation.
And it is not because the deranged pugilist once crowed that he loved to make big men cry in the ring. In Tyson, Androcles finally met his lion. By returning boxing to its primitive default setting of a bare knuckle contention between evolving man and savage beast, Tyson might have forced the world to face up to the unpleasant consequences of boxing as a brutal and cruel sports. If the so called civilised world takes a sadistic pleasure in watching two men boxed into a ring tear at each other unto death like savage beasts, then we had better prepare for the real thing.
Like a psychotic animal, Mike Tyson chewed off the ear of his opponent when he couldn’t contain the sledgehammer blows. It doesn’t get more savage than that. As the Yoruba memorably put things, even biting is part of fighting. Yet as civilisation advanced, the so called primitive societies substituted animals for human sacrifice or abandoned the savage ritual altogether.
But as Walter Benjamin has put it, there is no record of civilisation which is not at the same time a record of barbarity. Western civilisation puts a humane gloss on its fundamental barbarity by casting the other as savage. But the pristine savagery and cruelties of modern boxing puts a lie to that hollow ritual of self-ablution and exposes the violent decadence for all to see.
When Pliny the second famously observed that something new always came out of Africa, he was referring to the endless array of oddities, oddballs and superhuman oafs transported to ancient Rome from Africa as galley slaves to serve at the pleasure of the Roman imperial court. Many of them ended up in the arena as gladiators in bare knuckle contention against ferocious beasts or even more ferocious humans.
Several epochs and the American empire later, it is the descendants of African slaves forcibly transplanted to work on American plantations who serve as boxing gladiators at the pleasure of the American imperial court. Joe Frazier was one of the most distinguished of this breed. But just as it fell on Spartacus, a former galley slave, to lead a revolt of slaves against the Roman Empire, it has fallen on Barack Hussein Obama, a descendant of Africans, to lead a democratic revolt against the oppressive injustice of the American empire. Spartacus failed spectacularly, but the Roman Empire did not survive for long. Something new always comes out of Africa indeed. If boxing is poetry, poetic justice is the ultimate poetry.