No fighter in the last sixty years, maybe ever, gave fans more for their money than Joe Frazier. No matter the opponent or his style, you always knew exactly where Joe would be: as close to the other man as he could get. Bobbing and weaving, fists pumping, Frazier’s purpose was to back every foe into the ropes or a corner.
In Mark Kram, Jr.’s Smokin’ Joe, an unnamed ring veteran recalls that fighting Frazier was “like getting hit by four hands.” George Chuvalo, a rock of a Canadian whose back even Frazier couldn’t put on the canvas, said, “Everything moves, his head, his shoulders, his body and his legs … He fights six minutes every round.”
Consigned by history to a supporting role in the saga of Muhammad Ali, Frazier has long deserved a definitive biography. Kram (author of Like Any Normal Day, winner of the PEN 2013 award for literary sportswriting) writes with the intensity that Frazier fought with. In victory and defeat, “Few men in the annals of the ring produced moments as indelible.” Unlike his subject, Kram knows when to take a step back and reflect, revealing a Frazier far removed from the enduring portrayal of him as “an angry and unforgiving man so incapable of letting go of the hatred he harbored for Ali.”
To the public, he was Smokin’ Joe, but to his family and friends he was “Billy Boy,” a nickname given to him by his father Rubin “a one-armed handyman-cum-bootlegger whose speech impediment prevented him for uttering the words baby boy.”
Born in 1944, Billy grew up in Laurel Bay, South Carolina, in Beaufort County, perhaps the poorest county in America. He shared his first home, a bare structure of just four rooms elevated from the ground to keep it dry from flooding, with eleven siblings. The family had ten acres, which sounds like a lot but much of it was swamp land occupied by snakes and the occasional alligator. They spent long hours in the brutal sun coaxing beets, radishes, tomatoes, peas, cotton and watermelon from the land. His sister-in-law Miriam supplemented their diet with raccoon, warning that “Before you cook it, you got to strip away the glands, and you’ve got to get one that doesn’t have rabies.” Rubin boosted their income with corn liquor made with the help of government-subsidized sugar.