Legends: Requiem for a Heavyweight
Anyone who knows Marvis will tell you that he might be the kindest, most honest God-fearing Christian in all of Philadelphia. So after a bit of digging, a source close to the family who didn’t want to be identified confirmed what I suspected: that poor Marvis didn’t know about the impending closing of his father’s gym, the one he had been carefully planning to renovate, restore and renew for months. Joe Frazier had delivered the ultimate sucker punch.
But perhaps Marvis shouldn’t have been surprised. Perhaps no one should.
From his earliest days in Philadelphia, Frazier didn’t exactly endear himself to the city. Simply put, Smokin’ Joe did as Smokin’ Joe pleased. While hometown boxer Bennie Briscoe became a household hero, fighting the majority of his 95 career bouts in Philadelphia, Frazier and his handlers saw dollar signs in cities like Los Angeles and New York. In the ’60s, instead of living in town and chumming up the locals in North Philly, Frazier relocated to a six-bedroom house on two acres in Whitemarsh. He openly befriended Philadelphia’s own Bull Connor, police commissioner-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo. (“I still think he was a good guy,” Frazier says now. “We need someone like him today.”) He visited the Nixon White House. He chased women.
His behavior in the ’60s and ’70s might have been chalked up to impetuous youth, but Frazier hasn’t aged gracefully. He hasn’t mellowed. His stubbornness and single-mindedness, two of the qualities that helped him earn a heavyweight title, haven’t helped his image. There were the lawsuits: Over the past decade, Frazier has sued the City of Philadelphia following a DUI arrest (he was found not guilty of the DUI but subsequently lost his civil case), the Boxing Hall of Fame (the suit was dismissed), and his own daughter Jacquelyn (Joe eventually dropped the suit, but the two haven’t spoken in over a year). In 2004, police arrested Frazier for allegedly striking a former girlfriend. (The case was dropped when the woman refused to cooperate.) He has sired 11 children with, according to his manager, Leslie Wolff, “more than enough women.” And 33 years after the last of their three bouts, Frazier remains openly bitter toward the ailing Muhammad Ali. In his 1996 autobiography, Frazier wrote that he’d “like to rumble with that sucker again, beat him up piece by piece and mail him back to Jesus.”
“He never compromised in the ring,” says Frazier’s brother Tommy. “And that’s how he’s been his whole life.” If Smokin’ Joe doesn’t like something, he says so. If he feels he’s been wronged, he’ll do whatever it takes to make it right. He lives simply, on his own terms. “He hasn’t changed,” says Marvis. And if you don’t like it, he says, Joe will “show you the door.”
Only now that door is padlocked.
