Legends: Requiem for a Heavyweight

Joe Frazier’s tired, he’s bitter, and he’s just closed his famed North Broad gym. Maybe it’s because the city never gave him a parade

LATE APRIL sun splashes onto the New York City streets, and the garment district hums with activity. Around 11 a.m., the front doors of the Hampton Inn swing open, and the old bull in the black Borsalino hat (today with a beige suit) walks in. He moves cautiously, leaning on a walker, until he heaves himself into a brown leather chair in the lobby. “I love New York,” Joe Frazier says.

The former champ arrived in town last night for a publicity event at Sotheby’s, which is auctioning off the robe he wore in the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila,” Frazier’s third and most brutal bout with Ali. Afterward, Joe visited Tommy, who is sick in an East Side hospital. This morning, accompanied by Leslie Wolff, Frazier rose early to appear on The Howard Stern Show.

Joe doesn’t talk much. He never has, really. And he looks tired. Dog-tired. This is, of course, understandable. Time isn’t kind to old athletes, especially old boxers. Joe Frazier should be settled in somewhere, watching ESPN. Instead he’s regularly dragged across the globe, mugging for the cameras, forcing a pen into his knobby-knuckled hand to sign another scrap of paper. The business of being a former heavyweight champion has never been an easy one. It’s a lonely, ironic affair, that inevitable fall from the role of the world’s baddest man. Age takes its toll physically. Hubris, more often than not, exacts a cost financially. Late in his life, Joe Louis shilled for a casino; Sonny Liston died under mysterious circumstances. Larry Holmes quietly disappeared to his Easton hometown. Legal fiascoes consumed Mike Tyson. And here, in the small, tacky lobby of a midtown hotel, one of the greatest heavyweights has just spent the morning with Howard Stern, answering questions such as, “You still getting some young pussy?”

As, well, provocative as such queries are, that’s not the question I want to ask Frazier. Instead, it’s this: How could a man whose gym seemed to be his life close its doors without warning — even to his own son?

Mulling this, Joe Frazier cocks his head. He’s thinking. I study the scar tissue that bulges on his nose, cases his heavy eyelids. His is the face of a man who’s not afraid to express himself.

“I’m not sad about it,” he says finally. I believe him; there isn’t a hint of apology in his voice. He has never been sorry for the man he is. “I’ve been there 40 years. Fighters aren’t loyal. The city didn’t do anything for me. So I’m gonna sell it.”

I ask him about the city itself, about the roots he’s laid there.

“I’m not gonna stay” is all Joe Frazier says, and then he is up, slowly, laboriously, out of the chair, grabbing his walker and heading for the door. “Maybe for a year I will,” he adds. “Then I’ll move somewhere else. Don’t know where I’ll wind up.” As for poor Marvis, he told the Daily News he knew nothing of the e-mail, and promised that the gym would eventually reopen. He isn’t returning phone calls these days.