Come Out Smokin' (4 page)

Joe ignored the criticism. He believed he could beat any heavyweight in the world. Besides, if Yank thought Machen was the right opponent, that was it. Even the few dissenters among the members of Cloverlay bowed to Durham's greater knowledge. After all, Yank hadn't made any mistakes yet.

Machen was indeed a veteran campaigner, a classic boxer who had been in with the best in the world, had risen to the top bracket of the heavyweight division, and had been knocked out only once in sixty-one pro fights by former champion Ingemar Johansson.

Durham knew what he was doing. He had in his files, a letter from Eddie Futch, a respected veteran fight trainer who lived and worked in the Los Angeles area and knew all there was to know about West Coast fighters. Futch had seen Machen in a recent fight. Ironically, he had never seen Frazier fight, yet he sent this report to Durham: “From what you've told me about Frazier, the kind of fighter he is, the style he has, he can take Machen,” Futch wrote. “Machen is still good. He's tough and he's cagey, but he's older and has slowed a little. His style is tailor-made for Joe. He's easy to hit. I'm certain Joe will get to him with hooks, slow him up and win the fight.”

It was as if Eddie Futch had written the script. The fight went exactly as he had predicted—Machen starting fast, winning the early rounds, Frazier's hooks beginning to land in the middle rounds and coming on strong toward the end.

In the early rounds, it looked as if Durham had made his first mistake. Machen
was
clever. He was making Frazier look like an amateur. Eddie would wait for Joe to rush, pop two lefts, then cross a right and tie his opponent up before he could drive through with one of his powerful hooks. Machen was smart. He had moves Frazier never knew existed and he was giving Joe a thorough boxing lesson.

But Eddie Machen found out that Frazier doesn't discourage easily. He kept taking Machen's punches, but he never stopped moving in. By the fifth round, Machen was no longer able to hold off Frazier's rushes. Joe took two or three punches, but he kept boring in. In the early rounds, Machen was agile enough to sidestep Frazier's punches, but as the fight wore on, Eddie was a half step slower, a vital half step. Now Frazier's hooks were finding their target and the fight was beginning to turn.

“
We're
doing fine,” Durham said as Frazier sank onto his stool after the sixth round. “Let's keep it up,
we're
doing fine.
We
got him now.”

“
We
ain't out there at all,” Joe replied. “
You're
sitting here watching
me
go out there and fight.”

Toward the end of the fight, Machen had nothing left.

It was, said Frazier, his toughest fight. “My first fight with an old pro,” he said. “I had to keep driving all the way before I finally got to him. Now what do those Philadelphia sportswriters think of me? Do they still think I'm being rushed? Do they still think I'm not ready for fighters like Eddie Machen?”

Joe Frazier answered his own question. “I'm ready for anybody.”

The press agreed. For the first time, sportswriters wrote seriously about Joe Frazier as a potential heavyweight champion. And Eddie Machen, a KO victim for only the second time in his career, quickly climbed aboard the rapidly growing Joe Frazier bandwagon.

“He needs polishing,” said the veteran Californian, “but he's awful good. The boy has no defense, but the way he stays on top of you, he don't need one.”

Now Frazier was on his way. He took a three-month vacation from the ring after the Machen fight, then resumed his climb up the heavyweight ladder by stopping Doug Jones in six on February 21, 1967. Jefferson Davis fell in five two months later, and four weeks after that George “Scrap Iron” Johnson became only the second man in sixteen professional fights to finish standing against Frazier. But Johnson was soundly whipped in the ten rounds and Joe easily won the decision.

Next was another Madison Square Garden fight on July 19, 1967. The opponent was George Chuvalo, who had never been stopped and who had gone fifteen rounds against Muhammad Ali just sixteen months earlier. Joe Frazier stopped him. He handed the Canadian a merciless whipping and the referee finally called an end to the fight in the fourth round with Chuvalo beaten to a bloody pulp, both eyes punched practically closed.

Joe then concluded his year's work by taking out tall Tony Doyle with a right uppercut in 1:04 of the second round in a fight that dedicated the new $12,000,000 Philadelphia Spectrum on October 17.

As he returned to his dressing room, Joe Frazier heard the crowd. They were cheering for him, yelling for him. “You the next champ, Joe,” they kept saying. “You the next champ.” Frazier smiled and waved at them.

“It went like I planned,” he said in his dressing room. “I suckered him in the first round, feeling him out. I knew he couldn't get away . . . I did more fighting in the gym. I'm the first ever to fight here in the . . . er, the Spectrum. And some night I'll come back here to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.”

Two months and one day after he demolished Tony Doyle, Frazier put an end to 1967 by knocking out Marion Connors in three rounds. In two and a half years, Joe Frazier had ripped through nineteen opponents, seventeen of them failing to go the distance. He was ready for the best heavyweights in the world. He was ready to go right to the top. There would be no stopping Joe Frazier now.

On April 28, 1967, in Houston, Texas, exactly thirty-seven days after he had defended his heavyweight championship for the ninth time in three years with a seven-round knockout of Zora Folley, Muhammad Ali refused to take the step forward that would make him a soldier in the United States Army. Ten days later, a federal grand jury indicted Ali on a charge of draft evasion, a crime that carried with it a fine of $10,000 and, if he was found guilty, imprisonment for five years. But in the minds of millions of self-righteous, quick-to-condemn Americans, some of them in control of boxing in the United States, Muhammad Ali had already been found guilty.

Within hours of the indictment, a chain of events was set off that would alter the history of boxing and have a lasting, irrevocable, and vital effect on the life of Joe Frazier.

On the grounds that boxing could not accept a jailbird as heavyweight champion, the World Boxing Association acted without hesitation to strip Muhammad Ali of his title and suspend him from fighting in its domain, which is to say almost everywhere. To make the exile complete, the New York State Athletic Commission followed the WBA's lead, depriving Ali of his crown and suspending him in the state which boasts, among other landmarks, the Statue of Liberty.

Once the WBA had acted to remove its cherished crown from the head of Muhammad Ali, it decided that the world could never survive being denied a heavyweight champion, and it moved to start an elimination tournament among the leading heavyweights in the world, the survivor of the lose-and-out tournament to wear the coveted crown with the WBA's blessings.

For this honor, the WBA selected the eight leading heavyweights based on its monthly rankings. They were Floyd Patterson of Marlboro, New York; Jimmy Ellis of Louisville, Kentucky; Thad Spencer of San Francisco, California; Oscar Bonavena of Argentina; Ernie Terrell of Chicago, Illinois; Karl Mildenberger of Germany; Jerry Quarry of Bellflower, California; and Joe Frazier of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

It was a nice, neat arrangement, except for one small problem. It didn't quite meet with the approval of Joe Frazier of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rather, it didn't meet with the approval of Yank Durham.

“Screw their tournament,” Yank hinted from the strength of Frazier's No. 1 ranking in the WBA's list of heavyweights. “I don't need them, they need me. Let them fight it out and I'll fight the winner.”

It was a courageous step and a dangerous one. Durham was turning his back on boxing's powers-that-be and gambling with high stakes. There was money to be made in that tournament, a guaranteed $25,000 for the first fight, $50,000 for the second, and $100,000 for the last one. That's a total of $175,000 for three fights, more money than Frazier had made in all his first nineteen fights as a pro.

And a vital part of the prize was recognition by the leading authority in the world, the WBA, as heavyweight champion and public acquiescence in that title.

The alternatives looked bleak. By staying out of the tournament, what was left to Frazier? Inactivity. Lack of public acceptance. A few fights for peanuts.

Yank Durham gambled. He gambled that the public would admire him for his defiance of boxing's governing body and, therefore, have greater respect for Frazier. And he took the risk that when the tournament was over, when eight fighters had finished knocking each other around and the WBA had its champion, there would be only one legitimate challenger left and his name would be Joe Frazier. Then he would get a shot at the vacant crown in one fight, not three. And, Yank Durham gambled, for a lot more than $175,000.

True to their word, the members of Cloverlay's Board of Directors let Durham have his way. There were a few random dissenting opinions among Cloverlay's rank and file, those who believed that Frazier belonged in the tournament, that his developing career would be best served by entering it. But at a meeting of Cloverlay's Board of Directors on May 10, 1967, Durham outlined his reasons for holding out and so convinced the board, which voted unanimously to go along with Yank.

The group sent word to the press of its decision, saying, “The money isn't enough,” and adding it didn't want Frazier “tied up for two years by the ancillaries.” Part of the deal was that ancillary rights to the champion for two years would go to a corporation called Sports Action, promoters of the tournament, and that the champion's first defense would be for Sports Action in the Houston Astrodome. “We won't fight in the tournament,” a spokesman for Cloverlay said, “but we'll fight anyone, anytime.”

However, while the eight leading heavyweights were deciding who would be recognized as champion by the WBA, would there by anybody to fight? That was Durham's risk, that was the fear of the minority Cloverlay dissenters. But Yank had made no mistakes in his handling of Frazier up to now, and he had earned the right to do as he wished.

To many boxing people, it was astonishing that Yank Durham was so shrewd, so cunning after only a few years in the business. That's the mistake many people made. When he began handling Frazier, Durham was going on forty-five years old and most of those years had been spent preparing himself to make the decisions he was now making for Joe Frazier in the name of Cloverlay, Inc.

“I always had a theory,” he says, “that if left alone with a fighter who would listen to me, I'd be successful. I knew what I know now ten years ago. I got my ideas from listening to people, from watching them do things. I saw guys put fighters in remote training camps for weeks, up in the woods, away from everything, and treat them like animals. A guy could go crazy. I knew that wasn't for me. I let them live their lives. But the fighter has to listen. I've retired prospects that didn't. I tell them to quit fighting, to go get a job. I treat my fighters this way . . . any deal I make, the fighter can be right there, listening. The only thing I ask in return is hard work. Conditioning is what I stressed.”

These are ideas and theories that did not come to Yank Durham the day Joe Frazier walked into the PAL gym. They are part of the wisdom picked up over a lifetime spent in hundreds of gyms like the one on Twenty-second and Columbia.

Yancey Durham was born in Camden, New Jersey. “On Berkeley Street,” he emphasizes. “In 1921.” That means he has pushed past the half-century mark and for most of those years, he was just another former fighter trying to scratch out a living training fighters in what was a slowly disappearing business.

“I had nine fights as an amateur,” he says. “Not counting eleven bootleg fights.”

“A ‘bootleg fight,' ” Yank explained, “is where you go someplace and get ten dollars. Places like Glassboro, Scranton, Pittman. They'd give you some flukey name and you'd fight. I fought on cards with Tony Galento, John Henry Lewis, Freddie Steele, Fred Apostoli. I thought I'd be a fighter.”

Then came World II and Yank's career as a boxer came to an end during an air raid in Liverpool when a jeep ran him down and he suffered compound fractures of both legs, a fractured skull and a few broken ribs. He spent two years in hospitals. “I still thought I could fight when I came back home,” he says. “I was twenty-five, but I went to the gym and worked with Harold Johnson. I wanted to see what I could do. I was still a middleweight. But I couldn't get in shape. I didn't give myself a chance. I was supposed to be training, but I'd have a girl in the gym with me and I was thinking more about going off with the girl afterward than I was about training.”

The crusher came one day when he was working in a Philadelphia gym, sparring a few rounds with a fellow named Ellis Stewart. “The ring broke,” Yank says. “I fell and cracked a rib. The doctor told me to forget about fighting.”

He could forget about it as a fighter, but he couldn't abandon the game entirely. He began working with fighters, amateurs at first. Then he managed little-known, unsuccessful professionals whose names would be nothing more than that even to the most avid boxing fans. That was in 1952 and he had to wait more than ten years before a Joe Frazier came into his life, quite accidentally.

Durham has settled down considerably since his early carefree and wild days. Now somebody else does the training and he goes home to his wife and four young children, Nancy, Yancey, Mark, and Chandler Marcellus.

The name Marcellus has no significance, Yank says. “I didn't know that was Cassius Clay's middle name at the time my boy was born.”

Marriage was the first good thing that happened to Yank Durham. The second came in 1962, only Yank didn't know at the time how good it was. He was working with some of his fighters in the Twenty-third PAL gym the day Duke Dugent brought him over to look at the roly-poly kid who came in off the streets because he wanted to lose weight.

“He came into the gym weighing between two hundred and thirty-five and two hundred and forty pounds. And all I saw was that he was a strong boy who needed to get that weight off,” Yank recalls. “I didn't pay too much attention to him at first because these kids come into the gym all the time, then they quit when they find out how much work it is.

“His punching power was tremendous, so I told him to come back and we might make something out of him. You tell a lot of kids that. Most of them get discouraged. Joe kept coming. This fellow liked to work. He'd get up at three or four in the morning to run, then he'd come to the gym. He was powerful, he was determined, and he didn't mind working. If they're not there to work, there's no sense bothering with them.”

Yank Durham and Joe Frazier have been together ever since, through the amateurs, through the early days, right up to Frazier's ascension to the top of the boxing world. In a sport in which shotgun marriages and early divorces between fighters and managers are commonplace, the longevity of the Frazier-Durham wedding is a tribute to the manager. So is the success of the team.

If Frazier is to be given credit, with justification, for knocking off everybody in his path, Durham must also be credited with teaching, training, and pacing Joe's career, calling the shots in the name of Cloverlay.

For the team to have succeeded for so long, there has to be a rapport, a meeting of the minds and a delineation of authority. Durham did the training and Frazier did the fighting Yank called the shots, but Joe had to believe in him. First there was the matter of style.

“People used to come into the gym to see Joe work out and they'd tell me, ‘Why don't you teach Joe how to box?' Well, I say this ain't his way, it ain't necessary for him to be a boxer. It takes a boxer ten rounds to do what Joe gets done in two or three. A good boxer don't really hurt you. You just suddenly feel sleepy and that's it. Now Joe, he destroys a man with power. When Joe gets through with a man, he's all busted up. To win a fight don't take him ten rounds, it only takes two or three, so why do I want to make a boxer out of him?

“I figured this way,” Durham continued in typical nonstop fashion. “Joe was a strong boy with great power. Let's make him go right in. What we had to do was shorten his punches. You don't want to have a fighter wind up before he punches. He couldn't be a Hurricane Jackson or a Rocky Marciano. If he was going in, though, he'd have to learn to slip and slide. His offense is his defense and his defense is fighting.”

The reference to Marciano is interesting, coming from Durham, because many boxing experts have compared Frazier's style to that of the late, unbeaten heavyweight champ—similar physiques, power emanating from their legs, both willing to take a few punches to get in a few. But Durham gets uptight at the comparison.

“You never saw Marciano slip punches the way Joe does,” he growls. “Joe is more of a Henry Armstrong type of fighter. No heavyweight ever threw punches as fast as Joe. Fifty-six a minute. He can rack up thirty points a round. That's welterweight speed. He may not move around the ring so fast, but those hands . . . look out.”

Naturally, Frazier and Durham have had their tense times, no more and no less, though, than a lot of other people who like and respect each other but must work together on a day-to-day basis. The foundation of their relationship has been an ability to understand each other, to recognize that there are going to be differences of opinion and to keep them to a minimum and not to let them blow up out of proportion.

“I let him ask questions,” Durham says, “I don't tell him. It's a good relationship. Joe hasn't changed any through the years. He's the type of guy who never talks back. If we get into an argument, he'll turn and walk away. The only problem I've ever had with Joe is that he wants to start training too early and work too hard. Toward the end, he gets evil. I'll say six rounds and he'll say eight.”

For Joe's part, “Yank is all right. You know Yank, he's the boss. Whatever he says goes.”

If a reporter asks Frazier why he worked only four rounds or who his next opponent might be, his inevitable reply is, “Ask Yank. That's his department.”

“Me and Yank?” says Joe Frazier. “We're together, man.”

Sometimes it seems they are together more than as fighter and manager. Sometimes it seems Yank Durham is both fighter and manager, an impression Durham creates by his habit of referring to his fighter in the first person. “
I
boxed six rounds today” or “
I
knocked that guy out in three” or “
I
'
m
fighting Jerry Quarry in New York next month.” It sounds pompous, as if Durham and Frazier were one and the same, or as if Durham were the more important of the two, but it's not meant that way. It's just Yank's style and Frazier usually listens to such talk with an amused smile. Usually.

It wasn't until the purses started getting substantial that Yank finally gave up his job as a welder for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now he looks forward to retirement, or at least semiretirement. He anticipates not working so hard. He's been at it all his life and now that it has finally paid off, he would like to enjoy life a little more, to spend more time with his young family.