The sad passing Joe Frazier at 67 from liver cancer evokes memories of heavyweight boxing's golden era in the 1970s when champions like himself, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought each other for genuine titles and not disparate bits of bling.

It also allows me a moment of personal indulgence to recall that I am one of only two people (Foreman was the other) ever to have put the great Smokin' Joe on the floor..Well, kind of...

It happened at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics - the very first I covered. In those days we media types were permitted to roam the Olympic Village unaccompanied and I was doing just that when around a corner on a bike hurtled a large, thick-thighed young man  pedalling furiously at breakneck speed.

He saw me rather late, I jumped, he swerved and fell off heavily. I recognised him immediately as the US boxing heavyweight representative, one Joseph Frazier.

"Oh dear," I thought as he got up and glanced down at his grazed knees. "Am I in trouble here!"

But Frazier grinned sheepishly and apologised. "Sorry man, I guess I was going a bit fast," he said.

I introduced myself, we shook hands and I wished him luck in the forthcoming Olympic tournament, hoping that our near–collision had not damages his chances..

It hadn't. He went on to win the gold medal, deploying the wrecking ball of a left hook that was to become his trademark in the semi-finals against a Russian, on whose features he broke a thumb.

That injury restricted his punching power in the final, when he outpointed the German Hans Huber on a majority decision.

The next time I saw that left hook in action was at Madison Square Garden seven years later when it fractured the jaw of Ali in the final round. Bravely Ali survived the count but Frazier had clearly won the first of what was be the most memorable trilogy in boxing history.

Back then Olympic gold medallists traditionally graduated to become professional world champions, as Ali did after acquiring the Olympic light-heavyweight title as the 18-year-old Cassius Clay in Rome in 1964 and Foreman, Frazier's eventual nemesis, did at Mexico City in 1968.

They shared an an incomparable era in both Olympic and World Championship boxing. Between them they produced fights that were unforgettably dramatic.

I am fortunate to have been at most of them, including the Ali-Frazier  Fight of trhe Century in New York, The Rumble in the Jungle and the Thilla in Manila. As well as the savage encounter when Foreman literally blasted Frazier off his feet five times in two riounds in Kingston, Jamaica.

Of them all, it was the third Ali-Frazier fight which remains etched most vividly in the memory, not just for the raw intensity of their attrition, but for a poignant moment afterwards.


Then World Championships were fought over 15 rounds and at the end of the 14th  on that steamy Filipino morning (the fight began at breakfastime for US TV) Frazier, blinded in one eye and his face a grotesque gargoyle, was compassionately ordered to stay ion  his stool by his trainer, the legendary Eddie Futch.

He angrily remonstrated but Futch said calmly. "Sit down son.It's all over but no-one will ever forget you did here today."

And no-one has, least of all Ali. I was in Frazier's darkened dressing room later when Ali, who himself had been close to a bruising defeat, collapsing even before they could raise his arm, walked in and saw Frazier's then 14-year-old son Marvis (later to himself become a  heavyweight contender battered by Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson, and subsequently a preacher) sobbing on a bench.

Ali patted Joe on the shoulder and then walked across to Marvis. "What you cryin'; for boy?" he demanded

"I'm crying 'cos my daddy lost," replied Frazier jnr.

Ali snorted."You stop that boy, you hear. Your daddy ain't lost nuthin'. No-one lost. Your daddy's a winner you just remember that for the rest of your life."

The great irony is that while Ali had extended the hand of friendship to Frazier, it was not reciprocated until more than 30 years later when this sharecropper's son, an uncomplicated  man who never really understood the nuances of the  Ali hype, finally recognised that what The Greatest was doing was selling tickets and enriching them both.

Throughout the years Smokin'; Joe hadr had smoudered with resentment at the deeply unsettling insults Ali had flung in his direction, even calling him an  "Uncle Tom," Which Frazier certainly was not.

When Ali, stricken with Parkinsons. was called upon to light the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996 tears were shed around the world. But not in Frazier's Philadelphia home. "They shoulda thrown him in it," he is said to have growled.

Frazier even had answer-phone message which said:" Float like a butterfly, string like a bee. I done the job, he knows, look and see"  as blatant reference to Ali' s physical decline.

It was an apology from Ali that finally ended the one-sided feud."I said a lot of things I shouldna have" he admitted."I called him names I shoudna done. I apologise for that."

Both will be forever entwined with each other as arguably sport's greatest double act, topping Borg and and McEnfroe and Coe and Ovett.

Shortly before the announcement of Frazier's death in a Philadephia hospice early this week I was reminded of their inimitable rivalry by a truly evocative collection of photographs of Ali taken by one of our finest sports snappers, Chris Smith, of the Sunday Times. They are on display at a small gallery in London's Fleet Street, and a number show Ali in preparation for his contests with Frazier.


The ailing Ali will be 70 in January, and this exhibition a brilliant pictorial insight into the undisputed sports personality of the century who has surprised us all by outliving the first man ever to beat him. There also will be an new ITV documentary to coincide with his birthday but I recommend this still-life collection (at the Piero Passet Gallery, 21 Fleet Street, until Christmas) which represents real sporting art, unlike those newly-revealed Olympic posters..

As someone who miserably failed O-level art, I may not be the best judge, but I  am alone in thinking most of them a pile of arty-farty rubbish, plucked from that brilliant spoof TV series on next year's Games rather than the real thing. Supposedly they have been selected to showcase the nation's "artistic excellence" but even the expert eye eye of Independent's art critic Michael Glover sees, the typically esoteric offering by Tracey Emin as "a bit of scratchy sentimental hogwash." Another, he says, is a "a common or garden schoolroom effort". One that is merely a splodge fo blue paint is enough to give anyone an art attack.

Forgive me digressing, but here is just another example of what happens when you let the luvvies loose on sport, which is far better symbolised by the camera of Chris Smith and the genuine talent, sweat and passion of true Olympic gladiators is like Ali, Frazier and Foreman.

Should you needed need a further example of where art gets sport wrong, it ls in the statue they have erected in Philadelpia in honour of the city's "most famous fighting son." Joe Frazier? Sadly not. It is Rocky Balboa, the celluloid creature created by Sylvester Stallone.

Surely Smokin' Joe deserves a better epitaph than that.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.