On this day fifty years ago, Monday, March 8, 1971, I was a 17-year-old high school senior. When I came home from school, my father asked me, "How would you like to see the fight tonight?" Immediately, I felt blood rushing through my body. This was new emotional territory. Dad was uncharacteristically talking to me like a friend, not as if I were a nuisance, hindrance, or burden.
After regaining my sensibilities, I understood the situation. Dad was referring to the boxing match billed as The Fight of the Century, a battle of undefeated heavyweight titans, the challenger Muhammad Ali against the champion Joe Frazier. Ali was 29, a dancer and jabber in the ring with a record of 31 wins, 25 by knockout, and no losses. In 1967, after Ali famously changed his name from Cassius Clay and defended his title nine times in three years, he faced the injustices of having his heavyweight championship revoked, his license to box in every US state denied, and his US passport stripped, effectively eliminating any chance of his making a living through boxing. He now found himself as a 6-5 betting underdog for the first time since 1964, when he was an 8-1 underdog and captured the championship as a 22-year-old fast-talking, abrasive, egotistical, against Sonny Liston. Frazier was 27 with a record of 26 wins, 23 by knockout. Like Ali, he was an Olympic gold medalist but he did not renounce his achievement, winning the hearts of the establishment. He earned the heavyweight title three years earlier and successfully defended his crown six times. His bob-and-weave style and powerful punching made him seem invincible in the boxing world until Ali's return.
So much hype surrounded this fight, primarily due to Ali's remarkable promotional skills and growing reputation as a cultural folk hero and antiwar activist. In the weeks leading up to the bout, the boxers appeared in one television commercial after another. The print and electronic news media featured daily stories about the upcoming event. Each man was guaranteed an unprecedented $2.5 million, and the match would attract a full house of 20,000-plus at Madison Square Garden in New York City as well as 30 million closed-circuit viewers worldwide.
I knew Dad well enough to
realize his invitation was not a treat. I was earning an average of $50 per
week as a part-time janitor at White Castle, so the ticket price of $20 to see the fight live on screen was steep. But the viewing opportunity seemed like a worthwhile
investment for an idealistic, inspired teenager.
In 1971, I believed that Dad and I could not have been more different. He was an immigrant from Malta with less than an elementary school formal education. He survived the World War II Axis bombings on the island. After the war, he became a police officer in his one-cop village hometown of Mgarr, population 2,000. By 21 he married, by 22 he became a father, by 26 he moved to America, and by 27 he had a wife and three children to support with limited English proficiency as an unskilled laborer. His first job was as a porter, and he eventually became a butcher. He often told us how much he loved America because of the opportunities it gave his children. I was a longhaired pacifist ready to graduate from high school and enter the City University of New York system, worried about the prospects of being drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam War. I was growing up in the midst of a cultural revolution in which people were openly questioning their government's right to conduct an apparently unwinnable war 9,000 miles away where millions of innocent people were being slaughtered. I did not dare challenge my father about his beliefs. I understood them to be valid for him, yet my experience sent me in an entirely different direction.
Our stakes for attending the fight were different too. Dad was a chronic sports gambler, so I figured he had money on the outcome. He enjoyed the sport, having arrived in the US during the boxing golden age when Rocky Marciano, Archie Moore, and Sugar Ray Robinson were champions of their own weight class in their heyday. I saw the match as a chance for Ali to avenge the injustices heaped upon him over the past five years. I was not alone in thinking this way. In fact, one could likely tell the politics of a person just by knowing who they were rooting for, the radical Ali or the traditionalist Frazier.
Dad and I had rarely gone anywhere together since the mid-1960s, when he would occasionally get my brother and me bleacher seats for games at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. That was a lifetime ago for a teenager, and now we were headed for the Loew's American Theater in Parkchester, the Bronx, to see the fight. That night I felt like a man, like Dad's brother. The atmosphere in the movie house was electric, divided in half by opposing loyalists. Dad, a 46-year-old working class man, and I, his rebellious son, were rooting for the same person, smiling when Ali's trembling hand held a note predicting Frazier would fall in the sixth round, holding our breath throughout the difficult fight, heartbroken when Ali hit the canvas in the fifteenth and final round, disappointed when he lost the fight in a unanimous decision, and embarrassed for him when he did not crawl on his knees across the ring to Frazier and say, "You are the greatest," as he said he promised he would if he lost.
Everything changed since March 8, 1971, half a century ago. The winner Frazier would lose his title to the behemoth George Foreman less than two years later, and Ali would reclaim the title from the same man, who seemed so indomitable, less than two years after he had become champion. The Parkchester movie theater is gone. My Bronx high school changed its name from Saint Helena's to Monsignor Scanlan. Dad is gone 24 years. Since I became a father myself 39 years ago, I have seen how much like my father I really am. And how the Fight of the Century still binds us.
