Killa in Manila: The legendary Ali-Frazier fight still thrills 50 years on

“Looks like your little face, don’t it?”

As he taunted Joe Frazier, former heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, current champ, pointed at the custom black T-shirts he and his entourage sported as they crashed the Aug. 26, 1975, buffet luncheon in Frazier’s honor at Manhattan’s Four Seasons.

Ali and his minions thought the T-shirts — with the words “MANILA” and “GORILLA” framing a gorilla — rich stuff. For years, Ali, possessed of lighter skin, prettier face and hypnotic style, had cruelly mocked Frazier, squatter and darker, his pug nose and crouched ring posture emblems of an infinitely harder life as the 12th child of a South Carolina sharecropper.

The New York Post’s Vic Ziegel reported how Ali, at the luncheon, abused his opponent from two previous fights, a proud man dressed that August afternoon in a tomato-red three-piece suit.

“He pushed Frazier. He rested a straight-arm against Frazier’s forehead. He threw carefully wild lefts and rights. He let himself be held back. He turned to the television cameras, yelling for his T-shirted followers to join him. ‘Let’s take a team picture,’ he said. And they did. And then they were off,” Ziegel wrote. “ ‘How can that bother me?’ Frazier told the people who kept asking if Ali’s tactics were winning the cold war.”

As central to the early 1970s as Watergate and “The Godfather,” Ali-Frazier debuted March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden. Each man, promised the then-astronomical sum of $2.5 million, entered the “Fight of the Century” undefeated. In 1967, Ali had sacrificed his boxing career to his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. After an illegally imposed exile of three-and-a-half years and a landmark Supreme Court victory, Ali was three fights into his comeback, eager to reclaim his crown. Frazier — like Ali, a former Olympic champion — had won the belt in 1970, in a tournament staged in Ali’s absence.

Formerly Cassius Clay, Ali had converted to the Nation of Islam and advocated racial segregation; to sell tickets that would have sold out anyway, he employed black stereotypes to attack Frazier, punching a rubber gorilla at press events, pressing an index finger to his nose.

Frazier, on his off time, fronted a rock band. Yet the left aligned behind the beautiful and fiery Ali — pacifist pugilist, Louisville Lip turned war dissident — while conservative hardhats and other members of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority rooted for Smokin’ Joe. Only the 1930s Louis-Schmeling fights, freighted by Adolf Hitler’s assertions of Aryan racial superiority, carried greater symbolism.

Ali dominated the early rounds in that first fight, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, snapping Frazier’s head with left jabs and sharp rights. Joe smoked the middle rounds, driving Ali into the ropes with roundhouse lefts. The action was ferocious. In the 15th round Frazier’s perfect left hook to Ali’s jaw dropped the ex-champion. Ali rose instantly; Frazier won the decision.

At their second fight, a Jan. 28, 1974, 12-rounder at the Garden, neither man was champion. Frazier had been dethroned the year before by George Foreman, who had canvassed him six times in two rounds.

“Down goes Fray-zhuh!” yelled Howard Cosell. “Down goes Fray-zhuh!”

In Ali-Frazier II, the dancing master easily outclassed the bobbing, weaving slugger; indeed, Ali might have KOed Frazier in the second round were it not for the referee prematurely ending the round.

Nine months later, Ali, 32, reclaimed the crown by stunning Foreman, in the African nation of Zaire, with an eighth-round knockout.

So the third and decisive match with Frazier was set for a coliseum in Quezon City, outside Manila, in the Philippines, Oct. 1, 1975.

Each man had bested the other once; only Frazier had dropped Ali. The time for stunts, for mockery, was over.

“It must be 100 degrees here,” said announcer Don Dunphy.

The capacity crowd of 30,000, some 10% reporters and photographers, was joined by a global satellite-television and closed-circuit-theater audience of another billion or so. Thus the “Thrilla in Manila,” as Ali dubbed the bout, was one of the most widely anticipated and consumed events of the millennium coming to its close. Heavyweight contender Ken Norton, who split two bouts with Ali, once breaking his jaw, predicted “a very epic battle,” “one of power versus technique.”

The whole world understood the history in the making. “In a few moments we will either have the greatest heavyweight champion of all time,” joked comedian Flip Wilson at ringside, “or another sensational comeback and a setup for what will unquestionably be the greatest fight ever in history.”

Round 1 began with Ali flat-footed, left glove outstretched to glaze Frazier’s head: a demonstration of his great advantage in reach that both taunted his adversary like an older brother and aided in measurement. Ali threw punches in blinding flurries of combinations, leading with right crosses and following with left hooks, snapping Frazier’s head and stirring the crowd. “Frazier keeps smiling as Ali beats him to the punch,” Dunphy said. “That was a big round for Muhammad Ali.”

Midway in Round 2 Ali used the left probe to set up a sharp right that twisted Frazier’s head, briefly lifting him off the canvas. It ranks among the cleanest, most perfect rights of Ali’s career; indeed, rather than follow up, the Great One took a step back and lowered his gloves to savor the moment.

Round 3 brought the return of rope-a-dope, the tactic Ali had used against Foreman in Zaire: laying on the ropes, weathering 40 unanswered blows to arms, kidneys and cranium before unleashing a flurry of 30 counterpunches at Frazier.

By Round 5, Frazier, traditionally a slow starter, began to smoke. “Ali really got nailed!” Dunphy shouted after a classic Frazier left. Two more followed, and the crowd began chanting, “Fray-zhuh! Fray-zhuh!”

Ali was losing steam. His punches carried no zip. It seemed to Dunphy and many others that the action constituted “almost a replica” of the 1971 bout, with Ali dominating early, Frazier coming on strong midway.

But early in Round 6 an Ali right stripped Frazier’s mouthpiece. Then Ali tired again, retreating to rope-a-dope, Frazier scoring routinely.

The next round Ali rediscovered a primary tool: dancing. On display once more, slower than a decade earlier but still captivating, was the clockwise prancing from which left jabs and right crosses sprang like cobras. Four-punch combos, a jaw-crunching uppercut: the champ reclaimed control. “Ali, fighting a smart fight now, picking his spots, breaking off the action when he wants to, resuming it when he wants to,” Dunphy observed.

Both men had withstood each other’s best. But the toll on Frazier was growing. “Frazier is unbelievable,” marveled actor Hugh O’Brian. “The amount of times that he got hit on the head, that he got clocked. . . . That he could stand there and keep comin’ at him — it’s just fantastic, the punches that he’s been taking.”

“Joe has to find some way to stop getting hit so much,” Ken Norton agreed.

The final rounds witnessed nearly unrelenting action, as savage a contest as any heavyweight title bout has ever produced: the unceasing trading of blows, of combinations of blows, the fighters’ heads snapping left and right as they slugged each other at will, the crowd, riotous, standing and screaming like none before. “This is one of the great ones!” Dunphy shouted.

Two minutes into Round 13, another perfect Ali right sent Frazier’s mouthpiece flying. The champ poured it on, scoring 10 unanswered blows. The challenger was now cut on his lip and below his right eye. “Joe has taken a lot of punishment,” Dunphy lamented.

But Smokin’ Joe would not go down.

In Round 14 the champ danced and went right to work. “Ali is going out for a knockout, I think, in this round,” Dunphy said. Two minutes in, an Ali flurry — whup-whup-whup to the face — sent Frazier staggering. Ten more Ali punches connected. Referee Carlos Padilla — the native Filipino who had worked the bout skillfully, warning each fighter at times for rules violations — guided Frazier back to his corner.

He stayed there. Trainer Eddie Futch refused to allow his fighter, his face swollen like a lumpy potato, to answer the bell for the 15th round.

Ali had won the series, two victories to one; Frazier remained at once the only man to put the other down and the only fighter unable to finish a bout.

Ali collapsed amid the crowd that flooded the ring. “It was like death,” he said later. “Closest thing to dying that I know of.”

For the billions round the world who loved Muhammad Ali, the great mystery of his life is why he fought 10 more times after Manila.

For all those who loved Joe Frazier, it offered scant comfort that Ali, 10 years before Frazier’s death in 2011, apologized for the racial taunts.

Their names be linked forevermore.

James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and the author, most recently, of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”