The History of the Heavyweight Championship - 1975

What a year: Muhammad Ali was the world heavyweight champion and he made four defences – and every time he got in the ring there was a story, some mayhem, something funny, something absurd, something heartbreaking and sad… always some drama and in Manila there was a fight known then and now as … The Thrilla in Manila. A fight that nobody will ever forget.

At the end of 1974 Ali was invited to the White House by President Gerald Ford. It was something that nobody could have ever predicted when Ali refused to be inducted into the US military seven years earlier. The win over George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle had changed things forever in the Ali business and the sporting world. The extreme outsider was wanted inside.

Maury Allen, writing in the New York Post, captured the moment:

“The time has come to end the bitterness and forget the past. It seems time to appreciate and enjoy this incredible athlete, the wondrous man.”

The War in Vietnam had cost too many lives for Ali to gloat – The war would be over by the end of 1975.

Ali’s first defence of 1975 was in March and it was the first world heavyweight title fight to take place in America in 34 months. The first challenger for Ali in the year… well, it’s one of the crazier fights to have ever taken place for the title.

A man called Chuck Wepner was selected. Chuck had lost nine times. In one fight, a savage bloody brawl against Sonny Liston, he had required – according to his own count – 120 stitches to make his face look like his face again.

Wepner was 35, he had been in the marines, he drove a beer truck and would end up in prison. He was also the inspiration for Rocky – yep, Chuck Wepner is the real Rocky.

The fight was put together by Don King and made possible after a deal where legitimacy and rumour blend in the fading darkness. The fight was in Cleveland, funded by some gentleman. King knew these friends from when he had been the city’s number’s Czar and before he killed a man on a Cleveland street corner over a 600 dollar debt.

Anyway, Ali started to sell the underdog. “His best punches,” Ali pondered after a question. “The rabbit punch, the choke hold and a head butt.” Wepner nodded and smiled.

“I was never a great fighter. I was a brawler. And I figured, probably he’d take me lightly and I had a chance,” said Wepner.

Sylvester Stallone, a young actor, paid his 20 bucks to watch the fight at a pay-per-view cinema. He fell in love with the story:

“I thought everybody wants a slice of immortality. They want that sensation that they have a shot at the impossible dream.”

In round nine, after a right landed on Ali’s chest and Wepner’s foot trod on Ali’s toe at the same time … the world heavyweight champion was down, his legs up in the air, his white boots glowing in the neon. It was Wepner’s golden moment. Unbelievable.

The fight ended with just 19 seconds left in the 15th and final round – Wepner knocked down for the first time in his career, his nose broken, his eyelids cut… he beat the count – Wepner complained when it was called off, but he had nothing left. He only needed 23 stitches. It was Rocky stuff, trust me.

After the Ali fight, Wepner fought Victor the Bear in two close fights and met Andre the Giant in the wrestling ring. Stallone tried to put him in a later Rocky film, but poor Chuck had trouble with the lines. He was always a better fighter than he ever gets credit for. “I was just a lousy actor,” he said.

Ali moved on swiftly and was matched with Ron Lyle in Las Vegas in May. Lyle had spent time in prison for murder. He had been stabbed behind bars and lost a total of 36 pints. “I was dead, but I just refused to die,” Lyle told me in 2010.

He was 28 when he turned professional and was 34 to Ali’s 33 when they met. Lyle had lost just the twice, both on points: To Jerry Quarry in 1973 and in early 1975… to Jimmy Young, the fighter that was close to invisible. Lyle still got the fight.

After ten rounds Lyle was leading on two of the three scorecards and drawing on the third. This was not vintage Ali, but Lyle did his bit and refused to be suckered by the rope-a-dope tactics. He stood his ground, whacked away and had Ali under pressure. Howard Cosell, broadcaster and often a bizarre cheerleader for Ali said at one point:

“Lyle has no fear of this man – Lyle is not afraid.”

In round Ali eleven connected with a right and Lyle was upright… but out of his head. Ali looked at the ref, the ref ignored him and so Ali had to be his vicious self and put an end to the fight and Lyle’s night. Lyle’s wild dream was over – he was stopped after 68 seconds of the 11th round. Lyle still had some big, big nights left. He would also be charged with murder once again.

And then in July of 1975 in heat that felt like steaming liquid honey… Ali met old foe and friend Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur.

They each arrived in the city, showered with flowers and surrounded by adoring thousands. Bugner 25 and a veteran of 58 fights – the contender so few in the boxing business want to give any credit. Would Bugner’s youth be a factor? Had Ali had too many long training camps? The Lyle fight was bad… until the ending. Bugner was there to win.

There was a golden Ali moment at the final conference when the fight gloves were shown to the media. It has to be said the selling of the fight had been slow. Then, the local commissioner said that the fight gloves would be placed overnight in a safe in a prison…. It took Ali about two seconds to start screaming:

“How can you put my gloves in jail – they ain’t done nothing…yet!”

The fight was at 10 in the morning to satisfy American audiences. It was still sweltering. It was a long fight, the full 15 rounds in shattering heat.

Ali ended up in hospital on a drip and Bugner ended up in a swimming pool back at the hotel. He told me he was trying to cool off, resting his exhausted body… the British press insisted that he was just having a good time after not enough effort in the ring. There was a picture of him having a drink in the pool… supposedly proof of Champagne Joe’s lifestyle and perceived reluctance to fight. I guess everybody had forgotten the 12-round war with Joe Frazier in 1973.

“I was dehydrated, what was I supposed to do … not drink? The coverage of that fight pushed me over the edge. It was 118 degrees under the ring lights, I went the full 15 rounds with Ali,” said Bugner. It was an ugly standoff, very vicious. “I was bloody stitched up… a photographer got me that drink,” insisted Bunger.

Ali defended his old friend once again:

“Only he and I and the referee know just damn hot it was in there.”

Later, Ali went further during a television interview on the BBC:

“It’s a shame that the British can’t unite. You can build the man up, give him some confidence, and it might make him better than he is. You should stand up for him.”

The next day, still in Kuala Lumpur, Joe Frazier and Ali sat in front of the press to announce their third fight – it would be in Manila in October and it would be the Thrilla in Manila. It would be x-rated.

Ali started to call Frazier… the gorilla from that point.

“We can’t have a gorilla for champ. They’re gonna think, lookin at him, that all black brothers are animals.”

It is hateful and hurtful – Frazier never fully forgave the man he still called Clay.

The fight build-up made the giddy irrational, the storefront hustlers in Ali’s swollen entourage – Ali needed fifty rooms, Frazier accommodation for 17 people – played their games. It was hard to work out what the men … and women did, but Mark Kram, of Sports Illustrated wrote that “they could write his room number with confident flourish on checks.”

There was real drama in Ali’s love life in the days before the fight. Once again, Ali had travelled with his mistress, Veronica Porsche. She was there, on his arm one night, at the Presidential Palace, when Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-crazy wife, Imelda, held a function. “Your wife is beautiful,” the President said to Ali. There was no denial. Naturally, the story made the papers and magazines.

Back in Chicago, Belinda, his wife… who knew she had been under siege…. boarded a plane. She landed in Kuala Lumpur, refused a lift from any of Ali’s 38 hired hands and arrived at the hotel with malice in her heart and hate on her tongue. She stormed into his suite. He was filming, that stopped. The room cleared. She wrecked it. Threatened to break Veronica’s back. Then left and went back to the airport, to the plane and to a life without Ali – she got two houses and two million dollars. Frazier thought Ali got off light, but he was relieved – he thought that Belinda might injure Ali and cause the fight to be postponed.

And then the fight did take place. Nobody in his entourage could help him and nobody could help Frazier. They were simply meant to fight.

Here is Jerry Izenberg, of the Newark Star-Ledger, one of 800 press in Manila:

“What it came down to in Manila wasn’t the heavyweight championship of the world – Ali and Frazier were fighting for something more important than that. They were fighting for the championship of each other, and it was an epic battle.”

It was 10:45 in the morning and 28,000 were there. They witnessed the greatest fight in history. At the end, Ali said: “What you saw was next to death.”

They knew how to fight each other, but neither of the two boxers knew how to beat the other without sacrifice. They stood and fought. Some doubted they would fight with such ferocity – the fight got even more ferocious the longer it went. In round six Frazier landed what some experts believe was the greatest left hook he ever threw. Ali stayed up, but said: “They told me Joe Frazier was washed up.” Frazier crashed in another shot and replied: “They lied.”

After 11 rounds, Mark Kram had it 6-4-1 in Frazier’s favour. It was tight. The fourteenth round is quite simply incredible. Watching it, one of the ringside scribes said, was to make a man feel guilt. The fearless Frazier is reeling, tottering and the ref guides him back to his corner at the bell to end round 14. Ali is leading on all three scorecards, but he has nothing left. He admits later, he wanted right then to quit.

Frazier is one of 13 children. Born poor in South Carolina. Four of his brothers and sisters were dead before Joe was born. He worked in the fields from age six, alongside his one-armed father. He arrived in Philadelphia as a teenager, just 15 when he wisely left the south. He worked in a meat factory, actually a slaughterhouse, and … yes, he did hit the meat. He won Olympic gold in 1964 and he beat Ali in the Fight of the Century in 1971. It was a life. A modern American story, hard to invent, impossible not to respect.

Frazier sat down at the end of round 14 and tried to look at Eddie Futch, his trainer. His left eye was closed, the left side of his face was swollen, his eye was damaged under the purple bruising. Ali had hit him mercilessly with savage right hands in the 14th round. Frazier had no defence, just his battered heart. Futch took his time. He said he wanted to pull him out and Frazier shouted and tried to get up: “No, no. You can’t do that.”

But, Eddie Futch was a smart man, a lover of British 19th Century poetry, the Romantics – he put his hands on Joe’s head and uttered these unforgettable words:

“Sit down, son. It’s all over. No one will forget what you did here today.”

The Thrilla in Manila was finished. Ali was still the heavyweight champion of the world.

Ali can barely stand to celebrate. “It was the closest thing to dying,” Ali said. They limped, with support, back to their dressing rooms.

“Why do I do this?” Ali asked. “It makes you go a little insane.”

Marvis Frazier, the 15-year-old son of Joe, went to see Ali in his dressing room. Joe never went. “I didn’t mean all that stuff I said about him,” Ali told Marvis Frazier. The apology was rejected by the father. And needed by the son.

Ali also said: “He is the greatest fighter of all times, next to me.”

Thankfully, the stuffed gorilla toys, used by Ali to make his point, were never seen again. Ali had fought 63 championship rounds in 12 months. He needed a break and an easy fight or two or three.

Frazier went away, never quit, shaved his head and met George Foreman in 1976… in what would be his penultimate fight.

The rest of the heavyweight division’s top fighters were like vultures – they were ready to pick away at Ali’s flesh. The Thrilla had taken a dreadful toll, make no mistake. Some in Ali’s team wanted him to quit.

Lyle took a risk a few months after losing to Ali and met Earnie Shavers in Denver. Lyle was dropped in the second, but dropped and stopped Shavers in the sixth. Big Ron had a date with George Foreman in January 1976 – it was Foreman’s first fight since Ali beat him in 1974.

Kenny Norton stopped Jerry Quarry in the fifth – he would get a third fight with Ali in 1976 and a world title fight as a bonus. In 1975 he had starred in the Blaxploitation flick, Mandingo – Norton was an actor and would be in the sequel, Drum in 1976.

It was the end for former world champion, Jimmy Ellis. He won his last fight, but was stopped by Joe Frazier in Australia in March. It’s an odd fight that always goes under radars. He fought Frazier twice and both times it was the fight immediately before Frazier fought Ali. Ellis finished on a rough run of losses to Lyle, Bugner and Frazier – hard fights paid better money. They had no pension plan back then. In retirement Jimmy Ellis went to work for the Parks department in Louisville, the city he shared with Ali.

And Jimmy Young had beaten Lyle in January, but it was Lyle who got the world title fight with Ali. In 1976, Young would be one of four men to get a fight for the world heavyweight title against Ali. He had to be patient… and keep winning.

Joe Bugner was slowing down, his body was hurting. He had fought just once before meeting Ali in Kuala Lumpur. “That fight, that heat – it nearly finished me,” said Bugner. In 1976 he would have one fight – a grudge fight with real edge against Richard Dunn. There would also be a night of mayhem in Munich in May of 1976 for Dunn when he was given a chance to fight Ali.

It was easy in 1975 for Larry Holmes – he worked with Ali in the gym at the start of the year, fought on three Ali undercards, including the morning in Manila – he won nine times, eight by stoppage to end the year 19 and zero. For his last fight of the year – a win in Puerto Rico, Holmes was paid just one thousand dollars. Ali had cleared over seven million dollars in twelve months. The heavyweight boxing business was a cruel business of extremes, but Holmes was poised – his time would come.

Far away from the professional world, an ex-marine called Leon Spinks was winning a national amateur title at light-heavyweight and dreaming wildly of fighting in the Montreal Olympics. Neon Leon, as he would be known, was even then out of control. The heavyweight field was ready.

The year was Ali’s – the Thrilla had damaged both of the boxers, make no mistake. But, Eddie Futch had been right: Nobody would ever forget what they did in that ring.

In 1976 the warning signs were easy to spot, not invisible scars picked up during 14 rounds of boxing hell against Joe Frazier – Muhammad Ali was surely coming to the end of his boxing days.