17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Autobiography With Vivid Details and Great Stories, October 3, 2005
This review is from: Smokin' Joe: The Autobiography of a Heavyweight Champion of the World, Smokin' Joe Frazier (Hardcover)
First things first: I am a huge Muhammad Ali fan; and, I am a huge Joe Frazier fan. On top of that, I am fascinated by the lives of boxers. It seems that to become a great boxer, one must go through a bitter struggle to get to the top of that profession.
Like other great boxers, "Smokin'" Joe Frazier had a hard life, and one at which one wrong turn at the crossroads could have derailed his life.
Written in 1996, when "Smokin' Joe" was 52 and still bitter at Muhammad Ali's name tauntings of him when they were professional heavyweight fighters in the 1970s, this book was quite a revealing book about Joe's life.
Most of you who will read this review must be, to some extent, familiar with the boxing history between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. In this book, Frazier goes into astonishing details about his recollections which made me feel as if he were here next to me talking to me himself.
The book also connects Joe's past to his present and gives you clarity on how he developed as a man. He is very inspirational in how he explains how he rose to the top from his poor upbringing, though poor only in terms of money, not pride, committment to his family, or belief in himself: areas about himself that were a wealth of possibilities as long as someone believed in him.
The book begins with his childhood in South Carolina and he gives you a feel about what he was like and how close he was to his father and the relationship he had with women, his friends, and experiences he had while living in a racially segregated South.
Piece by piece, step by step, "like a train", Joe literally takes us on the train ride of his life clearly explaining many fascinating details about his early fights. What impressed me was his attention to detail about his opponents. I had no idea that Oscar Bonavena was shot to death in Reno because of his affair with a woman who's husband owned a Reno. I never noticed the connection about how trainers would also fight trainers through their boxers and how fights of the 60s would directly connect fights of the 90s.
There's a lot of that in this book.
Then of course, there is the relationship between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. They always had an amazing chemistry between each other. The perfect complimentaries in all aspects of life. Having Read Ali's Autobiography and Smokin' Joe's Autobiography, they both present themselves the same way they presented themselves in the ring. Joe was step by step in your face while Ali was multidirectional in his autobiography.
In this 200 page book, at least 50 pages and two complete chapters are dedicated in detail about the relationship between him and Ali. If you read it, it sounds as if Joe was still angry at Ali while he wrote this. But I learned in this book that Joe Frazier is a deeper person than most give him credit for. I really didn't read anger in his words of contempt towards Ali; rather a "hard-love" and maybe even some hurt and justifiable hurt of the personal bashing Ali directed at him.
The book goes into amazing details some of the verbal exchanges they shared even while in the ring, nights prior to fights or other personal confrontations they had over the years.
A lot of it is even humorous despite being serious. There's a great passage about Joe Frazier's taunting Ali in private about his pseudo-wife at the time Veronica Porsche when they fought "The Thrilla in Manila."
If you've seen Joe Frazier fight, the book reads with the same intensity of his boxing style: penetrating and persistant.
You can't help but admire this man for his ethic and philosophy on life.
For those of you who think Frazier has "deep psychological hatreds towards Ali," that's a bunch of, as Frazier would put it, "scamboogah talk."
As recently as June 9, 2001: Joe was quoted as saying after his daughter lost a woman's boxing match against Ali's youngest daughter: "-``It's over. I just don't want no more problems...If I see him tomorrow, I'll say, 'Hey man, let's get along. Forgive me and I'll forgive you.' I'm tired of the harsh, dirty words. I don't want to go back to that no more.''
This is a must read if you love boxing, especially the historically most important years of boxing: The 1970s,when Ali and Frazier were two of the 3 (Foreman too) top masters of this Sport.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shows the heart of a champion, March 19, 2006
This review is from: Smokin' Joe: The Autobiography of a Heavyweight Champion of the World, Smokin' Joe Frazier (Hardcover)
I admit that this book is hardly good literature. Yet I enjoyed reading it again and again.
Though I followed boxing at one time, I am really not a big fight fan. But I love stories about people who put their heart and soul into what they do, and Joe Frazier certainly did that.
He describes his impoverished childhood, his flirtaion with a life of petty crime, and then his getting into boxing from the ground up and working his way to the Olympic gold medal and eventually the heavyweight championship of the world.
He also gives a glimpse of what happend after his boxing career was over and his opinion of some of the 1990's boxers.
But much of the book was devoted to his wars with Mohammed Ali (who he refers to as Cassius Clay or "Butterfly"), both in and out of the ring. He talks about how badly he was stung by Ali's calling him an "Uncle Tom" (not black enough) and then calling him a Gorilla (as in subhuman; too black, too uncultured).
Because I am not African American, I can't fully understand the sting of what Ali did to him (in the guise of promoting the fights) but it is clear that he was still bitter about it. That's a shame too, as Joe Frazier is clearly one of the best boxers to ever live, and one of the two boxers to beat Ali while he was at or near his prime (Norton is the other one).
Oh yes, I picked up a cool "new" (to me) word: "scamboogah". I like it!
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