Video: Joe Frazier highlights – RIP Joe

Joe Frazier has died today from liver cancer at 67.

The boxer known as “Smokin’ Joe,” and who was Muhammad Ali’s greatest rival, was for a time the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world – a title he won in 1971 by destroying Ali at Madison Square Garden in “the fight of the century.” Ali won the title back in 1975 in Manila, in another of the most famous bouts in boxing history.

As the clip shows, Joe was a force of nature – huge, fierce, powerful, relentless.

Whatever you think of boxing and combat sports generally, and however boxing has been eclipsed – the victim of its own internal squabbles and the rise of the more elemental and extreme MMA/UFC – fighters like Frazier were larger than life in their day. They carried on the tradition – celebrated by macho novelists like Hemingway and Mailer – of man as metaphor. The names are magic, even now: Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey. In the early 1970s, at the height of Frazier’s fame, he, Ali, and George Foreman were superstars, in a way not even Georges St. Pierre is now. That run of boxing stardom ended with Mike Tyson, and it won’t be back.

Neither will Frazier. Ali is a shell, George Foreman peddles grills and god, and another icon from the generation past is gone.

RIP Joe Frazier.