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Bad blood?

Ali himself, meanwhile, was celebrated again as the black American who, after Martin Luther King, did most to confront racial prejudice in a once seething country. “I lived with it for years,” Frazier shrugs at his neglect. “But I like Obama. I think they picked a fine guy in him. Listening to him speak, it sounds like he’s going to be fair and clearcut.”

The bad blood between Ali and Frazier is a darker and more tangled business. But here in Washington, at the start of a new era for America, Frazier offers up a reminder of how he and Ali were once friends. “I helped him out,” Frazier says. “I felt sorry for him in a way.”

In 1967, having embraced Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam war. “I will face machine-gun fire before denouncing Elijah Muhammad and the religion of Islam,” he insisted. “I’m ready to die.” As the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, and at the height of his dazzling powers, Ali was stripped of both his title and his licence to box.

Broke and vilified, Ali started calling Frazier, his eventual replacement as world champion. “He’d be phoning every other day to say, ‘You got my title, man! You got to let me fight you!’” As he repeats that plea Frazier slips into an impersonation which sounds less like Ali in his fast-talking pomp than his old foe after Parkinson’s disease had made his speech slurred and halting. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do.’