Bad blood?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Bad blood?

“I went to see President Nixon at the White House. It wasn’t difficult to get a meeting because I was heavyweight champion of the world. So I came to Washington and walked around the garden with Nixon, his wife and daughter. I said: ‘I want you to give Ali his licence back. I want to beat him up for you.’ Nixon said, ‘Sure, I’d like that.’ He knew what he was doing and so Ali got his licence back.”

Ali had been in exile from the ring for three years before Frazier’s intervention in 1970. Did Ali thank him? “I don't remember. Maybe he did - but I doubt it. I was just happy he got his licence back so I could clean him out.”

Frazier had also given Ali money, but that did not stop the sudden animosity which welled up in the returning hero. Ali was initially amusing. “Joe Frazier is too ugly to be champ. He can’t talk. He can’t box. He can’t dance. He can’t do no shuffle and he writes no poems.”

But the joking soon stopped. “Joe Frazier is an Uncle Tom,” Ali ranted. “He works for the enemy.”

Joe’s son, Marvis, winces on the sofa opposite his father and me. “I used to get beat up every day at school by guys who would say, ‘Your dad’s a Tom”. It was terrible.”

A compelling new documentary, The Thrilla in Manila, is unflinching in the way it documents the systematic racial abuse Ali directed against Frazier for the next five years - culminating in the final fight of their epic trilogy in 1975. They had each won one bout and Ali demeaned Frazier as a big black gorilla who communicated in grunts rather than words.