Professional prizefighters come in all shapes and sizes and from all manner of backgrounds and locales, from the inner city of Brooklyn to the countryside of Uzbekistan, from broken homes and loving families. Eighty-one years ago today, on January 12, 1944, one of the greatest ever to lace up the gloves was born in South Carolina as the twelfth child to a sharecropper named Rubin and his wife Dolly. The man who would become a byword for ferocity and relentlessness was, he would willingly admit, a daddy’s boy who was afraid of the dark.
“We were as close as father and son should be,” he later wrote in his autobiography of his relationship with his dad. “I like to say I went from my momma’s belly into my father’s arms.”
The entire family lived in a six-room house with a porch that Rubin and the elder children had built. “I could look up and tell you what time of day it was from where the sunlight shot through [the roof],” he wrote. “And when it rained hard, we’d spend half the night putting buckets out to keep it from flooding us.” There was no running water, no plumbing; and the outhouse was “seventy-five yards from the back door” – a problem if, like young Frazier, you were “scared as hell of the dark.”
Which is why each room held a slop bucket, so that those who woke in the middle of the night with a need for the bathroom but a reluctance to risk the mosquitoes and who-know-what-else lay outside in the pitch black of a moonless night could simply take care of business, head back to bed, and discard the evidence in the morning.
It was Frazier’s uncle who first planted the seed of what would grow into a Hall-of-Fame career.
Looking at the eight-year-old Joe, stockier than most boys of his age on account of the sheer amount of physical labor he put in around the farm, the uncle remarked that “that boy is going to be another Joe Louis.” That sounded OK to him, and the next day he filled an old burlap sack with rags, corn cobs, and Spanish moss, and hung it from a tree. “For the next six, seven years damn near every day I’d hit that heavybag for an hour at a time,” he wrote.
His toughness earned him a side hustle, in the rough-and-tumble world of elementary school personal protection: classmates would give him a sandwich if he walked with them past the crowd of bullies at final bell.
Around the same time, though, he suffered an injury that could have spelled a permanent end to his athletic dreams but instead, the way he saw it, made them possible.
Frazier may have been a hard-working eight-year-old, but he was still an eight-year-old, and like kids of his age everywhere, he couldn’t help getting into mischief. One day, he decided to tease the family’s 300-pound hog by poking it with a stick and running away. Unfortunately, the gate to the pigpen was open and the annoyed boar ran through it and after Frazier who, panicking, fell and hit his left arm.
Because the family was too poor to afford a doctor, the arm had to heal by itself, which it did, more or less. Frazier wrote that it would never again fully straighten. “The left arm was now crooked, and lacking full range of motion,” he wrote. “But as it existed, it was as though it was cocked for a left hook – permanently cocked.”
Times were hard, and meals during the week had to be stretched, the family feeding on “big pots of peas and fried corn bread, or crab stew.” Sundays were special days, when they would cook a chicken they had raised and throw in butter beans, rice, and fried bread. Weekends were also, he recalled, “party time,” when he would accompany his father to hooch-fueled gatherings; and, when Rubin was too drunk to drive, little Joe would sit on his lap and steer them home.
“You’re going to end up just like your father,” his mother would cluck, and Joe knew exactly what she meant. Rubin had an eye for the ladies, and by his own admission had sired 26 children altogether, with many of Joe’s half-brothers and half-sisters stopping by the house, where Dolly would welcome and feed them as if they were her own.
Rubin’s wandering eye had almost gotten him and Dolly killed once, when a man called Arthur Smith, a rival for the attention of one of Rubin’s paramours, unloaded a gun as the two drove away from a bar. Dolly was struck in the foot, and Rubin’s left hand and forearm were so badly damaged they had to be amputated.
Frazier inherited his father’s wandering eye, and when he became a teenager, he and his friends would drive to the bigger towns nearby in search of parties to crash and girls to pursue. Whenever they showed up, he recalled, the local boys were rarely too pleased to see them, “but if they tried to muscle us, they ended up with bloody noses or worse.”
By now, Frazier was perfectly happy to showcase his strength and fighting ability, harnessing it to the growing anger and resentment he felt at his surroundings – not at his family or friends, but at growing up poor and black in the Jim Crow south.
Black kids couldn’t sit in the same part of a movie theater as whites, had to sit at the back of the depot when waiting to catch a bus, had to cross the street to the opposite sidewalk to let a white person go by.
Frazier was fourteen years old and hanging out on the street with some friends when a white boy drove past and, leaning out the window, yelled “Get out of the street, n*****.”
“Come and do something about it, cracker,” Frazier shouted back. The white kid parked his car one street over, and Frazier marched to meet him. As a crowd gathered, Frazier unleashed what would become his signature left hook, “and he went down like I’d leveled a shotgun on him.” He wouldn’t be the last man to feel the wrath of Frazier’s left hand.
From the age of about eight, Frazier began working on a farm run by a pair of white brothers, Mac and Jim Bellamy. “I never had no trouble” with either brother, he recalled. “I did my job; they treated me okay – as okay as a black man was treated in those times.”
But one day Frazier saw Jim – whom he described as “a little rougher and a lot more redneck-nasty” than his brother – beating a 12-year-old black farmworker with his belt in the field. Frazier told the other workers what he had seen, and when Bellamy found out, he threatened to use his belt on Frazier, too. The young Frazier stood his ground and Bellamy, sensing how things might unfold were he to push his luck, told the youngster to leave his farm and never come back.
Squaring up to white folk so readily did mot auger a promising and lengthy future, and Dolly knew as much. Given Frazier’s strength and penchant for letting his fists fly, she sensed that trouble – and worse – lay in her youngest son‘s future.
“Son, if you can’t get along with the white folks, then leave home because I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Nine months later, he did just that, boarding a Greyhound bus with a one-way ticket for Philadelphia.
He was fifteen years old and on his own. He had nothing to his name except a mighty left hook and burning sense of injustice.
Within ten years, the daddy’s boy from the back country, who slept in a room with a slop bucket, would be the heavyweight champion of the world.
Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcast about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He presently co-hosts the “Fighter Health Podcast” with Dr. Margaret Goodman. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.
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