Shadow boxing with legend of the heavyweight ranks

Joe Frazier. Picture / Richard Robinson

There are plans to make a film about boxing great "Smokin" Joe Frazier's life, and the man himself is keen - with one proviso.

"Only if it's going to be the way I want it to be," he says in a raspy and slightly slurry drawl.

"I don't want a whole bunch of sex going on, cos I was wild. Ladies love me and I love them."

As a result, he has 11 children to various women including his ex-wife, whom he married at 16. A bio without the graphic scenes shouldn't worry the film producers because it is another relationship that holds the real fascination.

Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali are linked like no other sports combatants, after their trilogy of 1970s' fights captured world attention.

Frazier, the star guest at Dean Lonergan's Fight for Life tonight, became undisputed world heavyweight boxing champion in 1970 by knocking out Jimmy Ellis.

This was a time of rising racial tension and the Vietnam War, when the champion Ali refused the Army draft. Ali - citing his Islamic faith for refusal - was stripped of his boxing licence, leaving the title vacant in 1968.

In the 1971 "Fight of the Century", Frazier defeated Ali at Madison Square Garden. But Ali won their next two, including the brutal Thriller in Manila.

There was more to it than boxing though. Ali had taunted Frazier, calling him "ugly", and a "gorilla". Frazier, it is said, has never forgotten. When Ali lit the Olympic flame at Atlanta in 1996, Frazier would have "pushed him in".

Frazier, dressed on a rainy Auckland day in an aubergine-coloured suit and black stetson hat, and wearing gold rings the size of knuckle bones, suggests it was not the taunts which angered him.

"Sting like a butterfly, float like a bee," he says of Ali, reversing Ali's famous self-congratulatory poem.

"He made a lot of noise. But he didn't put no moves on me at all."

Rather, Ali had been guilty of "mistaking the Lord's words", and dishonoured his mother by changing his name from Cassius Clay. Refusing the draft had been unpatriotic.

"I was born and raised in a town where the great marines were raised," Frazier says of his South Carolina origins.

"When you are called on you have to answer. And he didn't."

But Ali's words did sting and when he once apologised via a newspaper story, Frazier asked why he could not say sorry in person.

During their fight buildups, Ali had portrayed himself as a champion of black people and Frazier as an "Uncle Tom". This enraged Frazier, who was raised poor in the segregated south.

His is a classic boxing story, the youngest child of a sharecropper and bootlegger, with 15 siblings he tells me, who fought his way out of poverty.

Frazier says television images fired his desire to be a world champion as a kid, when he constructed a heavy punching bag - using cloth filled with corn husks and old clothing - which he hung from a tree.

His teenage endeavours included selling stolen cars for $50 to wreckers. His early jobs included working in a slaughterhouse, where he threw his famous left hook against sides of beef and so helped inspire Sylvester Stallone's Rocky film character - a sore point with Frazier.

At least Stallone gets a mention. The name Mike Tyson does not pass his lips, although he suggests "the man who doesn't go the distance any more" could have prospered under the guidance of Frazier, who was famous for his ring courage.

Frazier, who walks haltingly, lives above his massive Philadelphia gym. His business manager Les Wolff describes gym rules. "You don't come in with baggy pants, earrings, or braids in your hair, trying to figure out whether you are a male or a female," says Wolff. "It's good old-fashioned manners."

Frazier is "strict with but close to" his children, including son Marvis, a former pro heavyweight, and daughter Jacqueline, who has a boxing rivalry with Ali's daughter Laila.

Frazier even had his 1964 Olympic gold medal chopped up and spread among his children. He talks glowingly of friend George Foreman, who beat him badly twice.

"I needed a bigger weapon for that," he says of facing boxing's hardest hitter.

Frazier - whose ventures include a youth foundation - is entertaining, engages with hotel guests, sings, and is as accommodating as a 61-year-old travel-weary sporting legend could possibly be.

He'll even return to Ali.

They last met at a basketball game three years ago. Ali, trembling with Parkinson's Disease, leant over.

"He mumbled in my ear 'are we still two bad guys?'," says Frazier.

"I can stay in a room and have lunch with him. I never got to a place where I hated anyone."

It's a story that lives on, captivating and confusing each time it is told.