(Second of three parts)

This oft-quoted line from Dick Young of the New York Daily News has not lost its shine 50 years after Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought each other nearly to the death in probably the most brutal—and greatest—boxing match in history.

Young was among the sportswriting gods who descended on the Araneta Coliseum that sweltering Wednesday morning half a century ago to witness the climactic third act of the epic Ali-Frazier trilogy that everyone still talks about today.

Sharing the press row that historic moment were sportswriting luminaries like Red Smith and Dave Anderson of The New York Times; Will Grimsley and Ed Schuyler of The Associated Press; Sports Illustrated’s Mark Kram and the photographer who made legends look larger than life, Neil Leifer; broadcaster Dick Schaap for Sport magazine and NBC’s Today show; and the brightest star of them all, Norman Mailer.

As a young sportswriter, I hung on every word they wrote. Kram’s account of the Thrilla—“Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great”—would be enshrined in “The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.” Mailer, the dapper celebrity author, chronicled the Ali-Foreman “rumble in the jungle” in “The Fight.” And Schaap, the award-winning sportswriter and broadcaster, was in the middle of an interview with Ali when the champion’s wife, Khalilah (née Belinda), arrived from the United States, confronted him about strutting another woman as his wife, and flew home 12 hours later.

Here’s Schaap’s account: “She ignored the cameras and walked right up to her husband and put her arms around him and said, ‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’

“Ali lied like a husband. The Alis disappeared into an adjacent bedroom for round two of their reunion, and the sounds of conflict wafted out to the living room.” When the interview resumed, “it took 10 minutes before Ali again became his effusive self, 12 hours before Belinda boarded a plane back to the United States, and almost two years before Veronica Porche became the third Mrs. Ali.”

Travelling circus

The unravelling reality show kept pace with the hype. For two weeks before the fight, Manila became a travelling circus, much of it Ali’s making. The seaside Folk Arts Theater, the architectural showpiece designed by renowned architect Leandro Locsin for the 1974 Miss Universe pageant, was the scene of some of these sideshows. It was refitted as an oversized boxing gym and the dressing rooms, which once were filled with the scent of perfume and beauties from around the world, now reeked of sweat and liniment oil from boxers, sparring mates, masseurs, and assorted camp followers. 

Taunts and theater spilled outside. Ali pointed a toy gun at the balcony of Frazier’s Hyatt Regency suite, chased off a heckling Frazier sparring mate, slipped into the training venue ahead of schedule to spy on Frazier’s workouts, even accepted a dubious honorary doctorate degree from a dubious university, and insisted that everyone now call him “Dr. Ali.”

“Who would have thought,” he exclaimed wide-eyed, “that an uneducated black man would become a doctor?”

To keep boxing fans from swarming them, the two fighters did their roadwork on Roxas Boulevard during curfew hours (yes, kids, martial law was real, and there was a four-hour curfew then). 

I was there daily. I was filing for the Philippines Daily Express and its sister publication, the Evening Express, of which I became a sports editor at 19 (by default, thanks to martial law; but that’s another story). At 22, I was still the youngest member of the powerhouse Express sports team that covered the whole affair and was still learning the ropes from veterans Tony Siddayao, Ernie Gonzales, and Recah Trinidad, whose bylines I had followed since high school. Tony headed the crew; Ernie covered Frazier, I shadowed Ali, and Recah wrote the long pieces for the magazine Expressweek. 

Rubbing elbows with the royalty of my profession, a journalism school dropout with a press pass to the greatest show on earth, I was living the dream.

The real show

At last, the circus ended. On Oct. 1, 1975, the real show began.

Renamed “Philippine Coliseum” during martial law, the Araneta Coliseum—one of the world’s largest indoor arenas when it opened in 1960—debuted with the world junior lightweight championship between Gabriel “Flash” Elorde and Harold Gomes. Over the decades, the Big Dome has been many things: a boxing mecca; a cockfighting arena; a skating rink and cinema; a stage for political and religious gatherings, beauty pageants, a tennis exhibition, professional wrestling, circuses, and PBA and collegiate basketball; host to the 1978 and 2023 FIBA World Cups; a concert hall (Taylor Swift and K-Pop artists performed here); a vaccination center during the pandemic; and even the site of an international chess tournament opened by the late world champion Bobby Fischer.

I witnessed or covered most of these events. And now, I was at the Big Dome for the grandest show of all.

The fight was scheduled at 10:45 a.m., perfect for primetime viewing in the western hemisphere. The area was already throbbing with activity before sunrise, as fight fans, some from the farthest corners of the country, queued for the few remaining general-admission tickets. By the opening bell, the crowd had swelled to over 25,000 in the 18,000-seat arena, and the air conditioning could hardly handle the overflow of humanity.

The stands were packed to the rafters. The upper and lower box sections were filling up, too. Several rows around the Everlast ring were reserved for the army of media persons covering the spectacle. Television crews checked their lights, wire-service men tested their teletype machines (the digital age was still lightyears away). Technicians and engineers of the earth station in Tanay laid down the cables for the beams that would carry the signal to an estimated 700 million people worldwide via satellite (a technological achievement in the 1970s).

I watched Schuyler test his AP teletype to New York, where his round-by-round account would be transmitted all over the world, while the white-suited Mailer stood nonchalantly near the ringside entrance, chatting with the attractive younger woman he was with.

Testing our hotline to the newsroom, I heard a foreign photographer mutter “sabotage” as his gear balked. It was Neil Leifer, who took one of the most iconic photographs in sports: Ali standing over the fallen Sonny Liston. He had rigged his camera high above the ring, praying for a frame of a lifetime—duplicating a similar angle of Cleveland Williams spreadeagled on the canvas after being knocked out by Ali in 1966. The overhead camera and flash finally worked, but they were unnecessary, it turned out. No one was going to hit the canvas; Ali and Frazier were still standing after the fight.

The undercard saw the young Rolando Navarrete lose his Philippine bantamweight title to the disfigured Fernando Cabanela by a 12-round unanimous decision, as upcoming undefeated heavyweight Larry Holmes provided a glimpse of the future when he stopped Rodney Bobick by technical knockout in the sixth round.

‘Another day’s work’

With President Marcos, First Lady Imelda, and daughter Imee finally seated, it was time to start the show.

Sportscaster Joe Cantada, the other Smokin’ Joe in the ring, let his baritone voice roll over the jampacked coliseum, announcing the all-Filipino officials of the fight: referee Carlos “Sonny” Padilla Jr. and judges Alfredo Quiazon and Larry Nadayag.

“Another day’s work,” the champion proclaimed to the ringsiders as the predominantly pro-Ali crowd chanted “Ali! Ali! Ali!” Finally, officials cleared the ring, and the bell tolled for Round 31 of a rivalry whose aftershocks would echo for decades.

Ali was expected to come forward with his dance-shuffle-stick-and-jab routine, but he came out of his corner flat-footed, as if ready to mix it up early. Frazier bobbed, weaved, and crouched, forcing Ali to miss his shots. Ali did land a few blows, the biggest one a left hook to the jaw that staggered Frazier against the ropes.

Frazier’s legs buckled a few times but he kept moving forward, like a football lineman pushing against a blocking sled in training. Ali kept him at bay by sticking a left arm in his face. Early on, Padilla wouldn’t let Ali clinch. Sharp with his eyes and quick with his hands, the Filipino referee would slap Ali’s gloves free whenever he tried to clinch or to hook Frazier’s neck. Some later questioned Padilla’s move, but everyone agreed that it kept Ali honest, the fight clean, and the combat pure.

Unable to clinch, Ali toyed with rope-a-dope—the same tactic that drove Foreman to exhaustion in Zaire—but he could not lean back far enough from Frazier’s punches. A few days earlier, Frazier’s camp had checked the ring to make sure the ropes were tight.

From the fourth round on, it was a brutal battle of flesh and spirit. Frazier grunted and snorted as he buried hooks into Ali’s ribs and kidneys, as if pounding the heavy bag in the gym. Ali sent combinations upstairs, as if working the speed ball. At times, Ali looked awkward, firing shots from the sides like a pitcher throwing a sidearm delivery, as if he could not decide between a hook and an uppercut. 

Before the bell sounded for the sixth round, Ali rose to rally the fans, and they responded with more chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” It was getting hot and humid in the air-conditioned coliseum, but nobody—not even the two gladiators locked in mortal combat on the ring—seemed to mind.

The action grew more brutal and the violence grew more painful to watch in the sixth. Frazier pressed the attack, but Ali caught him with a short left that knocked his mouthpiece off. In the seventh, Ali started to dance, but this merely enraged Frazier, like the bull raging against the matador, and the challenger dug deeper into Ali’s body. 

By the 10th, Ali was looking spent and ready to go; his trainer Angelo Dundee and cornerman Bundini Brown were wearing panic on their faces. Frazier’s face was a bloody mask, his swollen lips and puffed eyes showing the toll he was paying just to get close enough to land the blows on Ali’s body.

The savage give-and-take continued in the 12th. The 13th was cruel: It proved ominous for Frazier as Ali took control of the fight. A right cross blew Frazier’s mouthpiece into orbit—blood, sweat, saliva, and all—spinning off the ring across a few rows at ringside. It sailed past my face and landed on the press table in front of the horrified Jullie Yap Daza, the veteran lifestyle journalist.

Enough

But Frazier’s legs knew no retreat. By the 14th, Ali was scoring almost at will, and Frazier kept coming back although his eyes had swollen shut. While Ali himself seemed on the brink, it was clear Frazier could no longer see the punches. He was fighting on instinct. When the bell rang ending the round, Padilla had to guide Frazier back to his corner. 

And Eddie Futch decided he had seen enough.

“I’m stopping the fight,” Futch told his fighter. Frazier shook his head and said “No!” He wanted the 15th. A champion’s pride wanted one more round. Futch refused.

With Ali himself on the edge, who knows what would have happened had there been a 15th round? Learning that the fight was over, Ali raised his hands and collapsed to the canvas exhausted.

“Fighting Joe Frazier is the closest thing to dying,” the champion would later say, the highest tribute he could give to the man who, in Mark Kram’s words, had taken the champion “to hell and back.”

Over 44 rounds spanning three brutal fights, Ali and Frazier dragged the best out of each other, each pushing the other beyond his limit. In their final 14 rounds of the Thrilla, both men reached deep into reserves they hadn’t known existed, each giving everything he had and absorbing everything the other could throw back. They were unbroken.

But they were never the same again. They paid a heavy price for greatness and for the legacy that etched their names in boxing history. Frazier fought twice more—one brutal return against Foreman and a draw with the unheralded Floyd Cummings—then retired. Ali boxed for a while—winning and losing to Leon Spinks before closing his career with losses to Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick. 

“We went to Manila as champions, Joe and I, and we came back old men,” Ali once said. He died in 2016 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease—an illness some neurologists suggest may have been exacerbated by years of head trauma in the ring. Frazier died in 2011 of liver cancer.

When Eddie Futch leaned into Frazier in his corner at the end of the fight, he gave him what no championship belt could ever give: “Son, no one will ever forget what you did here today.”

Indeed. Half a century later, Dick Young’s words still resonate: It was every bit the promised Thrilla in Manila—and more. To be concluded