One.

What's the first thing on the top of your mind?

So there was this sense.

I mean, whatever third grade at PS 33.

But there is this sense that close by, there's something monumental happening in the world of adults.

It has to do with Vietnam.

It has to do with the draft.

No one really understands it, but I remember it didn't stop kids at school from from getting into fights over it.

Um, three times I remember clearly, like klieg lights on Eighth Avenue, cutting, cutting the night like you see in those old Hollywood movies.

One for Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin to when Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone got married at the Garden and the third time and the first time I ever saw it.

Ali Frazier And if you look at it, especially apparent in the remastered cut.

But if you look at at the palette at the colors and the character is coming on and off stage like the cops, guys with Cigar is the girls, the celebrities.

It looks very much like a classic Sidney Lumet's movie, and there is this sense that this is New York.

It's the capital then of sports.

It's the capital of television.

It's also the capital of intellectual life in America, which was actually German here, because the best writers in the country or some of them converged on the fight, and this was this was written as a fable, but there was a very definite sense.

I remember as a kid that this kind of fight, the fight of the century, had to happen in the most potent city in the world.

You know, I would argue that that Louis Schmeling one was actually the most important fight that's ever taken place in boxing.

But as a piece of commerce for its time, Ali Frazier one was different than anything else because not only did Ali represent the countercultural revolution, and Joe Frazier was this throwback old school heavyweight slugger, but they were both somehow think about this.

If it sounds like logically impossible.

They were both somehow undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champions, and they were both under 30 at the time.

This was when you add in the styles difference.

It was the biggest fight of all time.

You make an interesting point with with Louis and Schmeling um, and the lines between what was good and what was evil were a lot easier to figure out.

We're Americans, and they're Nazis.

And to the extent that that any fighter deserves to be, uh, freighted with a greater meaning.

You know, I don't know if smelling deserve that, but But those lines were clear.

What you get in the sixties and the seventies is something much more ambiguous and and and difficult to figure out.

Um, you do have these two undefeated champions.

Ali is stripped.

Um, and his road back was not easy.

I mean, after 3.5 years, you get quarry in late October, then you turn around and get Bonavena, who was, you know, a bull and really hurt Ali in December.

But before you go into this, um, but you're also matching not just undefeated champions, but champions with legendary weapons.

This left hook and the jab really iconic left hands in in the history of this division.

Yeah, Yank Durham, Frazier's manager did not want Ali to fight bona Vina also at the Garden.

Because Bona Vita had given Fraser Hell, Fraser was it was raised like that was that was a hellish fight and wait, you're off almost four years, you come back, fight Jerry Quarry, first fight back and then Oscar Bonavena.

But before you fight Joe Frazier, are you insane?

But Ali thought the bone of in a fight would help prepare him for Fraser because Bonavena was so rugged.

Do you think that fight may have taken something out of Ali at that point?

The bone of in a fight, Ferdie Pacheco said.

It was a mistake to fight Bona Vina that it took an enormous amount out of Ali.

He was his doctor at the time and and in the corner.

But both Quarry and Bonavena um similar height similar reach both rugged guys.

To Fraser, What I see in looking at Fraser is a guy who throws this hook with such power, but also such easy.

Just flings it out.

It comes out in the same way that Ali spits out the jab.

Fraser afraid that hook just that hook just comes out, and it's interesting.

I mean, the irony is, and the politics of all the stuff are interesting, but I don't know how Fraser gets cast as the guy representing you know, Archie bunker and and Richard Nixon.

Here's a guy born to sharecroppers in South Carolina at the age of eight.

There is an accident with the Big Hog on his on his farm, and he's eight years old and as a result, he gets his arm banged up.

Don't have enough money to go to a doctor, left arm and the left never straightens out, but he attributes that to how his hook developed.

He was never able to straighten out the left arm, but he got accustomed to kind of flinging out there.

And if you look, if you look back at the film, yeah, Mark, you know, at the first time I heard that story I'm reading Muhammad Ali's autobiography, full of apocryphal stories.

You know, it was he was He was the Nation of Islam, had some editing, had some editorial say about what went in there.

But I remember Ali reproducing a transcript of a car ride he took with Joe Frazier.

I believe it was from Philadelphia to New York City, and they recorded.

Fraser was driving olives in the passenger seat.

Ali's during.

This is during exile, and Fraser, I believe in that transcript, retold the story about how he can't straighten his left arm, so he believes it gives him this special left hook.

What Mark?

One thing I want to ask.

Not not, Yeah, go.

It's not in there, but what what they're talking about.

I just reread that transcript.

It's extraordinary.

They're driving and and Frazier's the guy driving and they start out civil.

But they start working each other, and you can hear Ali start to really work him.

And by the time he says, Hey, drop me off on 52nd Street, you could see that Frazier's already steaming just from reading the transcript.

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