Larger than life, Ali captivated attention outside the ring as well as inside; his decision to refuse the military draft divided a nation already eating itself over the conflict in Vietnam.

Frazier, in contrast, was a sharecropper’s son who had left home at 15 and had initially not made the 1964 Olympic team before being called up as an alternate and then going on to claim gold. He became the leading heavyweight contender and took over as undisputed champ when Ali was suspended in response to his refusal to be inducted into the military.

Frazier did not share Ali’s penchant for the theatrical. When Ali used the build-up to their first fight, after he had returned from exile, to taunt his rival as an “Uncle Tom,” the umbrage he took soon solidified into a lifelong, guttural loathing. 

That initial encounter, on March 8, 1971, brought the nation to a halt and resulted in a Frazier decision win – Ali’s first loss – that was sealed with a knockdown in the 15th and final round.

“I knew Frazier would win that first Ali fight,” recalls Jerry Izenberg, a veteran sports writer who covered the careers of Ali, Frazier, and George Foreman for the Newark Star-Ledger. “I knew it for one simple reason. The guy [Ali] was gone for two and a half years. He came back. He had to fight [Jerry] Quarry. He had to fight [Oscar] Bonavena, and Bonavena gave him a tough time. And then he had to fight the killing machine, Joe Frazier.”

Izenberg, whose books include Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing, notes that Ali would frequently talk to his opponents in the ring – although the man himself disputed it.

“He always told me, ‘Don't write that stuff. You're making it up. It's not true,’” Izenberg recalls. “’I'm not,’ I said. You don't even know what you what you're saying or doing, because you are so into what you have to do.’ 

“Anyway, Ali was told going into the 15th round of the first fight: ‘You cannot win unless you knock Joe Frazier out in these three minutes.’ Ali comes out and he’s firing punches. Bing, bing, bing. And he's screaming at Frazier. ‘Fool, fool. You cannot win this fight. Don’t you know God is in my corner? How are you going to stand up to Allah? How you going to stand up to God?’ Just then, Frazier slips inside and lands a left hook. Bang! Ali’s on his way down, and Frazier yells, ‘Your god's going to get his ass whupped tonight.’”

It is often the case that an intense and violent fight can lead rivals to become friends. But it does not always work out that way. 

It certainly did not for Ali and Frazier, whose enmity (at least on Frazier’s side) only grew over the years. 

Nonetheless, by the time of their rematch in January 1974, both men had seemingly fallen from their peaks. Ali had had his jaw broken in defeat by Ken Norton, while Frazier had been dropped six times in two rounds and relieved of his championship by Foreman.

Within a matter of months of evening the score via decision victory, however, Ali had dethroned Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle to regain the heavyweight crown. After defenses against Chuck Wepner, Ron Lyle, and Joe Bugner, the stage was set for a third and deciding battle with Frazier. 

The fight took place at a time when Don King had Ali fight in all manner of locations around the world: Kinshasa, Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for his defense against Bugner. 

The rubber match with Frazier would be in Manila (or, more accurately, Quezon City) in the Philippines, at the behest of dictatorial president Ferdinand Marcos – who, like the dictatorial leader of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, foresaw an abundance of global publicity from hosting a heavyweight championship fight featuring Muhammad Ali.

The venue would be the aluminum-roofed Araneta Coliseum, temporarily renamed the Philippine Coliseum. A 10 AM local start time was in place to accommodate international audiences. However, the timing of the bout and the nature of the arena meant scorching temperatures by the time the fighters entered the ring. Izenberg estimated that it must have been “112 degrees” under the lights.

And yet, he says, remarkably, “there were no clinches.”

That, he says, was at least partly due to a sterling refereeing job by Filipino official Carlos Padilla. Ali’s camp, he says, had wanted Zach Clayton, who had reffed his win over Foreman; Frazier’s team, conversely, nominated Jay Edson, who they felt would let Frazier fight on the inside.

“So I decided to go to the rules meeting [prior to the fight] because I know these guys are desperate to have their own referee,” Izenberg recalls. “In comes a colonel in the army. He's got all the ribbons and all. He pulls out a gun - a .45, which is a considerable gun - puts it on the table and says, ‘A Filipino will referee this fight.’ No arguments, no question. Nobody was going to say a word when he touched that gun, right?” Fortunately, he continued, Padilla  refereed “a hell of a fight.”

Ali had “a habit of putting his hand behind your head, pulling your head down and throwing an uppercut,” says Izenberg. “The referee said, ‘Next time you do that, you’re out of this building.’ Frazier hit him in the balls, and [Padilla]  said, ‘Next time, you’re done.’ So they were more afraid of the official than each other. There were no clinches. No two human beings could go at the pace they went at in those conditions; I still can’t believe it.”

Frazier had looked unexceptional since his beatdown at the hands of Foreman. There was a sense that perhaps years of a marauding, brawling, left-hook-heavy style had taken their toll.

But, Izenberg recalls, Frazier trainer Eddie Futch had a secret weapon:

“Futch hires George Benton, a great, great middleweight. He says, ‘You got one job: you got to teach this guy how to throw a right hand.’ I used to kid Frazier, ‘If your right shoelace comes untied, I'm only a phone call away. Call me and I'll tie it for you, because you only got one arm.’ And Benton showed him a thing or two. Now, Futch later explained to me that he didn't expect Joe to knock him out with the right hand. I don't think Joe ever hit anybody hardly with the right hand. But he said Ali's IQ was so great  that he wanted him thinking, ‘Where did that right hand come from?’

“So when it happened, and this I got from Joe -  Ali is screaming, he's yelling, ‘You ain't got no right hand. You're too old to be told. What are you doing? You ain't got no right hand.’ And Frazier snaps back, ‘Go ask George Benton,’ and bing, he hits him again with the right hand. Now it wasn't ferocious, but Joe was on his way to getting knocked out early, and it slowed that process down to a crawl. Ali being Ali was thinking, ‘Do I have to worry about this? What does this mean?’”

Indeed, the early rounds of the fight were all Ali, as he stood tall, firing punishing blows from the outside as Frazier tried unsuccessfully to bull his way inside. So dominant were those opening rounds that, prior to the third, Ali blew elaborate kisses to the capacity crowd.

That third round, however, marked a shift in the momentum. Part of the way through, Frazier backed Ali to the ropes and kept him there, landing not just the occasional right hand to keep him honest but also his patented crushing left hooks to head and body.

Ever since his win over Foreman, Ali had demonstrated a fondness for periodically deploying his “rope-a-dope” strategy. As the heat rose along with Frazier’s success, he did the same in Manila, despite trainer Angelo Dundee screaming at him not to.

“Get off the goddamn ropes,” Dundee yelled. “You don’t rest on the ropes against Joe Frazier, you take a licking.”

By the fifth round, Ali had spent so much time on the ropes that Frazier’s timing was improving and he was able to rattle him with left hooks. By digging to the body, he was also bringing down Ali’s guard and sapping his strength in the stifling conditions.

In the sixth, a series of crunching left hooks caused Ali’s legs to wobble. “Old Joe Frazier, they told me you were washed up,” said Ali in the ring. “They lied, pretty boy,” hissed Frazier in retort, and promptly hit him again.

Ali spent the next couple of rounds boxing on his toes from outside and trying to clinch when Frazier closed to a dangerous distance. But still Frazier kept coming, battering Ali’s kidneys and head in equal measure. Dundee would later write that at the end of the tenth, Ali slumped down on his stool, seemingly spent.

The eleventh saw Frazier unleash another barrage of punches, pushing Ali to the brink of defeat. But then, suddenly, out of nowhere, in the twelfth Ali summoned up an extra reserve of energy and unleashed a series of right hands to Frazier’s head that lumped up his opponent’s face and closed his left eye.

Sensing that the tide had now turned definitively and that the twelfth had drained Frazier of the last of his resources, Dundee instructed his man to “go get him.” And so he did, stiffening Frazier with a left hand and uncorking a right that sent his foe’s mouthpiece flying. Frazier kept driving forward, but now he was marching into a constant fusillade of Ali punches that repeatedly found their target and had Frazier wobbling, gasping for breath. 

Frazier’s right eye was now also starting to close, and although he came out for the fourteenth, it was more of the same, Ali pounding Frazier’s face to the point that, when the bell rang to end the stanza, Padilla all but had to guide the half-blind challenger to his corner.

Ali had exerted so much energy turning the fight around over the previous three rounds that he had nothing left to give. 

“Cut them off,” he said of his gloves to his corner as he crashed down on the stool. Dundee ignored him and sponged him down. In the other corner, meanwhile, Futch had seen enough. 

“Sit down, son,” he said. “It’s all over. Nobody will forget what you did here today.” 

As his team exulted, Ali collapsed to the canvas in his corner, unable even to stand. It was, he said, the closest to death he had ever been. 

It had been an awe-inspiring, brutal battle, contested in the most inhumane of conditions and driven as much by personal animus as the glory of achievement. 

As Izenberg wrote in the lede of his post-fight report: “Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier did not fight for the WBC Heavyweight Championship here in Manila last night. Nor did they fight for the championship of the planet. They fought for the championship of each other, and in my mind, that title will never be settled.”

In the aftermath, the two men were briefly complimentary of each other, but Frazier’s resentment would not take long to resurface.

“I hated Ali,” Frazier later told Thomas Hauser. “God may not like me talking that way, but it’s in my heart. I hated that man … He shook me in Manila; he won. But I sent him home worse than he came. Look at him now; he’s damaged goods … He still wants you to think he’s the greatest and he ain’t. I don’t care how the world looks at him. I see him different, and I know him better than anyone. Manila really don’t matter no more. He’s finished, and I’m still here.” 

Ali was altogether more generous in victory.

“Of all the men I fought in boxing,” he told Hauser, “the roughest and toughest was Joe Frazier. He brought out the best in me, and the best fight we fought was in Manila …

“I’m sorry Joe Frazier is mad at me. I’m sorry I hurt him. Joe Frazier is a good man. I couldn’t have done what I did without him, and he couldn’t have done what he did without me. And if God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.”

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, including most recently Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.