Joe Frazier should have grown a little thicker skin. Everybody knows that Ali's antics were used to hype the fight, and it worked. Ali also called Foreman the "mummy" and called Frazier the "Gorilla". There is no way on this green earth these were racial slurs. It's bullshit to even mention them as such. He also rubbed Ernie Shavers head. Was that racial too?
The fact that you can even say that proves how clueless you really are. You have no idea how bad he actually hurt Frazier outside the ring. Here is an example:
In the medieval morality play of Ali's public life, there had to be a demon worthy of his virtue. If one did not exist, Ali and his media friends would create one. At the end of the day, Ali's role in this creation would prove to be the great, unforgivable sin of his life, greater than his mindless draft dodging, the casual humiliation of his five or so wives, his betrayal of Malcolm X, the reckless pursuit of money that would leave him punch drunk, even the abandonment of certain of his children.
That creation was Joe Frazier. In a cruel and unceasing string of abuse, Ali and friends managed to turn this humble, hard-working child of a one-armed South Carolina sharecropper into the most despised man in Black America, a pariah even in his own city of Philadelphia.
As Sports Illustrated's main boxing reporter during Ali's career, Mark Kram witnessed this ritual defamation on a regular basis. He recounts one chilling episode during a run-up to a Frazier fight in a gym packed with Ali fans.
As Kram tells it, after leading the frenzied crowd in chants of "the greatest," Ali then threw out the word, "gorilla" and taunted the audience to respond.
"Joe Frazier," yelled one white guy. "Ape! Ape!" shouted a young blond woman. "Jist ******s," screamed a black guy.
"Ain't that the truth," said Ali to the last comment, dropping to his haunches. "Gorilla," he howled now. "Ugly and smelly." And as Ali lurched ape-like around the ring, his fans jeered the mock Frazier much in the way the Parisian rabble might have jeered Quasimoto.
For the light-skinned Ali and his fans, Joe Frazier was both too black and not black enough. "A little old ****** boy from Philadelphia," Ali taunted him, "who never had a thought in his dumb head 'cept for himself." Even if there were an appropriate response, Frazier had no microphone. Ali owned the media. The psychic blows from this relentless assault bruised Frazier more deeply than all the punches of all the fights he ever fought.
That is just one example of how Ali treated Frazier.