Joe Frazier

Joseph William Frazier was born on the twelfth of January 1944 in Beaufort, South Carolina, the youngest of the twelve surviving children of Rubin Frazier, a sharecropper and home distiller, and Dolly Frazier, who worked the family's small farm and labored on local white landowners' land. Rooted in the Gullah Geechee lowcountry, Frazier learned work and endurance early, leaving school as a boy and, still a teenager, moving north to Philadelphia, the city that would become his home and his forge.

In Philadelphia he found the gym, and the gym found in him a fighter of relentless pressure and a thunderous left hook. In 1964 he traveled to Tokyo as a late replacement on the United States Olympic team and, fighting with a broken thumb, defeated Hans Huber of Germany to win the heavyweight gold medal — the only American boxer to take gold at those Games.

Turning professional in 1965, Frazier rose undefeated to the world heavyweight championship, unifying the title in 1970 and reigning as undisputed champion until 1973. On the eighth of March 1971, at Madison Square Garden, he met an undefeated Muhammad Ali in the "Fight of the Century," dropping Ali in the fifteenth round and winning a unanimous decision to become the first man to beat Ali. Their trilogy, closing with the brutal "Thrilla in Manila" in 1975, remains among the greatest rivalries in sport.

Frazier retired with a record of thirty-two wins, four losses, and one draw, and died on the seventh of November 2011 in Philadelphia. Smokin' Joe stood his ground against the finest of his age and never took a backward step — a champion of unbreakable will, honored still.