Joe Frazier Wins Belated Embrace as Philadelphia Starts a Fight

 frazier 2The efforts are a rethinking of Mr. Frazier’s legacy in his adopted city, which never so much as named a street after him during his lifetime. The question for many who knew and admired Mr. Frazier: What took so long?       

“There’s a statue of Rocky, a movie prop, at the Art Museum, but nothing to honor a legitimate heavyweight champion who came out of Philadelphia,” said Stan Hochman, 83, who as a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Daily News became close to Mr. Frazier.       

Mr. Frazier’s relationship with the city was complicated. People flocked to him for autographs, especially in North Philadelphia, a neighborhood of boarded-up row houses, drug markets and littered streets. But even there, he labored in the shadow of his rival Muhammad Ali, who ridiculed him as an “Uncle Tom” and the “Great White Hope.”       

Mr. Ali later expressed remorse, calling the taunts prefight hype, but they were hard to shake. Mr. Frazier did not help his cause, visiting the Nixon White House and embracing Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner in the late 1960s and early ’70s who later became mayor and who was a despised figure among many of the city’s African-Americans.   frazier 3    

As the first of Mr. Frazier’s three epic bouts with Mr. Ali approached in 1971, many here backed Mr. Ali even as they watched Mr. Frazier train at his gym on North Broad Street.       

“That was a big deal,” said Albert Talley, 58, who grew up in the neighborhood. “Even though Joe was from here, Ali was our man.” Mr. Frazier won that match.

Mr. Talley guessed that one reason the city never honored Mr. Frazier was that he was believed to be a Republican, “and this is a Democratic town.”       

Weatta Collins, one of Mr. Frazier’s 11 children, said her father was never political. “He didn’t care if people were Republican or Democrat,” said Ms. Collins, 48. “If someone needed him, he was there.”    

Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat and former Pennsylvania governor who was Philadelphia’s mayor from 1992 to 2000, has lamented not honoring Mr. Frazier with a statue. As mayor, Mr. Rendell said, he frequently called on Mr. Frazier to appear at events involving children and to promote the city. Mr. Frazier even agreed to help honor Mr. Ali at the Philadelphia Convention Center in 1993, though he detested his rival.       

“Whether it was the mayor calling on him or a charity calling on him,” Mr. Rendell said, “he never said no, and he never asked to be paid.” If the city’s failure to honor him troubled him, Mr. Frazier did not let on.       

“I said to Joe many times, ‘Joe, does that bother you?’ And he would say, ‘No, to hell with them,’ ” said Joe Hand Sr., a former police officer who had a share in Mr. Frazier’s management group, Cloverlay. “But you could tell it did.”       

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