Meilleur boxeur que Ali? Une meilleure personne aussi? L'opinion de Dave Anderson dans le NY Times.
"Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier. And for all the deserved accolades for Muhammad Ali, I’ve always believed that each at his best, Joe Frazier, who died Monday night at age 67, was the better fighter. And the better man.
After both entered the Madison Square Garden ring undefeated in 1971 for what was called the Fight of the Century, Frazier flattened Ali with a left hook and earned a unanimous and unquestioned 15-round decision that Ali didn’t wait to hear. His jaw swollen, he hurried out of the ring on the way to a nearby hospital. He knew who had won.
The Thrilla in Manila in 1975 was awarded to Ali when Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, wouldn’t let him answer the bell for the 15th round because “he couldn’t see the right hands coming” out of his closed left eye, but Frazier soon talked freely in the interview area. When an exhausted Ali finally arrived, he described their epic in brutality as “next to death.”
That evening, at a party in an old Filipino palace, Ali, his ribs battered, walked stiffly and sat stiffly, painfully offering a finger or two instead of shaking hands.
At his hotel, Frazier sang and danced. Seeing them both, if you didn’t know what had happened in the fight, you had to think Frazier was the winner.
Not long after that, Ali had a party for his autobiography at the Rainbow Room high in Rockefeller Center. Frazier was invited, but would he show up?
For years, Ali had insulted Frazier, calling him a “gorilla” and “stupid.” Frazier seethed; he once grappled with Ali briefly — and seriously — in a television studio before they were separated. But the night of the book party, he greeted Ali with a smile and “Hiya, champ” — the ultimate compliment from one boxer to another. Class.
To me, Joe Frazier won that night, too.
But the Joe Frazier I’ll always remember wasn’t in a boxing ring or at a book party. Soon after the Garden triumph, he was back home in Beaufort, S.C., where, one of 12 children, he had grown up picking vegetables for 15 cents a crate when not helping his father, a handyman who lost his left arm in an auto accident.
“I was his left arm,” he said.
Ten years earlier, Joe had left Beaufort with about $200 in his pocket on a Greyhound bus bound for New York and a better life. He soon settled in Philadelphia, where he sometimes worked in a meat locker, battering a side of beef as if it were a punching bag — the inspiration for a scene in the “Rocky” movie.
Now, as the undisputed heavyweight champion who had earned $2.5 million at the Garden, he had returned to Beaufort in a maroon Cadillac limousine. He was there to buy a new-home site for his 62-year-old mother. “Dolly Frazier, the mother of the champ,” she introduced herself. “How sweet it is.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/sports/joe-frazier-a-champion-who-won-inside-the-ring-and-out.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha27
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