FanPost

What are your views on trash talk?

I am what I am.

--Joe Frazier

I am the greatest.

--Ali

Criticizing icons is not popular, and, when one targets the "Greatest," sacred and inviolate ground may be involved. But I ask myself, how could Ali turn on his former friend, Joe Frazier, a decent man who considered Ali his friend and who to this day remains deeply wounded by the way Ali turned his own people against him? “It’s gonna be a chilla, and a killa, and a thrilla, when I get the Gorilla in Manila,” said Ali,1 but those insults may have said more about him thanthey did Frazier. He cruelly taunted Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell. After the Terrell fight, Tex Maule wrote, “It was a wonderful demonstration of boxing skill and a barbarous display of cruelty.” However, his worse abuse was aimed at Smokin’ Joe Frazier. Yet, the plain fact was Frazier was from a hardscrabble beginning, while Clay had ironically emerged from a relatively sheltered environment in Louisville.

There is no doubt Ali was the right man for his time. But his legacy must include the beginning of trash-talking, and maybe that was, in part, his way of standing up to the establishment. Calling opponents “bums” and “chumps” and predicting the round of their demise was something very new to the fans, and what gave this behavior credibility was that his predictions frequently proved accurate.

Now then, this narrative is not necessarily aimed against Ali as much as it is designed to get your juices flowing and conjure up some responses.


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