If there is a finer opening to a piece of sports writing then I don’t know of it: “It was only a moment, sliding past the eyes like a sudden shifting of light and shadow, but long years from now it will remain a pure and moving glimpse of hard reality, and if Muhammad Ali could have turned his eyes upon himself, what first and final truth would he have seen?” The writer is Mark Kram and it is the first sentence of his piece for Sports Illustrated (SI) about the Thrilla in Manila in 1975, when Ali and Joe Frazier pummelled each other to the brink of extinction.
There are some more mature grapes on this ancient vine, still writing, who were there in person, but for my generation to taste the unique flavour of the heavyweight circuit in its glory days of the 1970s, the second hand will have to do.
News of Frazier’s death on Monday, then, had me hauling down a well-thumbed collection called The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, to read again Kram’s evocation of that bout — one that remains my favourite piece of sports writing and one that would be a contender for one of the greatest pieces on sport ever written. If his assignment for SI was something of an open goal, given the shimmering brilliance of the occasion, then he did not waste the opportunity.
He opened the piece some time after the bout had ended. “Closest thing to dyin’ that I know of,” Ali had said after the battering each had inflicted on the other, and Kram set about observing the effects that this brutality had on the faces of each of the boxers.
He found himself at a state banquet in the Malacañang Palace hosted by Imelda Marcos in honour of the two great boxers, although only Ali was well enough to attend, and he saw something that can only be described as prophetic.
What had he glimpsed? He had seen the future for Ali. Having been led up the staircase by Marcos and towards the buffet, Ali stopped momentarily and “the candles threw an eerie light across the face of a man who only a few hours before had survived the ultimate inquisition of himself and his art”. Ali, Kram wrote, “had never appeared so vulnerable and fragile, so pitiably unmajestic”. He could barely hold his fork, nor lift his food to his bottom lip, which “had been scraped pink”. “The skin on his face was dull and blotched, his eyes drained of that familiar child-like wonder. His right eye was a deep purple, beginning to close, a dark blind being drawn against a harsh light.”
Suddenly, after chewing a painful mouthful or two, Ali moved away from the candles “as if he had become aware of the mask he was wearing, as if an inner voice was laughing at him. He shrugged and the moment was gone.”
When Kram went to see Frazier shortly after, he found something just as pitiable, the more so given that, unlike Ali, Frazier was unable to move away from the light that illuminated the shocking effects of the bout. The lights had been switched on in Frazier’s room but, his eyes completely swollen and closed, he could not see.
“The scene cannot be forgotten, this good and gallant man lying there, embodying the remains of a will never before seen in a ring, a will that had carried him so far — and now surely too far,” Kram wrote. “ ‘Lawdy, Lawdy, he’s a great champion,’ ” Kram reported Frazier as saying, “then he put his head back down on the pillow and soon there was only the heavy breathing of a deep sleep slapping like big waves against the silence.”
Neither boxer really recovered from that bout in 1975. Frazier never forgot the racial taunts and the teasing that Ali subjected him to and this hatred gnawed away at him so that much later he took a perverse pleasure in Ali’s physical decline. Who knows whether, with eternity approaching, these things were reconciled? Maybe at the end Frazier reflected on the bitter irony that Ali — even the shell of the man he had become — had outlasted him again. The eventual effects of the bout on Ali were more obvious, of course, than those that ate away at Frazier.
There is an irony, too, in that Manila in 1975 represented a high point for the man who chronicled it so beautifully. Kram had always been a sports writer in the classic hard-living, hard-drinking and brawling mode. He was a fine writer but a deeply flawed human being, as suggested in a magazine piece his son wrote, called Forgive Some Sinner.
In 1977, two years after his article on the Thrilla in Manila, Kram was given his marching orders by SI. He had written about a boxing tournament promoted by Don King and afterwards rumours circulated that not only were the boxers crooked, but that some of the New York sports writers were, too.
SI ran an internal investigation and Kram was found to have received $1,100 (now about £690) from Ferdie Pacheco, one of Ali’s cornermen, and $5,000 from Rocky Aoki, who founded the Benihana chain of restaurants, whom Kram had profiled for SI. He was fired for “gross misconduct” and fell into a spiral of drinking and despair. Ray Cave, the executive editor for SI who handled Kram’s story of the Ali-Frazier bout, said: “Mark came through in spectacular fashion. The story he did was more than splendid. He rose to the occasion. And it was the last occasion.”
Except not quite the last. In 2001, Kram revisited the events of 1975 and wrote a splendid book called Ghosts of Manila: the Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. It is impossible not to detect in it, though, some of the bitterness that infected Kram in the years after 1975, as he set about trying to demolish the Ali myth erected by other writers such as David Remnick and Thomas Hauser. Ali, he charged, was simply a nasty bully who was more artful self-promoter than social revolutionary.
There is no doubt that Ali’s racial taunting of Frazier shamed him, but Kram’s book overstated the case. Ali always held Frazier in the highest regard as a boxer, something Kram revealed at the end of his 1975 piece, when he quotes Ali talking softly in his suite the morning after the bout. “ ‘I heard somethin’ once, when somebody asked a marathon runner what goes through his mind in the last mile or two, he said that you ask yourself why am I doin’ this,’ ” he wrote. “ ‘You get so tired. It takes so much out of you mentally. It changes you. It makes you go a little insane. Why am I doin’ this? What am I doin’ here against this beast of a man?’ ”
The bitterness came later for Kram, as it did for Frazier. But given a golden opportunity in 1975 he produced a fine piece of reportage. Kram got himself access, took himself out of the piece, observed events in fine detail and then told us, in thrilling and memorable language, something we didn’t know. He told us of Ali’s decline to come.
The piece is called “Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great”. If you want a flavour of those events of more than three decades ago, and as a fitting tribute to the man who died on Monday, it is the best place to go.

but today's finest cricket scribe by a country mile is Gideon Haigh. All his books are worth checking out.

I wasn't aware of the article or Kram before so I will seek out his work.

Boxing does seem to inspire the greatest of American writers including Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates. For my money, the finest book on boxing is AJ Liebling's The Sweet Science.