50 years later, Charlotte doctor remembers attending Ali-Frazier “Fight of the Century”
It was 50 years ago this week, but John Allbert still remembers nearly everything about attending the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight.
The glamorous crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden that thrummed with anticipation. The haze of cigarette smoke that rose to the top of the bleachers where he and his father sat. Frazier’s unrelenting ferocity. The crowd chanting “Ali! Ali! Ali” in the late rounds. Peering through binoculars to see Frank Sinatra at ringside, on assignment as a photographer for “Life” magazine.
Allbert was 11 years old on March 8, 1971, the day of the fight — one of the youngest people among the 20,455 in attendance.
He would grow up to become a Charlotte maternal-fetal doctor who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, the ones dangerous to both mother and child.
But back then, Allbert had barely begun life himself. He was a fifth-grader who was able to persuade his father, Bob Allbert, that what would become known as the “Fight of the Century” was worth spending $40 to attend — two tickets at $20 apiece, in the second-to-last row of the arena.
The fight is a memory Allbert treasures at age 61, as well as all that came from it. Thirty years after the fight, the doctor was able to get both Frazier and Ali to sign a poster he had bought that night.
This column is partly a story about that fight and that poster. Allbert witnessed what became sports history and then also saw Frazier and Ali three decades later, when both men were physically diminished but maintained their dignity.
But the larger point of reliving this story, he said, isn’t about a fight. It’s about fathers and their children.
“I tell my patients and friends this all the time,” the doctor said. “I remember that fight 50 years as the best day of my childhood later partly because of what it was, but mostly because I went with my father — that he agreed to get those tickets for us and make a special night. That’s what you want to do as a parent. It doesn’t matter what you do with your children. It doesn’t matter if it costs money or not. But do some things that are special. Because that’s what is going to stick with them.”
Ali, Frazier, race and war
The buildup to the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971 wasn’t just about boxing; it had deep socio-political overtones.
Both men were undefeated heavyweight champions. Ali had been stripped of his boxing license and heavyweight title and lost more than three years in the prime of his career in the late 1960s for refusing to join the U.S. military to fight in Vietnam. He had declared himself as a conscientious objector and proclaiming “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.”’
Frazier, who grew up in poverty in Beaufort, S.C., had won the vacated heavyweight title in Ali’s absence. A hard-charging fighter with a vicious left hand that earned him the nickname “Smokin’ Joe,” Frazier was Ali’s equal in the ring but lacked Ali’s verbal adeptness.
Ali was always going to win the press conferences with Frazier. He often taunted Frazier, calling him “the white man’s champion” and “dumb” and “ignorant.”
Ali was also a slyly inventive poet (“This may shock and amaze ya, but I’m gonna retire Joe Frazier”). And he was far ahead of his time in terms of combining political views and high-level athletics, as athletes like LeBron James so often do today.
For his part, Frazier sometimes refused to call Ali by the name the boxer chose in 1967 after converting to Islam. Frazier would instead refer to him by his original name of Cassius Clay.
In general, though, Frazier expressed few political views. But because he wasn’t Ali, a potent symbol of Black power and opposition to the Vietnam War, Frazier was viewed as the favorite of the establishment.
The two men’s enmity was real and would last for decades, as Frazier never seemed to entirely forgive Ali for all the things he had said.
At age 11, John Allbert didn’t know a lot about that. He just knew Ali was cool.
“I wanted Ali to win,” Allbert said. “He was so charismatic that he captured most of the younger generation by then. But I also knew a lot of my father’s friends wanted Frazier to win.”
Sneaking in the gate at Ali-Frazier
The Allbert family lived in New Jersey then, about 45 minutes from Manhattan. Bob Allbert worked for the JC Penney offices in New York.
John Allbert was excited for the fight, enough so that he persuaded his father to buy tickets a month early. “February was the longest month I can remember,” he said.
When the big night came in March 1971, Allbert was dazzled by all the mink coats he saw outside Madison Square Garden. An older man approached the Allberts as they walked toward the building, offering $100 each for the two $20 tickets.
“You can sell them and keep the money if you want,” Bob Allbert said to his son.
“No way,” John Allbert said.
There remained a hurdle. John Allbert said he knew that the rules at the time forbid children under 14 years old from going to fight cards like this one in New York. And his father had never been a good liar. They approached the ticket-taker with some trepidation.
“He doesn’t look 14,” the ticket-taker growled.
“Yeah,” John’s father said agreeably.
“C’mon, we gotta get going, Dad,” John Allbert said, and suddenly they were in.
As the fights on the undercard came and went that night, a haze of smoke rose into the rafters. Still, though, you could see the fighters below, and the Allberts used their binoculars to spot celebrities like actor Burt Lancaster and singer Diana Ross.
Once Ali and Frazier began, the hum in the arena became a constant roar. The pace of the fight was furious, with Frazier stalking Ali and Ali trying to keep him away with his left jab (and also starting to use the technique that would in later years be labeled the rope-a-dope).
For 15 rounds, they fought as if their lives depended on it. In the 15th, Frazier scored the only knockdown, but Ali got off the mat and finished the round. All three judges’ scorecards, however, awarded the fight to Frazier.
The men would fight two more times over the next three years, making millions, punishing their bodies and brains and forever linking their names. Ali won both of the rematches, including the “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975. Of that final fight, Ali said: “It was like death. Closest thing to dying that I know of.”
A visit to ‘Mr. Smoke’
In 2000, Bob Allbert called his son.
This hadn’t happened in years — not because they never talked, but because his mother always was the one who called, and then she would later put his father on the line. This time, though, his father called. He was excited, having just watched an HBO documentary on the first Ali-Frazier fight.
“Do you still have that poster?” his dad asked.
Allbert did. They had bought a poster together that night, but his wife hadn’t let him hang it up in their house. It was in the attic, somewhat crumpled.
“Well, why don’t you let me have it?” his father asked. “Lots of good memories from that night.”
The Allberts decided to do him one better. They got the poster nicely framed, and then Albert had the idea to get it signed by both fighters.
The first opportunity came when Allbert referred a patient to a Philadelphia hospital for a specialized procedure in late 2000. He decided to take a few days off, go to Philadelphia and watch the surgery himself. During that trip, Allbert called Frazier’s gym in the city, got permission to come see him and then was escorted to the office of “Mr. Smoke,” as he was referred to inside the gym.
The office was a kaleidoscope of color. “There were mannequins with boxing robes on that he had worn in some of his fights,” Allbert said. “There was a zebra-skin sofa and a yellow-orange shag carpet.”
Frazier was standing. He wore black slacks and suspenders but was shirtless and looking at three shirts, trying to decide which one to put on. Frazier was polite to Allbert, asked him about Charlotte, signed the poster “To Bob and John, Smokin’ Joe Frazier” and asked for Allbert to make a charitable donation in return, which the doctor later did.
In terms of worth to a collector, the poster’s value went down tremendously when Allbert asked to have it personalized. If he had only obtained both fighters’ signatures, it would be worth around $3,000 today, based on current sports memorabilia listings. The doctor didn’t care, though; he wasn’t going to sell it.
As Frazier laboriously signed the poster, Allbert noticed how long it took for the former boxer to perform the task.
“He took the pen and began to write very slowly, as if he had just learned to write cursive,” Allbert said. (Frazier died at age 67 in 2011 of liver cancer; Ali came to the memorial service).
Ali’s signature on the poster was more transactional.
Allbert found out on a website that Ali would be signing autographs in New Jersey for $200 a pop in 2001, on the fight’s 30th anniversary.
Ali had been afflicted by Parkinson’s Disease for years by then. The former boxer’s hand had to be placed exactly where the signature would go, Allbert remembered. (Ali died in 2016 at age 74).
Allbert then gave the poster to his dad on Fathers Day in 2001. Bob Allbert was delighted. But several years ago, his father cleaned out his office and gave it back. Allbert, having eventually secured permission from his wife, now displays it prominently in his own house.
Forgetting and remembering
While John Allbert believes he will never forget the night of the fight in 1971, his father mostly has.
Bob Allbert is 89 years old. He quit the corporate world decades ago, borrowed $80,000 to open a Precision Tune in Raleigh and ended up eventually owning 32 of the auto-care stores. Now he is in a retirement home.
He has been mostly isolated in his room for the past 11 months due to COVID-19, but the rules have been relaxed a little in recent weeks. Twice a week he is now allowed to go outside, sit across a table from his wife of 65 years and talk for 30 minutes.
Recently John Allbert called his father and reminded him that the 50th anniversary of the Ali-Frazier fight was coming up. Bob Allbert answered, “Oh.”
The father couldn’t really remember that evening anymore.
But the son persisted, jogging his father’s mind with details and then asking: “Don’t you remember going with me to the fight?”
“Oh John,” Bob Allbert said. “Maybe. But that was so long ago. You know, you have always had such a good memory.”
And he does. For 50 years, John Allbert has remembered.
And even though his father no longer recalls that night, John Allbert has the poster. And the autographs. And the memory of a father and son, climbing into the next-to-last row of Madison Square Garden, about to see something great together.
This story was originally published March 11, 2021 at 10:39 AM.
