Philadelphia's lack of respect for Joe Frazier hits below the belt
They all came, the great and the small. Bus drivers, lawyers, doctors and boxers...
From New York Daily News
PHILADELPHIA – They all came, the great and the small. Bus drivers, lawyers, doctors and boxers. They came from around the corner, from across town and from across the country and filled the pews at the Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church on Monday morning.
Muhammad Ali, stooped and shuffling slowly from the ravages of Parkinson’s disease, was there, looking more vulnerable than he ever did in any of the three terrific matches he had against Joe Frazier. A section away, Larry Holmes, the man who sent Ali into retirement, sat upright and solemn, looking like he could still go 12 rounds with any of today’s heavyweights.
They had all come to pay homage to Frazier, who died of liver cancer on Nov. 7. He was a son of the South, born in Beaufort, S.C., the youngest of 13 kids of a sharecropper, who settled in Philadelphia and came to embody the city’s hard-working spirit.
As you surveyed the sanctuary and watched the photo montage that played on the television screens throughout the building as people filed in, it was obvious that in his 67 years on Earth Frazier touched a lot of lives — famous and not-so-famous — and he was loved.
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