It was oven-hot inside the arena, and that was before the fight began. The building’s air-conditioning had already lost the undercard against the tropical sun, and the air was thick with humidity. Still, almost 30,000 people waited with sweat soaking their shirts, standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of the men walking toward the center of the arena. From one side, draped in a dark-blue robe and flanked by an entourage in matching work shirts, Joe Frazier walked slowly through the crowd, stern and granite-jawed. A ripple of applause passed through the arena.From the other side of the arena, dressed in a white satin robe with his name embroidered on the back, walked Muhammad Ali. Even at age 33, approaching the twilight of his career, Ali was electromagnetic, drawing the crowd to its feet and polarizing its constituents all at once. The noise was raucous. When match officials placed a more-than-three-foot-tall trophy in the middle of the ring, Ali grabbed it and feigned running away with it. In the ring, after his name was announced, he pantomimed heartbreak as boos overcame the adulation. Frazier, whose ring demeanor generally toggled between glowering and frowning, glowered.This was the third bout between Frazier and Ali. Held on October 1, 1975, in the Philippine Coliseum, the fight is remembered by many who attended as the best heavyweight contest in history, and possibly the pinnacle of the sport. The match was the first ever broadcast live overseas by satellite, and hundreds of millions of people watched from abroad.It was not the most dazzling display of pugilism as an art. There were no knockdowns, no calls from commentators that now live on as sound bites. The significance of the fight was more narrative than technical, and its appeal was elemental: a bitter test of wills and an exploration of the outer limits of human endurance. The final contest between Ali and Frazier was the culmination of a relationship that had begun in friendship but curdled into deep enmity, the decisive battle in a war that had become larger than the two men in the ring. The match was filled with contradictions. It had been pitched as an announcement of the arrival of the postcolonial Third World—but staged in part to help cover up the abuses of an autocratic regime supported by the U.S. government. It would be a showcase for all of the beauty and ugliness of boxing, a sport that made the world smaller by making tall tales of men. Looking back now, 50 years later, the event reveals—perhaps more than any other since—the ways that sport can be a mirror to society and the soul.Ali and Frazier faced each other as the bell rang. And so began the Thrilla in Manila.The two fighters advanced, Ali jogging enthusiastically and Frazier plodding, cautious. They put up their guards and began to maneuver and dance, keeping their feet moving as they surveyed each other. Ali kept his hands high while Frazier reached out, almost gently, with a shot to the abdomen. Ali hit back with light left jabs as Frazier probed further, gauging Ali’s reaction time as he shifted his guard.Their measurements taken, the fighters increased their intensity. Ali aimed to knock Frazier out early, at times holding the shorter man off by extending his left fist straight out, like a football stiff-arm, while he waited for openings to strike with his coiled right. Frazier, though, was relentless, seeking a way inside Ali’s reach, driving blows into Ali’s ribs but moving too fast to get caught by the night-ender Ali had planned.Ali had spent much of the previous month telling any reporter who would listen how slow and tired the 31-year-old Frazier was, but it was immediately clear that the two were evenly matched. The crowd roared when they exchanged combinations, when Ali jawed at Frazier, and when Frazier yelled back. When the bell rang at the end of the first round, Frazier tapped Ali on the butt, almost playfully, as if to let him know: I’m here.Associated PressJoe Frazier was two years younger than Muhammad Ali, but Ali had a significant edge in height and reach.Jerry Izenberg used his walker to prop open the door of his ranch-style house and beckoned me inside. “I used to be a lot faster,” he said. We were in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas in the foothills of the McCullough Range. His house bears all the hallmarks of a Vegas retirement refuge—a rock garden, a brilliant-green turf lawn, a view of the Strip across the Mojave Desert. But Izenberg is not retired. In his mid-90s, he still writes columns for the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey, making him likely the oldest working sports journalist in America. (Dave Goren, the executive director of the National Sports Media Association, told The Atlantic that “if there’s an active sports journalist older than Jerry, I have no idea who it might be.”) His book about the heyday of heavyweight boxers, Once There Were Giants, was released in 2017.As he talked about his 74 years of sportswriting, the ease with which Izenberg recalled the fights he covered decades ago, and even the scorecards of specific rounds, astonished me. But he reached a different level of clarity when we talked about Ali and Frazier’s final fight. Izenberg leaned closer, recounting the entire match, blow by blow, and quoting the two fighters as they spoke to each other in the ring. It was the greatest match he’d ever seen in person.In late September 1975, Izenberg landed in Manila. The flight from San Francisco had been packed with sports reporters, and they were all transported to the Bayview Plaza, where the promoter Don King had arranged accommodations for journalists. The hotel, famed for its views of the sunset over Manila Bay, had been well stocked for the incoming brigade of thirsty men. They flocked to the bar for Joe’s Knuckle Punch, a drink made with lambanog, a local palm liquor that supposedly wouldn’t come with a hangover. The reporters drank for lunch and for dinner, and some stayed up late, talking politics over cocktails.By the time Izenberg arrived, Ali and Frazier had been in Manila for days in order to acclimate to the heat and prepare for the fight. Frazier had gotten there first, landing at the airport at dawn. He was greeted on the tarmac by security guards and taken to his hotel.Ali’s arrival was more of a spectacle. His team had delayed the plane’s departure from Honolulu so that instead of getting to Manila before dawn, Ali would arrive just after 6 a.m., which provided enough light for television cameras—and also coincided with the news hour back in the States. Hundreds of people crowded the runway to greet Ali, pushing against a cordon of soldiers armed with truncheons. As Ali stopped to address the crowd and the cameras, a disturbance broke out between the jostling spectators and the soldiers. “I don’t want any fighting here,” Ali said. He praised Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the president and first lady of the country, and bantered with the crowd, then launched into a poem he’d workshopped back home: “It will be a killa’, chilla’, thrilla’ / when I get that gorilla in Manila.” The rapturous arrival struck a chord with President Marcos, who aspired to build his own cult of personality in the Philippines. “I’d have to kill him,” he allegedly later said about Ali, “if he was a Filipino.” It was a joke, but only halfway.Staged in a former U.S. colony just five months after the fall of Saigon, the fight was billed as a showcase for a new postcolonial era. With no evident sense of irony, Ali had likened his role as an international figure to that of a “Black Kissinger,” a statesman for the Third World. Ali had recently taken huge purses, negotiated by King, for the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire, and a title defense in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But in Zaire, he had been the guest of the kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who’d paid handsomely for the good press. Marcos hoped to receive similarly favorable publicity.[Read: Muhammad Ali and the importance of identity]Under Marcos’s rule—which was propped up publicly by U.S. military aid and secretly by CIA assistance—the Philippines had been transformed into a police state. In 1972, in the name of fighting communism and terrorism, Marcos had declared martial law, granting himself supreme power. Three years into his regime, it had become commonplace for Filipinos to have family members who’d been disappeared, or to encounter the mutilated bodies of the president’s political opponents, left on the streets as warnings.One way that the Marcoses managed their reputation at home and abroad was through glitzy events that projected the Philippines as a booming, modernized state. The fight—for which they paid millions in purse money, promotion, and setup—was among the boldest examples. Nobody who knew the country was ever really fooled, and even Kissinger—the white one—warned President Richard Nixon that he thought Ferdinand Marcos was a self-serving tyrant. But boy, could he put on a show.It was always unclear whether Ali’s wide-eyed embrace of authoritarian regimes was a product of naivete or something more calculated. As with all things Ali, the boundaries between theater and reality were purposefully vague. But he readily availed himself of the Marcoses’ hospitality, taking members of his entourage to parties and events. When Ali’s mistress appeared at a state reception in Manila, Ali’s wife, Khalilah, flew to the Philippines in a fury. Asked by the press about the fight, she responded tersely, “I’m going to root for the best man to win tonight—whomever that turns out to be.”In many ways, the extracurriculars—the women, the parties, the junkets—were all standard Ali fare by this point. A week before the match, Izenberg wrote that when it came to time, “he never has as much as he would like because there are so many things he wants to say and do before the bell rings. Some of them even concern the fight.”Michael Brennan / GettyBut Ali’s antics in Manila had a more vicious edge. He leaned into his portrayal of the darker-skinned Frazier as more animal than human, even going so far as to wear a shirt imprinted with the image of a gorilla to the weigh-in. He had brought a toy gorilla to a press conference announcing the fight and pretended his sparring partners were gorillas. During one of Frazier’s training sessions in Manila, Ali taunted him from the rafters. One night, Frazier heard shouting from outside his hotel window. He looked down from his balcony and saw Ali pointing a pistol at him. Ali and his team would later say that the pistol was a toy, but the truth has never been determined.Frazier’s time in Manila was less remarkable. During press conferences, he always called Ali by his last name at birth—a growled, clipped “Clay,” as if even that one word was too much acknowledgment. He spent downtime at a villa in the mountainous outskirts of Manila, passing hours in monk-like silence. Cutting an image that contrasted with Ali’s more libertine act, Frazier traveled with his family, including his teenage son, Marvis, an aspiring boxer himself. Marvis had greeted Ali at the airport when he arrived in Manila, and was on hand to witness his delivery of the “gorilla” rhyme in front of the crowd.When reporters asked Frazier about Ali’s abuse, he would point to his children and ask how he could be an animal with such beautiful kids. He brushed off most of the taunts. But inside, as he later wrote in his autobiography, Frazier seethed. He wanted to kill Ali, or die trying.Takeo Tanuma / Sports Illustrated / GettyAli and Frazier meet with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in September 1975, shortly before fighting for the world heavyweight championship. Frazier was making his point early. Ali had assumed he was slow, creaky, and dangerous only with his left hand. But Frazier was a new man in Manila. Ali was scoring plenty with jabs and flurries, but his attempts to land big punches mostly fell flat.By the third round, the temperature in the arena may have reached 120 degrees. Ali gave up trying for a quick knockout blow and instead allowed Frazier to push him back into a corner, hoping to employ the “rope a dope” strategy he’d used so effectively against George Foreman in Kinshasa. Ali covered his face and tried to absorb Frazier’s metronomic body blows, aiming to tire him. Twice, Ali taunted Frazier, beckoning him to hit him. Frazier obliged, surprising Ali with a cross and an uppercut from his supposedly weak right arm.Ali began trying to clinch Frazier, putting his gloves behind the shorter man’s head and seeking to weigh him down. The two-man dance became a triad as the referee, Carlos “Sonny” Padilla Jr., repeatedly pulled the men apart and scolded Ali.Ali had often ridiculed Frazier for turning fights into slogs. Now he was in the mud himself. Despite it all, he managed his usual jabs to the chin and eyes, but Frazier seemed unfazed. Realizing the shift in rhythm, during the fifth round, Ali snarled at Frazier: “You ain’t got no right hand! What are you doing?”Izenberg first met Cassius Clay in Rome, while covering the 1960 Olympics. Clay was an 18-year-old amateur then, the Louisville golden boy who’d already captured eight regional Golden Gloves and two nationals. He was a dyslexic kid who’d chafed at the indignities of growing up Black in a visibly segregated city, and for whom the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 was deeply traumatic. Precocious, loud, and ambitious, he was discovered early by local trainers and promoters, and proved to be a boxing prodigy. He knew early that the sport would be his way out.At the Olympics, he was skinnier than you probably remember him, and the warrior-poet braggadocio that later defined him was still embryonic. His surprising gold medal in the light-heavyweight division, over a Polish champion seven years his senior, made Clay something of a household name in the States.Izenberg didn’t actually watch Clay fight in the Olympics, but remembers him cracking jokes in the Olympic Village. “Athletes are walking by,” Izenberg told me. Many didn’t speak English, but something about Clay captivated them, especially the women. They “walked past him, turned around, walked back a few feet to take a look at him,” Izenberg said. Later, Izenberg got in touch with the young champion, who begged him to come watch a fight. The two struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of Ali’s life.Joe Frazier, two years younger than Ali, arrived at stardom on a Greyhound bus. He was born to a Gullah sharecropping family in South Carolina’s Sea Islands. The shack where he and 12 siblings lived had been built by his father out of scrap lumber; luxuries such as plumbing belonged to another world. Like most sharecropping children, Frazier started working on the farm early. In his flickers of leisure time, at 8 years old, he made his own heavy bag, stuffed with moss, and tried to train himself to be the next Joe Louis. But a hard life made its mark. One day, he fell and seriously injured his left arm while trying to wrangle the family’s 300-pound hog. The family had no money for doctors, and the arm healed crooked, forever limiting his reach and range of motion. But, as Frazier liked to say, the arm’s awkward angle kept it “permanently cocked” for a left hook, which would become his signature punch.At 15, Frazier joined the Great Migration, taking a bus north to New York and then settling in Philadelphia, where he landed work at a slaughterhouse. He was 18 before he finally received his first formal boxing training, at a Police Athletic League gym in Philly. He worked out obsessively, carrying his own record player to the gym late at night and training solo to the soundtrack of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. The hard-nosed, straightforward style that he developed suited his adopted city, and would later provide a contrast to Ali’s finesse. He made the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as an alternate after another American boxer was injured, keeping to himself in the Olympic Village and focusing on training. Improbably, he kept winning his bouts. In the heavyweight semifinal, he broke his thumb, but he won that fight too, then hid the injury in order to compete in the final. He won the gold over the older, more experienced German fighter Hans Huber, only to be fired from his job in the slaughterhouse because his hand was in a cast.It seems only natural in retrospect that Ali’s and Frazier’s lives would become intertwined: the dyslexic boy who found purpose—and a refuge from racism—in boxing, and the young sharecropper dropout who escaped his own inner-city blues in the ring; the would-be heirs of the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis. And for a time, they were friends. Ali would turn pro shortly after his Olympic coming-out party, and within four years, at the age of 22, he claimed a heavyweight title by beating Sonny Liston. The same year, he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name. He cultivated both fame and infamy with his outspoken Black radicalism, and with his denunciations of the war in Vietnam. When he refused the draft in 1967, citing his faith, he was convicted for draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison, and then stripped of his boxing licenses, passport, and heavyweight title. Before public opinion turned against the war, Ali was likely the most despised man in America. In the boxing world, Frazier was among the few people who didn’t cut ties.[Read: When Muhammad Ali refused to go to Vietnam]Frazier had come up in Ali’s shadow. With Ali no longer eclipsing him, his career took off. In 1968, he fought Buster Mathis for the New York State Athletic Commission’s heavyweight title, one component of the unified world heavyweight title. After the fight, a reporter asked, slyly, if Frazier considered himself a champion. According to the New York Daily News, Frazier glowered.The promoter Butch Lewis later said that when the two met, Frazier continued to call Ali “champ,” even after taking part of his title. Ali moved to Philadelphia while waiting for his appeal to work its way through federal courts, and the two often crossed paths. In an interview he gave later in his life, Frazier would say that Ali popped into Frazier’s gym to talk about their inevitable fight, and asked Frazier for help with getting his license back. Frazier said he obliged. In 2011, many obituaries of Frazier mentioned that he said he’d lobbied President Nixon for Ali’s reinstatement.During his time away from boxing, which would end up lasting some three years, Ali supported himself with speaking engagements and appearance fees. According to Frazier, Ali liked to characterize the duo as generals in two different theaters. “Just keep whuppin’ those guys in the ring and I’ll keep fighting Uncle Sam. And one day we’ll make a lot of money together,” he told Frazier. Ali decided to write an autobiography, The Greatest. In it, he said he admired Frazier. “Of all the people in my profession I would like to have had as a friend,” Ali wrote, “he was the one.”On a summer day in 1970, according to that book, when the two men both had appointments in New York City, Frazier, flush from his earnings as the newly crowned heavyweight champion, picked Ali up in Philadelphia in his gold Cadillac and drove him to New York. Frazier told Ali about his aspirations as a soul singer, and Ali sang a ditty he’d composed, “Mighty Whitey.” They talked about race in America, and Frazier told Ali about having to fight his way through the Jim Crow Deep South.Sitting side by side, the two often returned to rhapsodizing about how their future fight might play out. There was no shortage of playful insults, but Ali told Frazier in earnest that with his fighting income dried up, he needed a job. He wanted to be Frazier’s sparring partner, and asked for money. Near the end of their trip, Frazier loaned Ali a hundred bucks. He let the top down on the gold Cadillac and they cruised. But when it came time for Frazier to drop off Ali, the men agreed that they shouldn’t be seen as friendly in public. Nobody pays to see two friends fighting.Shortly after the sixth round began in Manila, the dynamite in Frazier’s left hand finally exploded. He connected with a thunderous hook, stretching his arm and body as far as he could reach to snap Ali’s head back. A few seconds later, Frazier hit him again with the same punch. Ali stumbled, throwing a feeble, off-balance uppercut to the space where Frazier had just stood. The crowd, which had favored Frazier—for his Christian faith, it was said, and out of a national affinity for underdogs—erupted in cheers. Now it was Frazier who jogged and Ali who lumbered. Three more times in the round, Frazier’s left found Ali’s face cleanly. For the first time in the match, Frazier was the clear winner of a round.But after his exile from boxing, Ali had discovered something useful, and something terrible. Stripped of the preternatural speed of his prime, he realized, quite simply, that he could sustain more damage than most fighters could deliver. In the seventh round, Ali shook off the punishment and for a time found some of his younger self, beginning to dance in the middle of the ring again. Frazier kept pounding Ali’s body. But now, as Frazier advanced, Ali peppered his face with starch-stiff jabs and two-punch counters. His fist kept finding Frazier’s right eye.The genesis of the Frazier-Ali feud all depends on who’s telling the story. Long after Frazier’s retirement from boxing, after his hatred of Ali had solidified into a defining part of his life, he denied in his autobiography that they’d ever really been friends. And The Greatest, Ali’s autobiography written with Richard Durham, a renowned Black journalist and former editor of a newspaper for the Nation of Islam, may not be entirely reliable in its characterization of Ali’s sentiments. It was published in 1975, just two months after the Manila fight, with a mandate from Ali’s handlers to scrub unsavory elements of his life. It’s possible that the book’s praise for Frazier was a real-time revision of the ugliness Ali had recently unleashed in the Philippines.But the balance of the evidence suggests that the two men did share a bond. Frazier had looked up to Ali, and is said to have asked for his autograph when they’d first met, hoping they would one day fight. The question of when that might happen was postponed for a long time as Ali appealed his case. A match planned in Florida fell through, and rumors of bouts in Mississippi, Canada, and Australia never materialized.Ali had always made a habit of taunting his opponents, many of whom took it as funny and gave back as good as they got. That’s boxing. But over the course of his exile, Ali’s barbs and stunts against Frazier grew into something more venomous.During his sojourn in Philadelphia, Ali constantly challenged Frazier to unsanctioned fights. On a September day in 1969, he showed up at the Police Athletic League gym, demanding a fight with Frazier right there. According to a local report, more than 1,000 people who’d gotten wind of the challenge also arrived, and police soon broke up the crowd. Outside, Ali stood on top of a car and stoked the nascent mob, promising them a fight at a rec center a few miles away. He led a mass of people across the city to the supposed fight location, where as many as 10,000 people eventually gathered. Ali urged them to form a ring, and led them in chants calling out Frazier, who never showed.These spectacles might have all been excused as Ali doing what he did best: promoting. But ultimately, there was never room enough, in town or in boxing, for both men. It was not a given that Ali would ever fight again; that he could avoid jail time and be vindicated; that he’d reclaim the title. And all the while, Ali felt that Frazier was a counterfeit champ who wasn’t his equal in the ring, the face of all that had been taken from him. In the other corner, Frazier constantly had to prove himself as a deserving victor, even though his style and persona never quite captured audiences the way Ali’s did. And years of continual needling is apt to get under anyone’s skin.The growing fissure became a permanent rift when one day Frazier heard Ali doing a radio interview. Ali boasted about how easily he would beat Frazier, calling him a coward, as he’d often done. But this time, Ali added something new: He called Frazier an Uncle Tom.After repeated provocations, Frazier grew so incensed that he drove to Ali’s residence, where Ali began a frustrating game he would play with Frazier for the rest of their lives. He insisted that he hadn’t meant anything by the insults, that he was just trying to gin up attention for their eventual fight. Frazier was being too sensitive, he said; he needed to loosen up. But Frazier wasn’t having it. He’d told Ali about how he’d had to scrap with racists who meant him physical harm just to make it out of the South. Being called an Uncle Tom was a betrayal.They finally fought in 1971, at Madison Square Garden, a few months before the Supreme Court ruled that Ali had been improperly denied status as a conscientious objector and overturned his conviction for draft dodging. The “Fight of the Century,” as it was dubbed, was marked as much by personal animosity as by the unique excitement of having—by virtue of Ali’s forced hiatus—two undefeated champions face off in a title fight. In the months before the $5 million match, Ali turned up the invective, calling Frazier dumb, mocking his dark skin, and painting him as a lackey for his white handlers.Frazier didn’t hide his anger, raging in prefight interviews about how badly he would hurt Ali. He’d never called Ali by his chosen name, but now Frazier’s insistence on calling him Clay was tied to a larger rejection of the Nation of Islam, and his contention that the group was using Ali.Ali countered, saying that Frazier was himself being used by his management group, a collection of white businessmen in Philadelphia. He said that rooting for Frazier made a Black person a traitor, and that Frazier fought for Nixon. (According to a member of Frazier’s entourage, Dave Wolf, Ali also said that Frazier fought for Klansmen.) As a result, Frazier received anonymous death threats, and his children feared for his life. Winning the fight would not be enough for Ali; he evidently needed to erase the idea of Frazier as an equal, both in and out of the ring.The “Fight of the Century” lived up to the billing. Ali came out aggressively, with rapid-fire punches in the first few rounds. But he was slower than he’d been before his hiatus, and as he got tired, Frazier’s constant, precise body work took hold. Frazier was more John Henry than Joe Louis, driving steel over and over again into the core of his opponent. The fight went the distance, a full 15 rounds, but the outcome was clear. In the 11th, Frazier uncorked a left hook that made Ali wobble. In the 15th, he delivered another that knocked Ali down.The scorecards were unanimous, although Ali and his team disputed the decision and demanded another fight. After the match, Frazier said that he’d reached back home to “the country” for some of the blows he’d landed. In a match that was, in a sense, a referendum on Frazier’s Blackness, the arm that had been permanently marked by Jim Crow had forced a judgment.By the tenth round in Manila, Ali and Frazier both knew that this fight would take something from them, something they hadn’t had to give before. Sweat poured off them, and between rounds they sank onto their stools and gasped. This was a test of endurance, against each other and against the hellish conditions in the ring.A beleaguered Ali had gained momentum in the eighth, launching a barrage of punches that momentarily hurt Frazier, and began to swell his face. But Frazier was inexorable. He kept Ali on his back foot, driving him into the corners and delivering vicious shots to the head, blows that—had they been delivered by a slightly younger Frazier—might have knocked men out cold. Ali shook it all off. He was a blanket, still trying to clinch Frazier and hold him down. The two boxers teetered against each other, exhausted, until Padilla stepped in again, pulling Ali’s gloves off the back of Frazier’s neck. They raised their arms, almost unwillingly, and resumed slugging.When Carlos Padilla Jr. had woken up on the morning of the Ali-Frazier match, he was not the chosen referee. Amid all the acrimony between the Ali and Frazier camps, they hadn’t agreed on who would stand in the ring between the two men. Their second fight, in which Ali had thoroughly avenged his defeat in the “Fight of the Century,” had been marred by controversy over the officiating. That bout, also held in Madison Square Garden, was less a boxing match than a hugging match. According to Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, Ali had clinched more than 100 times, often pulling Frazier’s neck down in order to tire him. Both corners had criticized the referee, Tony Perez—Frazier’s side for not stopping the clinching, and Ali’s for a key moment in which Perez had accidentally ended a round too soon, after Ali had stunned Frazier with a right hand and might have been able to go for a knockout. Even on the eve of the fight, Ali’s and Frazier’s teams and the boxing authorities could not agree on which of the candidates who’d been brought to Manila would be in the ring.Ed Kolenovsky / APThe referee Carlos Padilla Jr. during the Thrilla in Manila. He had never officiated a fight above the 135-pound weight class before.There was a uniquely Marcosian way of breaking the deadlock. According to Izenberg, when the parties met that night to finally settle the issue, one of the omnipresent Filipino military men placed a .45-caliber pistol on the bargaining table between the two sides and suggested that the referee be Filipino. The leading candidate was Padilla. At dawn on the day of the fight, the commission called Padilla’s home to let him know he’d be the referee. But he had already left for the Coliseum to report for the undercard fights. After he arrived, he told me recently, an official said to get a move on; reporters were waiting for him. Confused, Padilla asked why. “Don’t you know you’re going to referee the Ali-Frazier fight?” was the answer.He had never refereed a fight above the 135-pound weight class, and most of his experience had come in amateur gyms and converted cockfighting rings, which were small compared with a regulation heavyweight ring. “I said, ‘Goddamn, it’s big!’” Padilla recalled. He’d never had to give instructions to fighters in English, and his English wasn’t so great. Trying to separate two 200-plus-pound men would be difficult for anybody, and at 5 foot 8, Padilla was diminutive next to Ali and Frazier.I met Padilla at his home in Las Vegas, not far from Izenberg’s. He’s 91, still spry, and still wearing the same thick mustache that made him stand out in the ring. Padilla is fiery and prone to a “goddamn,” a favorite expression. He was eager to show me a Facebook video, taken the year before, of him working a speed bag, sending it flying with a steady rhythm until it became a blur.We talked in his living room, which was crowded with photographs and Catholic figurines. On the wall and in frames propped up behind me were pictures of Padilla’s refereeing career, and of boxers who’d been in his orbit. In the middle were the highlights: photographs of Ali and Frazier squaring up in Manila, with Padilla looking on.Long before that fight, boxing had been a prominent part of life in the Philippines. After America seized control of the archipelago from Spain in 1898, then brutally suppressed Indigenous rebellions, it exported American culture in the name of “civilization”—part of the “white man’s burden,” as Rudyard Kipling put it in 1899. As was true of colonialism’s other exports, the intended subjects quickly made the art of boxing their own, subverting the original intentions. The legendary Pancho Villa won the world flyweight championship in 1923. In the 1960s, Gabriel “Flash” Elorde held the world super-featherweight title for seven years. Also trained in eskrima, the national martial art of the Philippines, Elorde embraced a boxing style—of “dancing” and maintaining distance while landing quick strikes—that influenced a young Muhammad Ali. When Ali floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, he was likely channeling Elorde.Padilla happily recounts his role in all of this history to anyone who’ll listen. The morning of the match, he was nervous: He had never officiated anything with anywhere close to this level of attention. Then again, nobody had. The fight was held at 10 a.m. local time, in order to accommodate an expected global audience of hundreds of millions; it was likely one of the most-watched television events in history at that point. Many people who watched the match live paid to do so in movie theaters or arenas equipped with closed-circuit projectors. But nearly half a million viewers in the United States watched it live via satellite on a new network, HBO.If Padilla got anything wrong, the error would be indelible. Just about every person in the Philippines would be watching. Hundreds had traveled to Manila just to be close to the action, even if they couldn’t get into the arena. “They slept around the outside of the Coliseum,” Padilla told me. “For boxing, Filipinos pause everything in life,” Jay Gonzalez, a Manila-born boxing coach and academic, told me. He was 11 years old in 1975, and watched the fight in class on a television his teacher rolled in. He and his classmates were excited to watch two Black champions, feeling an affinity as people of color. It didn’t hurt that the referee was Filipino.Padilla endeavored to make his mark early. With the Marcoses looking on—seated in high-backed thrones that Padilla believes were bulletproofed to foil assassination attempts—he barked at both fighters, trying to project authority. It was almost unheard-of for a referee to disqualify a fighter in a heavyweight championship, and Filipino officials warned Padilla not to make history. But he was never demure. He told Ali that he would penalize him for illegal holds, and gave a warning to Frazier early on for a low blow. Padilla kept the fight brisk, a welcome change from the wrestling match that had transpired during the previous Ali-Frazier fight.Lawrence Schiller / Polaris Communications / Getty Most agree that Ali won the beginning of the fight in Manila and dominated the end, but that Frazier owned the middle.Ali couldn’t have known that Frazier was fighting one-eyed—that he had been fighting one-eyed for years, having lost most of his sight on his left side because of a cataract. He had made it past physicals by memorizing eye-test charts and tricking fight doctors, just as he’d shrugged off other injuries and ailments that would have sidelined other men. But now his right eye—the good one—was failing him.After taking Frazier’s punishment to his body and skull for the better part of 10 rounds, Ali started landing power punches more frequently around Frazier’s face and right eye. Inflammation on each side of the socket met in the middle and began to shut it.In the 13th round, with the eye swelling and bleeding, and with blood pouring from his mouth, an exhausted Frazier willed himself out of his corner, throwing blows that even a gassed Ali could avoid or ignore. Frazier could not see clearly, and his entire head seemed swollen, and Ali kept landing punches. He knocked Frazier’s mouthpiece into the crowd, but somehow, miraculously, Frazier still stood.On a sweltering April night, I hailed a GrabCar and sped from the Manila airport to my hotel in Quezon City, one of the cities that make up the megalopolis of greater Manila and the site of the Ali-Frazier fight. Everywhere I looked, armed security guards crowded street corners and building entrances. The country’s midterm elections were approaching, and violence around elections was not uncommon. Still, as guards and a bomb-sniffing dog checked the trunk for explosives outside my hotel, I sensed a bit of theater in all the security. The legitimacy of the government, now led by Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of the two famed kleptocrats, still seems to rely on the appearance of safety more than anything else.The next morning, I ducked into the cool refuge of the Araneta Coliseum, which had been temporarily renamed the Philippine Coliseum in 1975 before it hosted Ali-Frazier III. The white-domed arena, now gray with age and grime, didn’t resemble its namesake so much as a spaceship, a Starship Enterprise plopped amid high-rises. Inside, the place that had been so hot as to be nearly unbearable on that morning 50 years ago was mostly empty, and the air-conditioning was cranked high enough to give me goose bumps. If I was looking for traces of Ali and Frazier, they might have been covered from my view: The venue was being prepared for a live show by performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race the following night.I left the Coliseum and walked around the corner to Ali Mall—built in honor of its namesake in 1976—and then to Gateway Tower, where I met Jorge Araneta, the leader of the empire that had built the Coliseum and the business district around it. He was 89 years old, still svelte and sharp in a patterned blue resort shirt, and still wearing the easy, confident air of authority. We sat at a round wooden table in his office and he picked up a stack of photo albums, all filled with snapshots taken during Ali’s time in the Philippines. Araneta found a picture of two smiling men attending the dedication ceremony of the mall I had just visited. One was quite obviously Muhammad Ali. It took me a moment to place the young face of Araneta himself.The Araneta clan had grown prosperous as sugar planters during Spanish rule, he told me. After their home was destroyed during World War II, his father took a trip to Rome and, upon seeing the Colosseum, had a spark of inspiration. “He said: ‘I’m going to build the same,’” Araneta told me.At the time of its completion, in 1960, the Araneta Coliseum was the largest building of its kind in the world. Its inaugural event was the super-featherweight title fight between Flash Elorde and Harold Gomes, when Elorde became the first Filipino in decades to capture a title.When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the elder Araneta, a prominent backer of the opposing Liberal Party, fled to New York. Jorge stayed behind and ran the business. When Marcos’s regime needed a venue for what would be the biggest sporting event in the history of the Philippines, there was just one real choice. The regime’s sole imposition was the temporary renaming of the building. In his office, Araneta laughed. “At least they gave it back,” he said. “Some people would have kept it.”The Coliseum today has hosted everything from Boyz II Men concerts to the Miss World Philippines pageant, but it still carries a special association with combat sports: boxing, kickboxing, mixed martial arts. The Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquiao, who recently returned to the ring after a four-year retirement, is planning an event commemorating Ali-Frazier at the Coliseum, fueling speculation that he might himself fight there. The arena is also home to an annual tournament billed as “the biggest cockfighting event in the world.” Blood still regularly stains the floors of the Coliseum’s rings.This is a fulfillment of the elder Araneta’s vision. Inside the first Colosseum, the masses of Rome watched slaves and animals butcher one another. Brutality, coercion, and terror were always elemental parts of the entertainment. But there were also moments of transcendence mixed in with the gore—the beauty and creativity of martial arts, the thrill of the contest, the inquiry into human limits and potential. And there was always the chance that some fighter might one day, through repeated victories, win freedom from the fight.Perhaps the importance of the Ali-Frazier match derives from the extremity of those blood-sport contradictions. Ali—or Richard Durham channeling Ali—would write just months after the fight that some part of him had always rebelled against the primal allure of his sport. “Like in the old slave days on the plantations,” he wrote, “with two of us big black slaves fighting, almost on the verge of annihilating each other while the masters are smoking big cigars, screaming and urging us on, looking for the blood.” But he, the race man’s race man, had needed so badly to prove something in that ring that he’d tried to turn the entire Black community against someone he might otherwise call brother.Frazier had needed to prove something too. In this, his last big bout, he had the opportunity to fight for a kind of freedom—freedom from torment and from constant comparison to his nemesis. But part of the reason the crowd was so rapt was the silent speculation—dreadful and giddy, and building in the final rounds—that he might face a gladiator’s end.Frazier came out of his corner in the 14th all but blind, rocking on unsteady legs. A knot on his forehead was growing by the second, and his mouth and both eyes were badly swollen. Ali went forward stiffly, his trunk and hips deeply bruised from Frazier’s body blows. He seemed to struggle to lift his arms. Whatever well from which he’d drawn energy had gone dry.Frazier couldn’t defend himself, but he kept throwing wild, delirious punches. A few left hooks landed, but they didn’t have much power anymore. Frazier kept tapping his own face, either to will himself on or simply to try to clear his limited vision. He almost entirely abandoned his guard. Ali threw wide, slow blows that arrived on Frazier’s skull by telegraph. It was like he was punching underwater. But the punches kept finding home.When they went back to their corners, Futch, Frazier’s trainer, asked Frazier why he couldn’t avoid Ali’s winding punches. Frazier told Futch that he could no longer see Ali’s right hand. Frazier was determined to finish the fight. But Futch had seen boxers die in the ring. Against Frazier’s murderous protestations, he told Padilla to stop the fight.After Padilla raised Ali’s arm and declared him the victor, the champion collapsed in a heap. The crowd roared, launching into chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” His team helped him push himself up to sit slumped on his stool, his arms dragging toward the floor as if his fists were too heavy to carry, his head bowed between his knees. When it came time to talk to reporters, Ali wobbled, barely able to steady himself or hoist the trophy. He told Izenberg that this was the closest to death he’d ever been. In his recap of the fight, Ali mostly eschewed his usual bravado: “I was surprised Joe had so much stamina,” he told a reporter. “He is the greatest fighter of all times, next to me.”“Except for you,” the reporter replied.“Except for me.”As the referee, Padilla was one of the three people who submitted an official scorecard for the fight. All three had Ali up by a healthy amount going into the 15th round. Padilla said that even if Futch hadn’t told him to do so, he probably would have called the fight. “Because Frazier was no more.”Neil Leifer / Sports Illustrated / GettyAfter 14 rounds, Frazier’s trainer tells Padilla to stop the fight, and Ali retains his title as the heavyweight champion of the world. The unofficial scorecards from journalists were more favorable to Frazier. The Associated Press scored the fight even going into the final round. The New York Times gave Frazier eight of the first 11 rounds. “Going into the 15th round, I had Ali ahead by one point,” Izenberg told me.The general consensus is that Ali won the beginning of the fight and dominated the end, and that Frazier owned the middle. Frazier always maintained that Ali was too exhausted to fight the 15th, and that he could’ve won by a knockout if he’d just been allowed to fight.After it was over, the Marcoses invited Ali to one of their many homes for the evening. They’d been pleased by the fight. In the Philippines, citizens rejoiced in it, and particularly in Padilla’s presence. “President Marcos wanted a showcase to the world,” Araneta told me. “What better show can you present than Muhammad Ali?” But the source of the regime’s good fortune sat in silence at dinner in the palace, seemingly unable to eat.Araneta hosted Ali at his home for lunch shortly after the fight. “He was very somber” and could “hardly walk,” Araneta told me. “I wanted to uplift his spirits, and I said, ‘Muhammad, I’m going to name a building after you.’” That woke Ali up, he said. The next year, Ali would come back for the opening of Ali Mall.The mall was one small testament to what Ali meant in Manila and in other corners of the subaltern world. He wasn’t all pageantry and promotion; people were genuinely inspired by his presence, his idealism, and his earned status as a symbol of resistance against empire. Even in the Philippines, where he dined with a butcher and entered the ring disfavored against Frazier, he is now revered—all part of the contradictions of the man. As President Barack Obama would say on the occasion of his death, Ali was “a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.”Frazier didn’t attend the Marcoses’ after-party. He was too hurt to go, and probably too prideful. He sat in his dressing room, his face battered into a new shape. His son hugged him, and Frazier grumbled with his team about what might have been. “I was there, wasn’t I?” he said.Ask anyone what makes a human human, and they’ll likely mention something to do with our brains. Maybe they’ll say we stand alone in our capacity for language, or reason, or self-awareness, not knowing that science has chipped away at each of these presumptions. We suspect now that whales can talk; that crows can reason; that octopuses may be self-aware. But one thing that seems to be truly unique to Homo sapiens is this: We are the only animal with fists.Perhaps the fist evolved as an anatomical accident, a by-product of the lengthened fingers and opposable thumbs that gave humans their unparalleled tool-grabbing dexterity. That’s one theory. But compelling evidence suggests that the exact shape of the human fist evolved at least in part for punching. The theory would place the duality of human nature quite literally in our hands. On the one side, we have our instruments for the written word and our tools for daily diplomacy—for shaking hands or putting our palms up in peace. On the other side, we carry our most primal weapons.In Jerry Izenberg’s home, there is a shrine to the human arsenal: a case holding a single, cherry-red boxing glove. On the thumb of the glove, Muhammad Ali’s famous, compact signature, scribbled in black marker. On the body of the glove, Frazier’s larger, swooping signature. The souvenir, which Izenberg thinks was signed after Frazier’s and Ali’s retirements, might suggest a thawing of relations between the men. But there’s some deception at play. According to Izenberg, the autograph seeker who’d first owned the glove had Ali sign first and then took it to Frazier, holding it so as to obscure Ali’s mark while Frazier signed.In the waning years of Ali’s and Frazier’s lives, friends and media figures tried to patch things up between the rivals. But they never really reconciled, and both men’s lives were too abbreviated to let time do its healing. Like many of their peers in the pantheon of Black heavyweight boxing, they died relatively early, facing serious health and financial trouble.Shuffling and diabetic, Frazier died broke in 2011, at the age of 67. As he had in Manila, Ali outlasted him, but again in Pyrrhic fashion. Parkinson’s disease hollowed him out in front of the world’s eyes, and he died at 74, in 2016, his own fortune having been diminished by friends and hangers-on.[Read: The death of Muhammad Ali and the new definition of Parkinson's disease]There had been promising statements and portents—charity matches and television appearances—that made it seem like Ali and Frazier might finally rekindle their friendship, but all were false starts. Invariably, Ali would renege on his apologies.In 2000, when Izenberg was working on a 25th-anniversary retrospective for the Star-Ledger, he interviewed his friend Ali by phone. “And he said, ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t like me,’” Izenberg told me. “I said, ‘Yes, you do.’” He reminded Ali about Frazier’s children, who would come home from school crying when other kids teased them about their father being a gorilla or an Uncle Tom. “If Laila came home crying—‘Daddy, they think you’re a gorilla; you’re an animal’—how would you feel about that?” he asked Ali, referring to Ali’s daughter. Ali responded that he hadn’t meant to hurt Frazier’s family—again pleading that he hadn’t quite understood the impact of his own words.Izenberg later called Frazier to relay Ali’s regrets. “Well, first of all, let him come and say that to me,” Frazier told him. It was something of a cruel jab toward Ali, who by that point struggled to get around on his own, and to speak. Frazier, despite his own infirmities, took pride in the idea that his blows in Manila had contributed to Ali’s Parkinson’s—or even caused it—going so far as to gloat about the possibility on the outgoing voicemail message for his cellphone. “But secondly,” he continued on the phone with Izenberg, “I ain’t accepting no apology. You hurt my boy, and that’s all there is to it.”There’s a lifetime of what-ifs between the two signatures on the glove, of parallel realities where the two men did find common ground, and with it, a measure of peace. I envisioned how the glove might look if I squeezed it together, so that Ali’s and Frazier’s names finally found themselves side by side. But I realized that to do so would be to reconfigure the imaginary hand bearing the glove. It would disfigure the fist, our one uniquely human trait, and diminish that which makes us us.This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “The Greatest Fight of All Time.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.