Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali, billed as The Fight of the Century or simply The Fight,[2] was an undisputed heavyweight championship boxing match between WBA, WBC, and The Ring heavyweight champion Joe Frazier and Lineal champion Muhammad Ali, on Monday, March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
[3][4][5] The fight is widely regarded as the biggest boxing match in history and arguably the single most anticipated and publicized sporting event ever.
Ali, who had been stripped of his titles by boxing authorities for refusing to submit to the draft for the Vietnam War, had become a symbol of the anti-establishment public during his government-imposed exile from the ring.
Ali had won the title from Sonny Liston in Miami Beach in 1964, and successfully defended his belt up until he had it stripped by boxing authorities for refusing induction into the armed forces in 1967 (though he was still recognized as the Lineal heavyweight champion).
Frazier was plausibly Ali's equal, which created a tremendous amount of hype and anticipation for a match pitting the two undefeated fighters against one another to decide who was the true heavyweight champ.
[10] On the March 4, 1971, episode of The Dick Cavett Show, Howard Cosell, Joe Louis and Jimmy Breslin all correctly predicted that because of Ali's lengthy layoff, Frazier would prevail.
[12]On the evening of the match, Madison Square Garden had a circus-like atmosphere, with scores of policemen to control the crowd of outrageously dressed fans, kids, and countless celebrities, from Norman Mailer to Woody Allen.
Perenchio enlisted sports owner Jack Kent Cooke as financial backer of the fight with a bank guarantee of $4,000,000 which provided the bulk of the fighters' $5,000,000 fee.
[17] The fight was sold, and broadcast by closed circuit, to 50 countries in 12 languages via ringside reporters to an audience estimated at 300 million, a record viewership for a television event at that time.
Ali, his jaw swollen noticeably, got up at the count of four and managed to stay on his feet for the rest of the round despite several terrific blows from Frazier.
A few minutes later, the judges made it official: Frazier had retained the title with a unanimous decision, dealing Ali his first professional loss.
That October, Ali shocked the world with a victory in Kinshasa, Zaire, over the heavily favored Foreman to regain the heavyweight title in The Rumble in the Jungle.
Without the same social divide, with the unknown of whether Ali could ever regain enough of his former greatness to dominate post-layoff partially answered, and without the impetus of two unbeaten champions meeting one another for the first time, neither their second nor their third matchup would attain the unprecedented hype of the first.
[37] The fight provided cover for an activist group, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, to successfully pull off a burglary at an FBI office in Pennsylvania, which exposed the COINTELPRO operations that included illegal spying on activists involved with the civil rights and anti-war movements, on the basis that guards listening to radio coverage of the fight would be distracted from their duties.