No pay for covering fight

The fight of the century was earlier. The “Thrilla in Manila” came later.
But on a cold January night in 1974, I made my way to downtown Indianapolis to watch the second match-up between legendary heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who died last week.
The fight wasn’t in Indianapolis, of course.
It was pay-per-view 1970s style. That meant projection of a grainy black-and-white televised image on a screen in a movie theatre.
At that time, I was covering a little bit of everything for a few underground, entertainment, and neighborhood newspapers in Indy. I was getting published, but I wasn’t getting paid. And since I wasn’t getting paid, that meant I could write about just about anything I wanted.
It was inevitable that I’d want to write about Ali. He was a towering figure in the world of sports, and he was enormously controversial because of his political and religious views.
Besides, I’d been a fan since back in the day when he was an Olympian from Louisville by the name of Cassius Clay.
The first Ali-Frazier fight had been cast as an epic battle, and Ali had succeeded to casting Frazier — completely unfairly — as an ignorant “Uncle Tom.”
The re-match was irresistible.
The only place showing the fight in Indy was the old Indiana Theatre on Washington Street.
It was a huge, rococo, gilded monstrosity of a place.
The walls were covered with various plaster bits that were supposed to be elegant but were pretty much weird instead. (Imagine, if you can, a large urn supported by legs that are in the form of dachshunds standing on their forelegs with their rear legs raised in the air. That should give you some idea of the décor.)
In the 1960s, the Indiana had reinvented itself as the only place in the state with a true Cinerama screen.
Three movie projectors worked simultaneously to show films on a curved screen that was supposed to make the audience feel surrounded by the action. It was a gimmick as odd as those dachshund-shaped legs on the urn, and it soon fell out of favor.
By the early 1970s, with downtown Indianapolis becoming seedier by the day, the Indiana was the preferred venue for “blaxploitation” movies like “Shaft” and “Superfly.” And it was the perfect site for the local live showing of the Ali-Frazier re-match.
I can’t remember what the ticket price was, but it was high enough that I had second thoughts about attending the fight simply so I could write an article about it that would be published without payment.
The place was crowded, and the crowd was rambunctious. It was a prizefight crowd, not a movie crowd.
And it was a black crowd, not a white crowd. More than a few people had to wonder what that long-haired white kid in the pea coat was doing there.
Finally, the lights came down and a somewhat fuzzy TV image appeared on the screen. It was as far away from HD TV as you can imagine, but it was the best available technology in 1974.
The gladiators made their way to the ring, and the crowd at the Indiana started whooping for Ali and shouting insults at Frazier.
Ali’s unfair characterization of Smokin’ Joe had stuck so well that when Frazier came into the ring wearing a robe with a hood, someone in the theatre yelled that he looked like a Klansman.
A few Frazier fans shouted something back, and it looked for awhile as if a fight might break out in the moviehouse before one actually started in the ring.
I remember wondering how many people in the room were armed, and I remember suspecting that I was the only one who was not.
But then the bell sounded, and the heavyweights went to work on the screen.
The fight, as it turned out, was something of a disappointment, with way too many clinches.
I’m not sure, at this point, what I actually wrote about it. All I know for certain is that I didn’t get paid.[[In-content Ad]]