Dear Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali,
To my friends
Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali
By Phil Shinnick
In 1964, I walked onto the bus from the Olympic Village in Tokyo and tried to find a seat. I walked down the aisle and saw an empty seat next to an Afro American with a cast on his hand. I asked if I could sit down. He seemed surprised, moved over and motioned for me to sit down. I introduced myself and he said his name was Joe Frazier. We both had heard of each other and we were one of the youngest athletes on the team, just barely in our 20s.
I looked at his hand and asked what happened. He said that he broke it during the quarterfinals of the Olympic boxing rounds. He boxed two opponents with a broken hand but won the Gold Medal. My long jumping story wasn’t as interesting. Shifting 12 mile per hours wind in a driving rainstorm and a run way half under water led to two foul jumps. Another jump was way behind the board. I missed the qualification for the finals. I was predicted to get the silver medal. I liked his story better.
The full US Olympic team was going to a reception to meet the US Ambassador to Japan held in an art gallery setting. Joe and I stayed together and studied the artwork and made comments. I introduced him to my track and field teammates. We rode back together to the Olympic village, ran into each other now and then and chatted.
In 1973 I was in my back office at Rutgers University at 8 AM in the morning going over the days athletic activities. No one else was in the gym. I had tried to make my third Olympic Team (1972) but was injured just before the Olympic Trails. I accepted a position as an assistant professor at Rutgers University. As part of the deal, I became the Athletic Director at Livingston College for several years, a predominantly Afro-American, Hispanic, working class white campus with top faculty. At 8 10 AM the door opened to my office. Muhammad Ali walked in. I asked him what he was doing in my office so early. I had arranged for him to speak to the students that night at 7 PM. He said he heard that I was a friend of Joe Frazier and wanted to talk about Joe. Every detail of my conversation with Joe he needed to know, the broken hand, the art gallery, what he was thinking, how he treated a white guy like me. He never said a bad thing about Joe and just seemed curious about his inner character.
Next, he took out a tap measure and told me he wanted to compare himself to me, first the thighs, same size, our height 6’ 4” same, chest, waist, weight all the same except his deltoids were a little better. He seemed satisfied. Except for our skin, we were like twins. Next, he wanted to talk about politics, but came back to Joe again and again. We talked about slavery in America, in North Africa, in Rome, Greece, to see if it was racism or pure economic exploitation. We talked about capitalism, socialism, war and religion. What was Joe’s background what did he say about his early childhood.
He opened his brief case, full of paper with small poems. He asked me to read each poem to him and then we discussed it, about 200 in all which took us several hours. They were all about the soul and the heart and I could tell that his respect for Joe, and me, ran very deep. There really is a brotherhood between top world-class athletes, no matter the color. It was restful and peaceful for us to share our deepest feelings and soul with each other. To us this was a strength not a weakness. AT 3 PM, students came back into the office and asked him to go with them to the dorm to meet the students, so he disappeared. I saw him later that night and his talk had our conversation sprinkled into it, racism, capitalism, exploitation and the war in Viet Nam. Although I felt a deep friendship with both, I saw no reason to pursue neither them nor they me. I’ve heard of Joe’s stress over what Muhammad said about him but I felt that he had to do this in order to weaken him and put nicks in his armor so that he could prevail.
My overall sense of both Joe and Muhammad was that they were real athletes and to meet another Olympic athlete (white) like me made them feel very comfortable and relaxed which went beyond the color barrier, which at that time was very high. They both discussed in great detail the discrimination and pain that racism provoked. I feel very sad and upset about Joe’s death and Muhammad’s neurological disease, two athletes with great souls.
Dr. Phillip Shinnick broke the American and World Record in the long jump in 1963, jumped with the US Olympic team in 1964 and 1968 and lives in Manhattan