Page 93 – LIFE

Ali, Frazier and the ‘Fight of the Century’

February 25, 2020October 10, 2014 by

After refusing to register for the draft in 1967 — at the very height of his career — 25-year-old Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship title and endured a forced layoff from the ring for three years. In 1971, after winning the appeal of his conviction and five-year prison sentence before the U.S. Supreme Court, the former champ returned to boxing, fighting a few bouts against lesser (albeit ranked) rivals before facing the title-holder, Philadelphia’s “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier.

Long before the first bell sounded at their March 1971 fight, that bout had been billed as “The Fight of the Century” and, amazingly, it lived up to the hype. That night, a star-studded crowd watched two of the greatest boxers who ever lived battle for supremacy in the world’s premier sports arena.

Frazier had earned the heavyweight belt a year earlier. “I often felt bad for Joe,” photographer John Shearer, who died in 2017, once said, recalling the weeks and months he spent with both fighters before the bout at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “He was completely miscast as the bad guy in the fight. In so many of the pictures I made of him that winter, when he’s with friends and relaxed, there’s something genuinely charming there but something in his face suggests that if you scratched the surface, you’d find a world of other feelings.”

“The pictures I made of Ali training in Chris Dundee’s Miami Beach gym, meanwhile, are incredibly revealing in another way,” Shearer said, “not least because you can see that Ali had a belly. And this is not all that long before the fight. He just wasn’t in the kind of shape he needed to be in to battle a warrior like Joe Frazier.”

Many of Shearer’s photos of Frazier, including several in this gallery, make the clear case that Frazier simply wanted the title more than Ali. He was fighting, scratching and clawing for it long before the two men stepped into the ring.

“When I see the pictures I made of Joe running by himself, for example,” Shearer says, “the one thing that strikes me, maybe even more now than when I was making the photos, is his discipline. He was training, training, training. He was driven. And in many ways, he was a man alone.”

“That fight was the last time Ali took Joe for granted,” Shearer says. “I wonder if, deep down, he hit a point in Miami where he looked for that fire, that drive, and it just wasn’t there. You know you want to fight, you want to hold that title belt again, but you can’t make yourself run those extra few miles at five in the morning, or spar for twenty more minutes every single day.”

Another aspect of Frazier that Shearer captured before the title belt was his creative self. Frazier was a singer and a performer, with his own band and with his own backup singers, the Knockouts. The truth is, he wasn’t bad.

“The two places Frazier communicates best,” wrote LIFE’s Thomas Thompson in a March 1971 cover story for the magazine, “are in the ring, when a cloak of menace and fury drops over him, and on a nightclub stage, where he sings with strength and sincerity.”

“The image of Frazier remained, unfairly and for the longest time, that he was just another fighter,” says Shearer. “That he was just another guy with his nose pushed off to the side of his face. But he felt, strongly, that he was every bit as articulate as Ali and, as importantly, perhaps, that he was every bit the showman that Ali was.”

As for the bout itself, one of the key factors that ratcheted up the rhetoric was the record purse offered both fighters. As LIFE observed in its March 5, 1971 issue: “[Ali] and Frazier are both going to get $2.5 million the morning after the fight whether anybody comes or not. A flat $2.5 million. Guaranteed. The most money ever paid to any man for a maximum 45 minutes’ work.”

“It was electric in the Garden the night of the fight,” Shearer remembers. “It was the night of the great showdown between the era’s two gladiators, and there was a sense that the unprecedented hype for the fight might actually fall short of the reality. And, remember, without a doubt it was a very, very pro-Ali crowd. They all came to see him win, to see him destroy Joe Frazier.”

That’s not the way it worked out. The relentless, punishing Frazier stalked and pummeled Ali all night, and in the 15th and final round floored him, for only the third time in Ali’s career, with an absolutely titanic left hook. Ali got back on his feet quickly, but the damage, literally and figuratively, had been done. Frazier won by unanimous decision, and held on to the crown until losing it in spectacular fashion to George Foreman two years later, in 1973.

“Frazier didn’t fight by going for the head, the way a lot of other boxers did against Ali,” Shearer remembers. “He went after Ali’s body the whole fight, pounding away, taking terrible blows to the head himself. You know, you keep whacking at the base of the tree, and the tree is going to come down. And that’s what happened. That’s really the story of that first, unforgettable fight between those two great champions.”

—gallery by Liz Ronk

Muhammad Ali with the press during a pre-fight weigh-in at Madison Square Garden in March 1971.

John Shearer/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali, Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier during a break in training before his March 1971 title bout against Muhammad Ali.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali, Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali took a break during training in Miami Beach in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali (rear), Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali, Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali, along with light heavyweight José Torres (in suit) and others, watched the action at boxing promoter Chris Dundee’s gym in Miami Beach in February 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali taunted rival Joe Frazier at Frazier’s training camp in Philadelphia, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans at Joe Frazier’s training headquarters in Philadelphia in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier in training, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier, rear, trained for the title fight versus Ali.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier in rural Pennsylvania in the winter of 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali clowned in his new Cadillac limo in Miami, February 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali with fans in Miami Beach, February 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali drew a crowd when he playfully sparred with an unidentified man in the parking lot of a grocery store in Miami Beach in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A sign advertised a concert by Joe Frazier’s R&B act, Joe Frazier and His Knockouts.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier and the Knockouts performed in January 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

At 214 pounds three weeks before the fight, Frazier began drinking only orange juice for breakfast and skipping lunch to peel off five more pounds.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier backstage before an appearance with the Knockouts in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier in the recording studio, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier tested out a band member’s trumpet on the set of NBC’s “Kraft Music Hall” variety show in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier in the recording studio in 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A ticket window at Madison Square Garden, the site of the March 8, 1971, heavyweight title bout.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Muhammad Ali fan waited for the title bout to begin at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jazz great Miles Davis (right) at Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Future heavyweight champ George Foreman gazed into John Shearer’s camera at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali with assistant trainer and corner man Bundini Brown, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier (left) and Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden during the “Fight of the Century” on March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier lunged at Muhammad Ali during the fight.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier rested in their corners between rounds at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Heavyweight champ Joe Frazier celebrated his title bout victory over Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier, pictured in his dressing room after defeating Muhammad Ali on March 8, 1971.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Frazier savored his heavyweight title bout victory over Muhammad Ali on March 8, 1971, in New York City.

John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, March 5, 1971.

John Shearer—LIFE Magazine

Trip the Light Fantastic With LSD-Inspired Art

January 14, 2022October 7, 2014 by

On April 16, 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with a miniscule amount of a new, virtually unknown, clinically-synthesized compound, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 becoming, in the process, the first human being to trip on acid. A few days later, Hofmann experienced a full-blown intentional acid trip when he self-administered 250 micrograms.

The 250 micrograms with which Hofmann dosed himself represented what he believed to be a “threshold” amount, i.e., a dose that would spark a noticeable and perhaps even quantifiable response in the test subject. Subsequent clinical studies indicate that a threshold dose of LSD is actually closer to 20 micrograms.

Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of artworks created in the 1960s by a group calling itself USCO (an abbreviation for “the Us Company, ” or “the Company of Us”) a collective of artists, film makers, engineers, poets and other creative folks who staged interactive, acid-inspired art shows in lofts, galleries and museums around the country. In its September 9, 1966 issue, LIFE reported on the then-new phenomenon of what it called “LSD Art” through the lens of a show at New York’s Riverside Museum:

Amid throbbing lights, dizzying designs, swirling smells, swelling sounds, the world of art is “turning on.” It is getting hooked on psychedelic art, the latest, liveliest movement to seethe up from the underground. Its bizarre amalgam of painting, sculpture, photography, electronics and engineering is aimed at inducing the hallucinatory effects and intensified perceptions that LSD, marijuana and other psychedelic (or mind-expanding) drugs produce but without requiring the spectator to take drugs. [Viewers] . . . become disoriented from their normal time sense and preoccupations and are lifted into a state of heightened consciousness. In effect, the art may send them on a kind of drugless “trip.”

Psychedelic art is not all new. It derives from earlier innovations of art and electronics, as well as from such old-fashioned devices as the kaleidoscope and slide projector. Some of it even incorporates ancient Oriental philosophies and American Indian lore. But what is new about the art is its complex integration of these techniques and elements as well as its overall purpose. “We try to vaporize the mind,” says a psychedelic artist, “by bombing the senses.”

Of the show at the Riverside Museum and other trippy USCO exhibitions, LIFE wrote that the art found “its most receptive audience at colleges. Young people who grew up with TV and transistor radios and who take electronic equipment for granted have no difficulty in attuning themselves to the audio-visual bombardment. Older people,” the LIFE article concluded, “who prefer what is called rational sequential experience, i.e., just one movie or a single radio station at a time, tend to freak out.”

LSD Art, LIFE magazine, 1966

Yale Joel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Dizzy Gillespie: Rare and Classic Portraits of a Playful Genius

December 3, 2020October 5, 2014 by

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who would have celebrated his 103rd birthday on Oct. 21, was the very model of the modern American musical genius: a brilliant instrumentalist and stylistic innovator, he was also an extroverted performer with a wicked sense of humor.

One of the primary creators of bebop in the mid-1940s and an unparalleled trumpeter, Dizzy was a populist who wanted his music to be understood, appreciated and enjoyed. Audiences may have associated him with signature visual clues the beret and goatee he sported in the 1940s, and the trumpet with the upturned bell he began playing in the 1950s and adored his onstage clowning and dancing, but anyone with ears could tell how seriously he always took the music. An international star until his death on January 6, 1993 (the same day as Rudolph Nureyev), Gillespie was as fervently respected by fellow musicians, as he was beloved by generations of listeners.

A spread by LIFE photographer Allan Grant in our October 11, 1948 issue, during bebop’s glory days. Conspicuous in his absence is Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop, and the man whom Dizzy called “the other side of my heartbeat,” but Gillespie’s vivacious personality was far more palatable to the mainstream. To see this magnificent musician in his youth, ready to convince the world that the music he and his not-yet-understood peers were making was the sound of the future, is still a glorious thing to behold.

Steve Futterman is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie greeting fellow musician Benny Carter, 1948.

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie. 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Crooner Mel (Velvet Fog) Torme happily bites on his finger while he and a model, June Bright, watch Dizzy Gillespie (reflected in mirror), 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Drummer Chano Pozo, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Actress Ava Gardner dons beret and specs and pretends to wear goatee at Billy Berg’s Hollywood nightclub as Dizzy (left) grins.

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie signing autographs, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Rita Hayworth: Hollywood Legend, Pinup Icon

August 25, 2023October 1, 2014 by

With the possible exception of Betty Grable and her fabled legs no single Hollywood star was more popular with American troops during World War II than the actress and dancer Rita Hayworth. Thanks to a photo made by Bob Landry that ran in LIFE magazine in August 1941, months before the U.S. officially entered the war, Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn on Oct. 17, 1918) was the face and the lingerie-clad body of arguably the single most famous and most frequently reproduced American pinup image ever.

LIFE.com remembers the star of films as varied as Pal Joey, Strawberry Blonde, Orson Welles’s Lady From Shanghai and the 1946 noir classic, Gilda in which she played one of moviedom’s most devastatingly sexy femmes fatale. Hayworth could play comedy, was stellar in dramatic roles and danced well enough that none other than Fred Astaire, with whom she starred in two hits for Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s, asserted that she was as talented a partner as any he’d ever had.

Hayworth’s offscreen life, meanwhile, was frequently tough. She married five times; she struggled with alcoholism; and for the last years of her life she suffered from a disease that was only diagnosed (and given a name) a few years before she died: Alzheimer’s.

For countless Americans of a certain age, however, and for movie fans around the world, Rita Hayworth remains one of those rarest of creatures: a bona fide movie star from a classic era the Hollywood of the 1940s and ’50s that will never come again.

Rita Hayworth on August 11, 1941 LIFE Cover

Bob Landry (LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth, 1945.

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946

Columbia Pictures

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth with husband Orson Wells and daughter Rebecca, 1946

Peter Stackpole (LIFE Picture Collection)

LIFE at the Circus: Behind the Scenes With Ringling Brothers, 1949

January 25, 2024October 1, 2014 by

LIFE.com celebrates the legendary entertainment juggernaut that Charles Edward Ringling (Dec. 2, 1863 – Dec. 3, 1926) and several other Ringlings owned and operated through the years: the Ringling Brothers Circus (later the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the “Greatest Show on Earth”). Here are photographs by LIFE’s Nina Leen, chronicling the lives lived behind the scenes by the huge extended family that made up the traveling extravaganza in the late 1940s.

In fact, Charles Edward’s nephew, John Ringling North, was the larger-than-life focus of the LIFE feature for which these photos were originally made. (Very few of the photographs ran in the magazine.)

Of all the marvels, human and animal, which populate the Ringling Bros.’ circus [LIFE wrote], none can match John Ringling North, the man who runs it, in sheer, brassy flamboyance. It is the considered judgment of a large following of friends and enemies that the sustained private performance given by North, a former stock-and-bond salesman who hacked his way through a financial jungle to become president and majority stockholder of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc., is easily as spectacular as any that takes place under the Big Top of The Greatest Show on Earth.

The 1949 article goes on to portray a man of outsize appetites, remarkable talents (“He tap dances, plays the saxophone and cornet, juggles lighted torches and sings songs of his own composition. . .”) and boundless, near-manic energy who somehow was able to put his stamp on a massive pop-culture phenomenon while, if the article is to believed, he rarely slept, constantly boozed it up in his private Pullman train car and galloped around on a stallion named Stonewall’s Pride.

Under the Big Top or outside of it, they just don’t make ’em like that any more.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

NINA LEEN

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1918 Flu Pandemic: Scenes From a Cataclysm

November 2, 2020October 1, 2014 by

The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused more than 1 million deaths in 2020 and put much of the world into quarantine. The race now is to keep COVID-19 from becoming as devastating as the 1918 flu pandemic (the “Spanish Flu”) that infected an estimated half a billion people around the globe and, by most estimates, killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people—at the time, three to five percent of the world’s population.

In America, in one year the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years, according to the United States’ National Archives. All told, more than 675,000 men, women and children in the U.S. died of the virus.

Here, we remember what the world looked like as the post-World War I pandemic ran its lethal course before ending, almost as rapidly as it began, in the early summer of 1919.

These Red Cross volunteers fought the flu pandemic, 1918.

Apic

The St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps was on duty during the influenza pandemic, 1918.

Universal History Archive/UIG via Shutterstock

Influenza victims crowded into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kans., 1918.

AP Photo National Museum of Health

A patient wore a “flu mask” during the influenza pandemic which followed the First World War.

Topical Press Agency—

Unidentified baseball players wore masks that they thought would keep them from getting the flu, 1918.

Underwood And Underwood/The LIFE Images Collection

A doctor inoculated Mayor Andrew Peters of Boston against the Influenza virus during the pandemic, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

Inspecting Chicago street cleaners for influenza, 1918.

Bettmann/Corbis

Court was held outdoors in a park due to the influenza pandemic, San Francisco, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

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