Alerts
Professional boxing had come a long way in the half-century that preceded March 8, 1971, the night Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali stepped into the Madison Square Garden ring for what remains history’s greatest heavyweight championship fight.
Advertisement
Fifty years earlier, in a previously-billed “Fight of the Century,’’ Jack Dempsey had met Georges Carpentier in a makeshift wooden arena constructed to hold 120,000 fans at a place called Boyle’s Thirty Acres across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The only way to see the fight was to be there, and if you were anywhere in the outer reaches of the vast amphitheater, you needed binoculars or a telescope to see the minuscule figures in the distant ring.