Mar 8, 2021
The 90-year-old sportswriter wants to make a point about Joe Frazier, almost 50 years after the boxer’s most famous fight. “Did you know that Joe’s hook came from a deformed arm?” Jerry Izenberg asks, in the way that only Jerry Izenberg can. He’s backed by seven decades of firsthand sports history, thousands of championship fights and Super Bowls and the moments that came before them. His insight remains the kind gleaned only by those who saw these careers unfold up close.
So, about Joe Frazier and that arm: the young boxer worked on a farm back in South Carolina, and one of his jobs was to chase the family’s prized hogs back into their pens. One day, he fell while giving chase, breaking his left arm. Frazier never regained his full range of motion with that limb, in part because his father asked him to put off surgery, which only made his left hook more compact and thus ultimately more dangerous. Many of his 27 career knockouts resulted from the damage infl