Brutality of ‘Thrilla’ still delivers a chill

Fifty years ago, Frazier and Ali delivered one of greatest and most punishing bouts ever.

- By BILL DWYRE

MUHAMMAD ALI, right, said of his 1975 fight with Joe Frazier that it was "the closest I ever came to dying."

(BETTMANN Getty Images)

Once all the papers were signed and the fight was officially on, Muhammad Ali knew exactly what to do.

The master quipster, fight-promoting wizard and most famous and outrageous boxer in the world — the longtime heavyweight champion who had trumpeted his boxing style as one to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee” — told the media what would happen on Oct. 1, 1975.

“Tt will be,” he bellowed, “Akilla anda thrilla anda chilla when I get to the gorilla in Manila.”

It turned out to be all of that 50 years ago, as well as being offensive, when he called his fight opponent, Joe Frazier, a gorilla. The shortened “Thrilla in Manila” stuck and became the label and the headline for what was to become one of the greatest boxing matches of all time.

Bob Arum will turn 94 in December, and he is still going strong.

In the ‘60s, he was a Harvard-educated lawyer who ended up working for Bobby Kennedy's justice department. Kennedy assigned him to confiscate closed-circuit TV revenue from the 1962 Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight because information had been leaked to the U.S. government that the promoter, Roy Cohn, was planning to skirt some tax responsibilities by illegally paying Patterson in Sweden.

That’s the same Roy Cohn who eventually became the lawyer and confidant of a young Donald Trump.