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and send it to Joe. The meat packing firm he worked for sent $100. Joe used the money to buy gifts for his wife and kids. “It wasn’t very much,” he said, “but I wanted to let the kids know that Daddy was still around.”
    But it would be almost a year before the broken thumb would heal, almost a year before Joe Frazier could convert the years of hard work and training and his Olympic gold medal into dollars and cents.
    The Reverend William H. Gray hired Joe to work as a janitor for the Bright Hope Baptist Church. It didn’t pay much, but it was a job, and with what little Florence made at Sears, it would help put food on the table and buy clothes for the three Frazier kids. What it would not do, what it could not do, was satisfy the hunger inside Joe Frazier, the hunger to fight, to prevail.

The Professional
    Duke Dugent was out of the picture, omitted by a police department rule that officers could not manage professional fighters. Yank Durham was alone now, aided by a huge, soft-bellied man named Willie Reddish, who had fought as a professional heavyweight and trained Sonny Liston for his two fights with Cassius Clay. But Yank Durham was in command. There had been many managerial bids for Joe Frazier to turn professional when he came home to Philadelphia carrying his Olympic gold medal. But Yank and Joe decided to wait until the offers, as inevitably they would, grew bigger and better.
    The winter passed painfully for Frazier. He couldn’t train because of his thumb, and even with his janitor’s job, the situation was precarious. Frazier was anxious to get started on his professional boxing career, anxious to begin making the money all his friends said would just “roll in” after the Olympics.
    Finally, in the spring of 1965, his thumb healed, Frazier went to the gym to began training for his professional debut, a four-round fight in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall on August 16, 1965. Joe was to be paid $500 to fight someone named Don Hobson. Later, Hobson, whoever he was, pulled out and it was announced he would be replaced by an equally unknown heavyweight named Roy Johnson.
    By a quirk of fate, on the afternoon of August 16, 1965, in New York City’s posh 21 Club, another heavyweight was turning pro. A group of wealthy young men, banding together as Peers Management, announced it was entering the boxing business with a one-man stable that consisted of Frazier’s old adversary of the amateurs, Buster Mathis.
    The contrast was striking. Mathis turned pro midway between the steak and pie a la mode at one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants and before the No. 1 city’s press corps. Several hours later and less than 100 miles away, Joe Frazier was in a dingy dressing room in Convention Hall, preparing to make his professional boxing debut before a not-so-ample gathering of Philadelphia boxing fans.
    Whatever had happened to disappearing Don Hobson had also happened to Roy Johnson, because when Joe Frazier entered the ring, the guy in the other corner was somebody named Elwood Goss—“The Rose.” It said so clearly on the back of his blue terry cloth robe.
    â€œI know the guy,” said a ringside cynic. “He’s a steam-fitter. He came to the fights and they pulled him out of his seat. They needed an opponent for Frazier and this guy has had a few fights, so he was picked.”
    â€œI’ve seen him fight before,” said another ringsider, “but his name wasn’t Elwood Goss.”
    When they asked Goss if he would be willing to fight Joe Frazier, he said, “Sure, who knows, I might get lucky.”
    Elwood Goss got lucky. He was lucky he came out alive. Frazier hit him a left hook in the first round and The Rose went down in sections. He got up at eight and for the rest of the round there was little more than pushing and shoving and Elwood Goss lying all over Joe Frazier, trying to stay on his feet. Finally,