Come Out Smokin' Read Online Free PDF Page B

Joe into the ring again and in that second professional fight, Yank learned something about his fighter, something invaluable. He learned that Joe Frazier could take a punch. He learned that while the arms and legs were small, the heart was mammoth.
    In his second pro fight, Frazier got hit on the chin by Mike Bruce and went down, and Yank could see a great career and a lot of money flying right out the window. Now Joe was to undergo his sternest test. Instead of quitting right there on the floor as many young fighters have, Joe climbed off the canvas and flattened Bruce in three rounds.
    Eight days later, Frazier bombed out Ray Staples in two, and thirteen days after that he kayoed Abe Davis in one. Four knockouts in four professional fights as 1965 came to an end. Now Durham was ready to make a run at the big money. First, he needed backers. He wanted a group like the one that backed Muhammad Ali and sent him on his way toward the heavyweight championship of the world.
    â€œNo Philadelphia sharpies,” Durham warned. “I want respectable businessmen.”
    At that very moment, a group was already being put together, a group that would change Joe Frazier’s life, that would put him on solid financial footing and on the path to the heavyweight championship of the world.

Clover for Luck
    The twelfth fight of Joe Frazier’s professional career was scarcely twelve minutes old when the lights almost went out. Oscar Bonavena, burly and bullish heavyweight from Argentina, blood gushing from an angry cut above his left eye, charged Frazier, fired a smashing right cross to the jaw and deposited Joe on the Madison Square Garden canvas.
    There was a gasp around ringside and ashen faces on a group of men whose interest was more than just sporting. And there was the discouraging sound of hearts dropping and Joe Frazier stock plummeting. The group of angels, sought by Yank Durham, had been put together eight months before. It was called Cloverlay, Inc., the name coming from a wedding of words—“cloverleaf” for luck, “overlay” from a betting term that means good odds.
    Yank Durham had dictated. The group that backed Joe Frazier would have to be aboveboard. Only respectable businessmen need apply. And that’s what he got.
    It was Yank himself, who had introduced Joe to the Reverend William H. Gray, pastor of Philadelphia’s Bright Hope Baptist Church, and the Reverend Mr. Gray who had given Joe a job as a janitor in his church when Frazier returned injured from Tokyo. The Reverend Mr. Gray knew a man, Dr. F. Bruce Baldwin, who easily fit the Durham-imposed respectability quotient and who had been looking to get involved in some sports project. Dr. Baldwin had been the president of a dairy and had earned his doctorate for the thesis “The Chemistry of Frozen Milk and Cream.” Since leaving the dairy, he had become president of a well-known baking company.
    The Reverend Mr. Gray told Dr. Baldwin about Frazier and it was Baldwin who got the ball rolling. He was intrigued by the idea of backing a professional fighter, interested in putting together the kind of group Durham had in mind. Baldwin sought out bankers, industrialists, contractors, lawyers, clergymen, doctors and journalists and soon he had a group of forty interested in backing a fighter and able to withstand the loss, if any. The only restriction was that all members of the group had to be residents of the state of Pennsylvania, which was testimony to the civic-minded nature of the people involved.
    Among those in the group, in addition to Dr. Baldwin and the Reverend Mr. Gray, were Bruce R. Wright, an attorney; Thacker Longstreth, president of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and onetime Republican candidate for mayor of Philadelphia; Arthur Kaufman, a department store executive; Harold Wessel, partner in the accounting firm of Ernst & Ernst; Milton Clark, president of a building maintenance firm; Jack Kelly, contractor,