Some of sport’s long-running rows range from the petty to the frankly dangerous Kevin Mitchell Mark James might think he’s got the tiger by the tail in his “feud” with the equally stubborn Nick Faldo, but he doesn’t know the half of it. It’s all very well, a couple of golfers handbagging it in a series of separate interviews over a long-gone tournament and, okay, James might have been better off not binning Faldo’s goodwill message at last year’s Ryder Cup (honestly guys) – but imagine having someone like Joe Frazier on your case. Or falling out with the hard man’s hard man, Tommy Smith, as Graeme Souness did at Liverpool?
Nor would you want to get between Ian Botham and Ian Chappell on a bad night. Beefy’s response to Chappell’s late-night wisecrack in a Melbourne hotel was to chase him through the car-park threatening death by smashed beer glass and is one of cricket’s best Anglo-Australian legends. So, when Rob Steen asked Chappell to write about “My Favourite Pom” for his anthology, The New Ball, the former Australian captain began with the observation, “It could have been worse; I could’ve been asked to nominate my favourite Martian.” When Alex Higgins threatened serious damage on Dennis Taylor if he strayed into the wrong part of Belfast, who could be sure the Hurricane was joking? And when Jimmy Connors refused an invitation to the recent parade of champions at Wimbledon, there were those who will tell you it was because he could not stand sharing a stage with John McEnroe. Watching McEnroe chatting amiably with the other great member of their triumvirate, Bjorn Borg (who had stayed away from the place for 19 years), it was obvious, also, that McEnroe recognised the difference between a feud and a rivalry. Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank, meanwhile, kept the coolness between them long after their head-to-head title fights in the Nineties – to the point that Benn feared he would lamp Eubank if he wound him up when they met in the dressing room at the Brit Awards a few years ago. It was only that night, as it happens, that they finally put the row behind them. Mary Decker, however, will never forgive Zola Budd for tripping her up in a race at the Los Angeles Olympics. The pain and anger on the American’s face as she lay on the track with Budd and the other runners skipping over her said all that was needed – but she wouldn’t let it go and gave the young Budd a fierce verbal working over for a long time afterwards. Yet, of all these tiffs and many more, I think the 30-year war between Muhammad Ali and Smokin’ Joe Frazier must rank as the sporting feud of the past century, as much for its longevity as its seeming daftness. They fought their fights, among the finest in the history of boxing, made their money, which was considerable, and earned the respect of millions of people not even remotely interested in the sport. Yet, to the bemusement of outsiders, the fight goes on. Take no heed of their public reconciliations – they were stage-managed to publicise various TV shows and other boxing functions. This is no petty squabble, either. The reasons for it go beyond hype, and constitute more than the injured posturing of a couple of retired superstars.
Even now, the argument generates further argument. Ali’s daughter, Laila, told me recently that he had apologised in person to Joe for ridiculing him during their incredible heavyweight trilogy in the Seventies. Only a week before that, Richard Slone, a close colleague of Frazier’s, said Ali had never made that gesture personally, only through third parties. Slone reckoned Joe would not forgive Ali, whatever the poor state of his health, until he came to him and said just two words: “I’m sorry.” There is a further twist. Frazier’s son, Marvis, has made it a quest to bring the two fighters together. Which is fine. And, it seems, commercially viable. Marvis’s sister, Jacqui, is angling for a big-money fight against Laila at Madison Square Garden next March – which happens to be the 30th anniversary of The Fight Of The Century, the first clash, at that famous venue, of Ali and Frazier. Now that would be some night for a genuine reconciliation. However, it was their third fight, the Thrilla in Manila, 25 years ago this September, that really tipped Joe over the edge. Frazier, half-blind, had to quit at the end of the 14th, reluctantly, and nobody was more pleased than Ali, who was all but “sold out”. Victory gave Ali a 2-1 edge in their encounters and Joe has never come to terms with that. The reason is he subsequently learnt that Ali was also about to quit. The realisation that it might have been him, not Ali, whom history would judge as the better fighter has gnawed at him for a quarter of a century. That’s proper pride. The other element in their feud lies deeper. Frazier was seriously hurt by Ali’s representing him as an Uncle Tom, an outrageous slur given Frazier’s poor rural upbringing. Frazier reckoned, probably with justification, that Ali’s sniping was inspired by the Nation of Islam propaganda machine, who sought to paint Ali as the hero of his race for railing against white society, while trying to depict Frazier as a collaborator. Ali knows that such a demeaning representation of Frazier was always unjustified and he knows too that his mischievous references to Joe as a gorilla caused him and his family a lot of pain. That’s quite a bit of damage to repair; it will be interesting to see if Marvis can bring them together for real this time. Still, sport would be a duller place without feuds. And they arise out of some curious circumstances. Adolf Hitler thought the American sprinter Helen Stephens so comely that, after her win in the 100m at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, he propositioned her. It gets more bizarre than that. In second place in that race, 1,8m behind, was one Stella Walsh (real name Stanislawa Walasiewicz). Stella had beaten Stephens in the 100m final four years earlier at the Los Angeles Games, and Stephens, second that time, wasn’t happy. Nor was the Canadian commentator who described Walsh’s “long, man-like strides”. However, it was Stephens’s gender that was challenged in Berlin – whatever the attentions of Hitler. She passed, but it would be Walsh, the first woman to break the 12-second mark, who would go on to outshine her. She broke 11 world records, won two Olympic gold medals and dominated the sprints, pentathlon, discus and shot- put.
Sixty years later Walsh was shot dead, an innocent bystander in a robbery in Cleveland, and the autopsy revealed what Stephens and many others had long suspected: Stella was a fella.
No such ambiguities attended the red- blooded animosity between the United States and Cuba at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In the boxing, which Cuba dominated as usual, the Americans continually turned their backs on the gestures of goodwill proffered by any Cuban opponent, which was merely a small flower or other gift. It was pettiness of the highest order, and the hostility grew when David Reid, hugely behind on points, knocked out his Cuban opponent to win America’s only boxing gold. The gloating was appalling. There would be sweet justice in the baseball final. The few Cubans scattered about the stadium had every expectation of victory but things were not looking great halfway through the fixture. Their best player, two strikes down, had lost his bat and the American pitcher moved to pick it up for him, only to turn away with one finger in the air. Next pitch, the Cuban put him over the fence and the team went on to win handsomely. There are a couple of interesting head-to- heads bubbling under for the next Olympics, none better than that between the troubled 100m favourite, Maurice Greene, and his 200m rival, Michael Johnson. The team-mates are decidedly frosty towards each other. Even so, it’s not quite in the class of that between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis, whom the Canadian will not forgive for his self-righteous ostracising of him over his drug use. Johnson reckoned Lewis, his only real rival, might have been more generous – and certainly more realistic, given the widespread use of banned substances in their sport. Some feuds fizzle out – like that between Ian Wright and Peter Schmeichel, whose goal-mouth collisions resembled a date with the dentist – because the antagonists go their own way. Most of us, though, just never grow up.