“Looks like your little face, don’t it?”
As he taunted Joe Frazier, former heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, current champ, pointed at the custom black T-shirts he and his entourage sported as they crashed the Aug. 26, 1975, buffet luncheon in Frazier’s honor at Manhattan’s Four Seasons.
Ali and his minions thought the T-shirts — with the words “MANILA” and “GORILLA” framing a gorilla — rich stuff. For years, Ali, possessed of lighter skin, prettier face and hypnotic style, had cruelly mocked Frazier, squatter and darker, his pug nose and crouched ring posture emblems of an infinitely harder life as the 12th child of a South Carolina sharecropper.
The New York Post’s Vic Ziegel reported how Ali, at the luncheon, abused his opponent from two previous fights, a proud man dr