Frazier Batters His Way to Boxing Title

He won it, he said afterward, with his “home run punch.’

Joe Frazier, with one left hook, won the heavyweight boxing championship 29 years ago today in Madison Square Garden.

Frazier’s relentless, nonstop style overwhelmed Jimmy Ellis, who was defending the World Boxing Assn. title he’d won in a tournament. Frazier was recognized as champion in six states. And with that one punch, the 26-year-old Frazier added 44 states.

In the fourth round, Frazier unloaded with a four-punch combination, capped by a left hook that sent Ellis pitching forward, onto his face. He got up at the count of eight, got tagged again, this time by the home run left. Again, Ellis landed on his face.

“When I hit him with that left hook, it was like hitting a baseball--I knew it was going to ride right out of the park,” Frazier said.

A crowd of 18,000, who paid up to $100 ringside, saw it, and so did a national closed-circuit TV audience.

Frazier, who’d turned pro after the 1964 Olympics, improved to 25-0, with 22 knockouts. In his future would be the great fights with Muhammad Ali, who at this time was in his banishment period after he had been stripped of his title for refusing to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.

Also on this date: In 1955, the Yankees re-signed Mickey Mantle, 23, to a $25,000 contract. . . . In 1959, Tim Mara, the founder of the New York Giants and a link to the years when pro football was played on high school fields, died at 71. . . . In 1955, President Eisenhower asked the IOC to put the 1960 Olympics in Detroit.

In 1967, Jim Mora resigned as Occidental College’s football coach to join the Stanford staff. . . . In 1965, Bill Shoemaker ended a riding slump at Santa Anita with three wins, but was suspended for five days by the track for “careless riding.”

In 1955, bettors who wagered the rider and not the horse and backed 18-year-old Roy Lumm at Santa Anita were amply rewarded. When his mount, Alidon, won the San Luis Rey Handicap, it paid $112.80. Then he won aboard Gigantic in the San Antonio Handicap for an $85.50 payoff. . . . In 1984, skier Bill Johnson became the first American to win a Winter Olympics gold medal in the men’s downhill at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. . . . In 1961, Dazzy Vance, a Dodger Hall of Fame pitcher who won nearly 200 games, died at 69.