Joe Frazier was a mean-looking guy in his prime. Photo / THE RING

I once asked Joe Frazier, who turns 66 years old on Jan. 12, to tell me everything he knew about clinching, that regrettable survival maneuver to which all fighters resort sooner or later, mostly because they have run out of answers.

We were collaborating on an instructional book called Box Like the Pros and I wanted to make sure we included a section on this fundamental skill, which most fighters learn as amateurs.

I asked Joe, “So what do you want to say about clinching? You know, when to do it, how to do it, under what circumstances, things like that.”

Joe Frazier looked at me with what I interpreted to be a mixture of pride and disdain and said, “I never worried about it. My job was to make the other guy clinch. If I’m doing my job, he’s clinching. I never worried about it.”

Of course. What could I have been thinking?

Clinching was for cowards, for scamboogahs. He didn’t have to say it.

He is every bit a hard man and a hard fighter. Still.

When you think of all the great struggles Frazier was in, all the storms of mayhem he created with his fists, and especially the left hook, it was always the other guy trying to clinch, the other guy who had run out of answers. Who he had forced to run out of answers.

Muhammad Ali, Jerry Quarry, Jimmy Ellis, Bob Foster, George Chuvalo, so many others. At one time or another they all were compelled to grab Frazier and hang on for dear life, the way you or me would wrap our arms around a palm tree in a typhoon. It was the only way to slow him down.

The only one who didn’t worry about getting Frazier wrapped up was George Foreman, who also had a way of running guys out of answers.

“The guy who beat me up was George,” Frazier told me recently, when I asked him whether he had any regrets about his career.

“I shouldn’t have gone back at him twice. But he was always a good guy so I would never say anything against him,” he said.

Then, as if to remind anyone who might be listening and thought he heard Joe Frazier admit someone had got the best of him, he supplied a corrective.

“But I took on ‘The Butterfly’ three times and let’s say he won two, and I won one, but if you look at him now, you know who won them all.” Then he laughed. Hard.

This is one of Frazier’s favorite devices. His enmity toward Ali remains profound and deep, still, 35 years after the Thrilla in Manila. He has claimed at various times to have forgiven Ali, usually when there is some financial consideration at stake. It is a charade.

The rest of us in our comfortable living rooms and suburban memories would like Frazier and Ali to become dear old friends in these the last years of their lives. To sit around a checkerboard reminiscing about the good old days. What do you think that would sound like?

“Yeah, Butterfly, remember how fun it was when you called me an Uncle Tom and ignorant and a gorilla, and said I was the white man’s champion? Wasn’t that fun?”

Ask Frazier what it was about him that gave him the mettle to walk through hell to become the champion athlete and American hero he was, and he diffuses the credit.

“Number one from the beginning: The Lord above. And then mom and dad. They raised me the way they were brought up, with an understanding of respect for mom and dad and let’s say brother and friends and fans. And that’s why things happened for me the way they did,” he said.

“I made up my mind that I was going from the South up here and I was going to be champion of the world. And I was going to serve the world with righteousness and be a good guy and be an example, so all the young men and young ladies could say well, ‘Joe did it, so why can’t we do it?'”

Health and financial troubles have picked away at Frazier over the last few years, the way Ali’s jab did in Madison Square Garden and Manila. He’s had several surgeries on his back and neck.

He had to sell his beloved gym on Broad Street in Philadelphia. There have been family spats and failed lawsuits. The fortune he earned over a 37-fight, 11-year pro career (not including a one-fight comeback in 1981) is long gone.

If he is bitter about it, he hides it well.

“The Lord’s been good to me. I’m happy with the way my life turned out,” he said. “My mom and dad did a fine job with my brothers and sisters. I had 18 brothers and sisters and there are just two of us left. So God has been good to me.”

He earns a living making appearances all over the world, trading in the warm nostalgia people feel when they see his face and remember how he made them feel when both of them were young and strong.

But only one of them paid the price for willing himself into one of the great heavyweights.

“I keep going around saying hello to the fans and doing different things with different people,” he said. “And that’s a rougher job than fightin.’ Because you gotta smile, be a good guy, sign autographs. In the fighting game you just gottta walk in there and beat ’em up.”

To Joe Frazier, that always was the easy part.

Some random observations from last week:

If you’d like to drop Joe a line to say hello or wish him a happy birthday, go to http://www.joefrazierscorner.com/

Rumors abound that now that his fight with Manny Pacquiao is off, Floyd Mayweather is looking not at the winner of Shane Mosley-Andre Berto, but of Edwin Valero-Antonio DeMarco. Those rumors are untrue. Mayweather would never fight Valero. 

Instead, reports indicate Mayweather is trying to make fight with — brace yourself — Ricky Hatton’s brother. SighÔǪWho will it be after that, Luis Collazo’s busty great-aunt from Schenectady?

If Mayweather doesn’t want to fight Pacquiao because he believes Pacquiao is juicing, that’s his right. Bully for him. But to go from that fight to Matthew freakin’ Hatton? For shame, Floyd ÔǪ

For everyone who believes Pacquiao’s history of clean postfight test results places him above suspicion, I have two words: Evan Fields.

Face it, folks: Performance enhancing drugs are everywhere, in all sports — including ours. Don’t waste your time agonizing over it. Instead, ask yourself why there’s such a negative stigma attached to PEDs when in every other area of athletics, we have accepted, nay, embraced, the achievements that advancements in science have made possible. ÔǪ

A plea to Freddie Roach: Please, pick a look and stick with it. We’ve now seen the clean-shaven, mulletted Freddie; the buzz-cut, mustachioed Freddie; the longer-haired mustachioed and goateed Freddie; the buzz-cut, mustachioed and goateed Freddie; and the longer-haired mustachioed but no-goatee Freddie. The only thing left is the Billy Gibbons Freddie, which, quite frankly, I’m rather looking forward to.

http://www.fanpix.net/picture-gallery/928/395928-billy-gibbons-picture.htm

It was wonderful to have Friday Night Fights back, wasn’t it? One programming note: Brian Kenny will be filling in ringside next week for Teddy Atlas, who will be on special assignment covering the first annual Miller Lite Antelope and Caribou Body Building Championships live from, you guessed it, Venison Beach, Calif. Someday we will miss Teddy and his wonderful malapropisms. ÔǪ

Lionel Butler?! I thought he retired after losing to Dino Dennis in Milwaukee in 1978. Seriously, Andrey Fedosov, who stopped the 42-year-old Butler in the second round on Friday Night Fights, looks to me like a heck of a prospect.

The bigger-is-better crowd will insist that at 6-foot-1 and 223 pounds, Fedosov is too small to compete with today’s “super heavyweights,” but mark my words: When the Klitschkos disappear, so too will the era of the very good giant heavyweight. ÔǪ

These Eastern European fighters are a stoic bunch, aren’t they? Fedosov (from Russia), Anatoliy Duecento (Ukraine) and Roman Karmazin (Russia) each scored good wins Friday night, and yet if you lined them all up next to one another after the show, you would have thought they were pallbearers.

Really, that’s refreshing, though, isn’t it? I’m tired of undefeated former Olympians pushing over sub-.500 migrant farm workers, dishwashers, roofers and other assorted alcoholics and wanderers and acting like they just won the Live Like Tiger Woods for a Week Dream Vacation, sponsored by Red Burn Energy Drink. I’m just saying.

Bill Dettloff can be reached at [email protected]