Joe Frazier

“I don't mind people want to think Muhammad is the greatest fighter around. Everybody wants to make him great because of his mouth, that he was the best. He was good, but that doesn't make him great. I proved that.”

“I don't want to be no more than what I am.”

“My mom allowed me to take an old burlap bag and fill it with moss, corn stalks and rocks, then hang it from a tree and spend an hour a day punching my heavy bag.”

“Boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.”

“When I go out there, I have no pity on my brother. I'm out there to win.”

“I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.”

“Fightin' George Foreman is like being in the street with an eighteen-wheeler comin' at you.”

“Joe Frazier's life didn't start with Ali. I was a Golden Gloves champ. Gold medal in Tokyo '64. Heavyweight champion of the world long before I fought Ali in the Garden.”

“I want to hit him, step away and watch him hurt. I want his heart.”

“Work is the only meanin' I've ever known.”

“When I was a boy, I used to pull a big cross saw with my dad. He'd use his right hand, so I'd have to use my left.”

“Since I was a boy of five or six, I had it in my mind I would be a world boxing champion.”

“This is just another man, another fight, another payday.”

“Twenty years I've been fighting Ali, and I still want to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus.”

“I couldn't go to school with whites. Now there are schools that educate everyone.”

“Had my own car at twelve years old. Left school in the tenth grade. Married when I was sixteen. Ain't hard to figure out; I was a man at a very young age.”

“When you work for me, you don't say good things about Ali.”

“I wasn't a big guy. People thought the big guys would eat me up. But it was the other way around. I loved to fight bigger guys.”

“You can map out a fight plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the way you planned, and you're down to your reflexes - that means your [preparation:]. That's where your roadwork shows. If you cheated on that in the dark of the morning, well, you're going to get found out now, under the bright lights.”

“I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.”