Tom English: A chance to talk to Joe Frazier? I want it like a pig wants slop

THIS WAS the way it was. Fire in The Garden, March 8, 1971. Joe Louis is ringside. Joe and Sugar Ray and Willie Pep and Gene Tunney and James J Braddock, the Cinderella Man.

Everybody's there, scrambling for a view. Diana Ross sweet talks her way into the press seats then gets thrown out, Aretha Franklin beside her. Dustin Hoffman gets booted, too. "I don't care who you are, sir," says security. "You gotta leave."

Frank Sinatra next for the jobsworth. "Mr Sinatra, this is for the working press only."

"I'm a photographer," says Frank. "The hell you are."

Sinatra produces his credentials with a flourish and a look that says don't bother me no more, sunshine.

The Garden. The biggest fight in boxing history. Joe enters in his green and gold brocade robe and the place goes mad.

Fray-sher, Fray-sher, Fray-sher

Muhammad enters and madness is redefined.

Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee

Ali is 215 pounds of magnificence. He's a poet, a wind-up merchant, a bully.

Joe's gonna come out smokin'
But I ain't gonna be jokin'
I'll be pickin' and pokin'
Pouring water on his smokin'
This might shock and amaze ya
But I'm gonna destroy Joe Frazier

Ali brushes up against Joe in the ring and says, "Chump!" Arthur Mercante, the referee, calls them together. Let's have a fair fight, you two. They're not listening, either of them. They hate each other now more than ever. Ali is dancing and prancing and giving lip.

"You're jabbering, you bug-eyed nutball," thinks Joe. The Garden is packed to the rafters. The worldwide audience is 300 million. But Joe's planet begins and ends with this small square of canvas and this "jive-ass sucker in red velvet trunks".

Joe moves towards Ali and hits him hard. Ali moves towards Joe and tells him his place. "Don't you know I'm God," Ali taunts. "God, you're in the wrong place tonight," replies Joe. "I'm kicking ass and taking names."

"I'm gonna kill you, nigger,"

"Come on sucker, let's go."

"I'm gonna destroy you, Clay."

For 15 rounds they bang hell out of each other. Industrial-strength hooks. Vicious lefts and rights that would bring down buildings. They're too tired to continue but too proud to stop. Joe cracks two lefts on to Ali's jaw, then a right to his chin, then a left to his jaw. Ali embraces him to stop the beating. Joe steps back, dips down and lets fly. He leaves his feet to land the money shot on the right side of Ali's face. Ali falls. "Mr Him on his butt."

They fight on but Joe wins a near-death match. He retires to his dressing room and sticks his horrendously bruised face into a sink of ice for so long his corner-men think he's gonna drown. He whips his head up at the memory of something Ali said:

"If Frazier beats me I'll crawl across the room."

"Hey, somebody go get Clay," spits Joe through his bloodied mouth. "Tell him come in here and crawl across this room."

Ali didn't crawl. Next day, a journalist put something to him.

"Joe says he doesn't think you want to fight him again." Ali smiles a half-smile. "Oh, how wrong he is," he replied.

Joe and Ali. Ali and Joe. Sport's most intense rivalry. They fought twice more after that and Ali won both, the third part of the trilogy being the "closest thing to dying" marathon that was the Thrilla in Manila.

The reason we're talking about all of this now is because Joe is coming to town. In early September, he's doing three shows in Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh. An Audience with Smoke? To paraphrase Joe when asked once did he want Ali's soul in his hands. "I want it like a pig wants slop."

Ask him what you like, it says. To that, I would reply: where the hell do you start? There's an awful lot I'd like to ask Frazier but that would take weeks. Even cramming the Ali issues into one night would be a stretch. There's so much ground to cover, so much that is still fascinating more than 30 years after they last traded blows.

Hard to believe that in the beginning Joe and Ali got along. I'd start there with Joe. I'd remind him of the trip the two of them took together once, both of them riding up front in Joe's Coupe DeVille. Ali was suspended at the time, turfed out of boxing for refusing to go to war in Vietnam. Joe didn't agree with Ali's stance, thought him a coward, but he didn't like to see him out of the game. "Not right to take away a man's pick and shovel," he'd say.

They drove and drove that day all the way to New York from Philly, yakking about what would happen when they got it on in the ring one day. Joe laughed a lot. "The cat had shit that didn't quit."

Joe helped Ali when he was out of boxing. He spoke up for his right to fight, he gave him a dig out financially, he was good to him when many others were not. On that road trip Joe agreed to a 50-50 split when they fought. He didn't have to do it. He was champ. He called the shots and commanded the money. He gave Ali his word. "An even split, Joe? Right down the middle. I don't have much. I gotta come back big." "No trouble there," said Joe.

Everything changed when Ali got his licence back. Now it turned vicious. I'd like to ask Frazier about how much it hurt when Ali betrayed him, called him an Uncle Tom. When he said that no black man with an ounce of pride ought to support Joe how did it make him feel? How long did Joe's hate last. Is it there still?

He used to call Ali a phoney. In his book he wrote: "Clay used his blackness to get his way. Plain and simple he was a nigger when it was in his interest and when he could get folks fussing about him. Yeah. He'd go into the ghetto and create a stir. Block streets and bring the cops out. And after he caused a traffic jam, it was back to Sugar Hill, or Cherry Hill, or whatever Hill the joker lived up on. What did he know about hard times? He never had to do real work. Spent his summers on a white millionaire's estate. And later as a pro everything was greased for his success. He had a white man in the corner and rich plantation people to fund him. A white lawyer kept him out of jail. And he's going to Uncle Tom me."

Manila was the worst of it. Ali turned up at Joe's hotel in the preamble and pulled a gun out as Joe appeared on the balcony.

"Go back in your hole, Gorilla," he shouted. "You gonna scare the people. Come out again and I'm gonna kill you before time."

Joe retreated, humiliated and full of hate.

He lost the Thrilla, his trainer, Eddie Futch, calling off the fight seemingly as Angelo Dundee in Ali's corner seemed about to do the same. Joe couldn't see the punches coming in the end, his eye was shut fast but still he wanted to go back out, still wanted to bring Ali down somehow. Futch, in one of the most poignant scenes ever seen in sport, put his hand on Joe's shoulder and uttered the immortal words: "Sit down, son. It's over. No one will forget what you did here today."

Joe's coming to town and there are many questions that need answers. Tickets are £90 a pop. As Burt Watson, a former business manager of Joe's, once said: "Getting to Joe without jingle ain't gonna happen."

But to listen to the life and times of a legend in these days where that word is scandalously misused, it'll surely be worth it.