"The Night the Unstoppable Was Stopped" Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali – Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971 | Bibiano Fernandes

Joe Frazier died of liver cancer in 2011, at age 67. He never lived to see his likeness on a statue, or his name on a street sign, or any other grand gesture from the place that shaped him. That bothered his family and friends. What bothered them even more was the city’s decision to embrace its fictional son before its adopted one. “Rocky was good in the movies, but he wasn’t real,” said Frazier’s nephew Rodney. “You’ve got a real champion, who did things that you saw in the movies, but you don’