A tweet, believe it or not, gave me the inspiration for the first line for this column, the first one I am attempting to write in years.

 @Xbodies just typed in:

"Down goes Frazier…!

"Down goes Frazier….!

"Down goes Frazier….!"

Like in Marcel Proust's Masterpiece, "A la Recherche Du Temps Perdú", the 3 simple words triggered a curious reaction, somewhere in the lower part of my right brain:                            

The heavy door of my vault of memory unlocked --magically-- and a stream of images, dormant for decades, immediately began flowing out, met by mixed emotions. 

Out came the childhood memories of the epic confrontation of 2 Modern-age Gladiators, Mohamed Ali and Joe Frazier, that captured the imagination of the world. Literally, from NY Madison Square Garden, all the way down to the little village of Latin America where I followed the fight, on a Black & White TV set with bad antenna reception. I was in 5th Grade and I didn't know anything about boxing but I was glued to the TV set following, like the screaming adults, the "Fight of the Century".

I was 11, and had no idea that, 40 years later, at the tender age of 51, I would be overwhelmed by emotions when learning of the passing of a Man I never met, although he lived most of his life in a city I now called, as much as he did, "My Hometown": Philadelphia, or Filadelfia, as we call it at Home, "Mi Casa."

So many times I drove by his Gym, on Broad Street, in North Philly, where the front of the building proclaimed to the world, written in Stone, that the Old Glory of the Heavy Weights had a place he cared to set up to teach the new generations his Art, which now I understand a bit better:

Punching the Heavy Bag of Challenges Life is…

His life, I am sure now, must have been something like that. One day in Philadelphia, when rushing to catch my plane at the International Airport, I managed to catch also a glimpse of an African American man being checked in at the Airline counter, while sitting in a Wheel Chair Frazier was pushed around in the final stage of his life.

I never connected this man with the Athlete in funny long and flashy green trousers who dared to knock down "Goliath" (Muhamed Ali), 40 years or so before, with everyone cheering him on as a newfound "David."

He was just a handicapped old man, wearing a big hat, with a sad face, as I remember, probably in search of refuge in his Winter home, South of our much colder Northeast.

Maybe he was going for a break to his native North Carolina.

Who knows? I don't know. I didn't stop to ask, selfishly "busy" as I was that day.

He lived here, in the City of Philadelphia, the one people keep calling the "City of Brotherly Love", and yet so short ourselves, Philadelphia residents (myself, included) of providing it.

Yes, to others, as that is not, can not be, a selfish feeling-- as those many others we experience as human beings.

I could easily have, for example, stopped my car one day and parked it in front of that building on Broad Sreet and simply inquired what was that "Joe Frazier Gym." Instead, I chose to be totally indifferent.

I simply assumed --as most of us do regarding other people we don't know-- and I drove furiously fast by, as all of us do, on to my next daily demand for my time.

Joe Frazier is now resting-- no demands on his time, not any more, thanks God.

Those of us who continue down here, rushing up to our next obligation, should use his memory, now made unavoidable by his death, to slow down a bit and check, first, who The Man, the real Joe Frazier was.

We should, as often as we can, aided by that powerful "left hook" Joe threw last week at "The Jaw of Our Indifference," with any other "average Joe", any other ordinary Human Being, Mr. Frazier came to symbolize.

What do I know, also a naive immigrant who ended up into this City of, often, "Brotherly Left Hooks…"
All I know is that he came one day from rural town in North Carolina to a "Metropolis" called "Philadelphia", where crooked and fake lawyers often achieve more recognition.

I also know now, after reading a New York Times article about his funeral --attended by Heavy Weight Champions Mohamed Ali, Larry Holmes and Michael Spinks-- that Philadelphia was this week "a somewhat embarrassed city (as it) began to realize, in Frazier's death, what it had not during his life..."

"…That he was a flesh-and-blood heavyweight champion who deserved as much respect and remembrance as the celluloid hero named Rocky, who has come instead to embody Philadelphia's image of itself as a gritty, blue-collar place that favors effort over élan."