In a terrific write up in the Sunday Times, Joe Sexton writes that the true sport fan’s most exquisite sensation is “not joy, but relief.”  I remember when the Yankees were winning championships in the late ’90s–especially when they beat the Mets–relief is exactly what I felt when it was all over, not joy. 

Anyhow, Sexton’s piece is about a new documentary about the third fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.  The Thrilla in Manilla fight, most famously captured by the late Mark Kram for Sports Illustrated.   Sexton says the movie is most effective when dealing with the action inside the ring:

Watching again the two at war did not evoke 18th-century painting so much as, well, the Toronto Blue Jays’ 15-14 defeat of the Phillies in Game 4 of the 1993 World Series — a glorious, near-endless horror from which you could not avert your eyes.

Neither fighter was much good at defending himself anymore. Ali was 33, freshly triumphant from his defeat of George Foreman in Zaire but lazily out of shape. Frazier, 31, had absorbed a hurricane of hurt when destroyed by Foreman, had a bit of a gut, and his head, as Liebling wrote of the former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, retained its “unlimited absorptive capacity for percussion.”

But in watching glimpses of the fight in “Thrilla” I love again the quality of Ali’s chin. I wonder anew at Frazier’s forever forward-moving sense of purpose. I am touched by Futch’s brave decency. Simple enough pleasures, and durable enough truths, that held up pretty well to re-examination.