Smoking Joe Frazier fights for his life!

Smoking Joe Frazier was pound for pound one of the greatest fighters that ever hit the ring.

He gave the boxing world “The thriller in Manila” where he and Muhammad Ali gave the world 3 exciting fights and other classic fights.

Joe Frazier fights beyond boxing

According Smoking Joe Frazier’s manager, he is currently fighting liver cancer.

Leslie Wolff, who has been Frazier’s manager for seven years, said the boxer had been in out and out of the hospital since early October and receiving hospice treatment the last week.

Joseph Frazier, nicknamed “Smokin’ Joe,” was an American professional boxer who competed from 1965 to 1981.

Frazier was known for his strength, durability, formidable punching power, and relentless pressure fighting style.

He was the first man to beat Ali, taking him down in what is called the “Fight of the Century” in 1972.

In his autobiography, “Smokin’ Joe,” written with Phil Berger, Frazier said his first trainer, Yank Durham, had given him his nickname. It was, he said, “a name that had come from what Yank used to say in the dressing room before sending me out to fight: ‘Go out there, goddammit, and make smoke come from those gloves.’ “

Foreman knocked out Frazier twice but said he had never lost his respect for him. “Joe Frazier would come out smoking,” Foreman told ESPN. “If you hit him, he liked it. If you knocked him down, you only made him mad.”

Frazier was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Laurel Bay, S.C., the youngest of 12 children.

He won the Olympic heavyweight boxing gold medal for the United States in 1964 and held the title of world heavyweight boxing champ from 1970 to 1973.