Odell Beckham vs. Josh Norman: The Ali vs. Frazier America Needs Now

America wasn’t exactly a paradise when Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier clashed inside and outside the ring in the early 1970s.

It was the era of Watergate and the Vietnam War, of oil embargoes and a crippling recession. President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in the month before 1975’s Thrilla in Manila—one by former Manson family member Squeaky Fromme. If foreign armies, powerful coalitions or our own government weren’t enough to worry about, the minions of hippie cult-leader sociopaths were still at large. 

The early 1970s were a time of extreme pessimism, international and domestic anxieties, racial strife and overwhelming governmental distrust.

It was probably a little worse then than it is now.

Against that backdrop of fear and unrest, Ali and Frazier delivered global spectacle, a much-needed distraction, inspiration and a little bit of hope. Their bouts were epic. Their rivalry was fun for just about everyone but Frazier.

But there was more. The Ali-Frazier rivalry was an insistent, unrepentant racial and religious integration of America’s living rooms. This was a big deal in the days of “Archie Bunker for President” bumper stickers. Like it or not, the draft-defying Muslim convert and his big, terrifying rival were going to dominate the headlines for a while, not by protesting—but simply by being. And you were probably going to like it. Because they were awesome.

We don’t have Ali and Frazier anymore, much as we may need them.

Instead, we’ll have to settle for Josh Norman and Odell Beckham.

Two of the NFL’s most compelling players will square off on Sunday. Their Week 15 matchup last year was one part MMA bout, one part superhero aerial battle and one part Three Stooges episode. During the offseason, they traded social networking barbs like graduates of the “Katy Perry University of Advanced Subtweeting.”

The capital and the Big Apple are in one of those mass-media tizzies that acquires its own storm center and begins pummeling the East Coast with torrential nonsense. Beckham vs. Norman is supposed to be silly, frothy, overhyped football fun.

Read the headlines, though. It’s hard to be in the mood for frothy fun, Twitter beefs or football for football’s sake right now. It feels like the early 1970s all over again. Which makes Beckham vs. Norman more important than ever.

Other cornerback-receiver rivalries have had a little of that Ali-Frazier flavor. Chad Johnson shared Ali’s ability to hone trash talk into a samurai sword. He once told reporters before a 2010 playoff game that Darrelle Revis “couldn’t cover me with a brown paper bag on a corner of a Manhattan street inside a phone booth.”

After Revis shut him down, he admitted that—like Frazier before him—he wasn’t in on the gag. “He kinda made it personal,” the cornerback said. “We’re friends off the field, but he tried to come at me as a football player. I just think he wasn’t giving me my respect.”

Johnson (or Ochocinco at the time) vs. Revis was never about much more than one man’s craving for attention and our willingness to provide it. For all the problems we faced, 2009-10 was a simpler time. Hourly news of violence, protests, condemnations …

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