It was oven-hot inside the arena, and that was before the fight began. The building’s air-conditioning had already lost the undercard against the tropical sun, and the air was thick with humidity. Still, almost 30,000 people waited with sweat soaking their shirts, standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of the men walking toward the center of the arena. From one side, draped in a dark-blue robe and flanked by an entourage in matching work shirts, Joe Frazier walked slowly through the crowd, stern and granite-jawed. A ripple of applause passed through the arena.

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From the other side of the arena, dressed in a white satin robe with his name embroidered on the back, walked Muhammad Ali. Even at age 33, approaching the twilight of his career, Ali was electromagnetic, drawing the crowd to its feet and polarizing its constituents all at once. The noise was raucous. When match officials placed a more-than-three-foot-tall trophy in the middle of the ring, Ali grabbed it and feigned running away with it. In the ring, after his name was announced, he pantomimed heartbreak as boos overcame the adulation. Frazier, whose ring demeanor generally toggled between glowering and frowning, glowered.

This was the third bout between Frazier and Ali. Held on October 1, 1975, in the Philippine Coliseum, the fight is remembered by many who attended as the best heavyweight contest in history, and possibly the pinnacle of the sport. The match was the first ever broadcast live overseas by satellite, and hundreds of millions of people watched from abroad.

It was not the most dazzling display of pugilism as an art. There were no knockdowns, no calls from commentators that now live on as sound bites. The significance of the fight was more narrative than technical, and its appeal was elemental: a bitter test of wills and an exploration of the outer limits of human endurance. The final contest between Ali and Frazier was the culmination of a relationship that had begun in friendship but curdled into deep enmity, the decisive battle in a war that had become larger than the two men in the ring. The match was filled with contradictions. It had been pitched as an announcement of the arrival of the postcolonial Third World—but staged in part to help cover up the abuses of an autocratic regime supported by the U.S. government. It would be a showcase for all of the beauty and ugliness of boxing, a sport that made the world smaller by making tall tales of men. Looking back now, 50 years later, the event reveals—perhaps more than any other since—the ways that sport can be a mirror to society and the soul.

Ali and Frazier faced each other as the bell rang. And so began the Thrilla in Manila.

The two fighters advanced, Ali jogging enthusiastically and Frazier plodding, cautious. They put up their guards and began to maneuver and dance, keeping their feet moving as they surveyed each other. Ali kept his hands high while Frazier reached out, almost gently, with a shot to the abdomen. Ali hit back with light left jabs as Frazier probed further, gauging Ali’s reaction time as he shifted his guard.

Their measurements taken, the fighters increased their intensity. Ali aimed to knock Frazier out early, at times holding the shorter man off by extending his left fist straight out, like a football stiff-arm, while he waited for openings to strike with his coiled right. Frazier, though, was relentless, seeking a way inside Ali’s reach, driving blows into Ali’s ribs but moving too fast to get caught by the night-ender Ali had planned.

Ali had spent much of the previous month telling any reporter who would listen how slow and tired the 31-year-old Frazier was, but it was immediately clear that the two were evenly matched. The crowd roared when they exchanged combinations, when Ali jawed at Frazier, and when Frazier yelled back. When the bell rang at the end of the first round, Frazier tapped Ali on the butt, almost playfully, as if to let him know: I’m here.

Associated Press Joe Frazier was two years younger than Muhammad Ali, but Ali had a significant edge in height and reach.

Jerry Izenberg used his walker to prop open the door of his ranch-style house and beckoned me inside. “I used to be a lot faster,” he said. We were in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas in the foothills of the McCullough Range. His house bears all the hallmarks of a Vegas retirement refuge—a rock garden, a brilliant-green turf lawn, a view of the Strip across the Mojave Desert. But Izenberg is not retired. In his mid-90s, he still writes columns for the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey, making him likely the oldest working sports journalist in America. (Dave Goren, the executive director of the National Sports Media Association, told The Atlantic that “if there’s an active sports journalist older than Jerry, I have no idea who it might be.”) His book about the heyday of heavyweight boxers, Once There Were Giants, was released in 2017.

As he talked about his 74 years of sportswriting, the ease with which Izenberg recalled the fights he covered decades ago, and even the scorecards of specific rounds, astonished me. But he reached a different level of clarity when we talked about Ali and Frazier’s final fight. Izenberg leaned closer, recounting the entire match, blow by blow, and quoting the two fighters as they spoke to each other in the ring. It was the greatest match he’d ever seen in person.

In late September 1975, Izenberg landed in Manila. The flight from San Francisco had been packed with sports reporters, and they were all transported to the Bayview Plaza, where the promoter Don King had arranged accommodations for journalists. The hotel, famed for its views of the sunset over Manila Bay, had been well stocked for the incoming brigade of thirsty men. They flocked to the bar for Joe’s Knuckle Punch, a drink made with lambanog, a local palm liquor that supposedly wouldn’t come with a hangover. The reporters drank for lunch and for dinner, and some stayed up late, talking politics over cocktails.

By the time Izenberg arrived, Ali and Frazier had been in Manila for days in order to acclimate to the heat and prepare for the fight. Frazier had gotten there first, landing at the airport at dawn. He was greeted on the tarmac by security guards and taken to his hotel.

Ali’s arrival was more of a spectacle. His team had delayed the plane’s departure from Honolulu so that instead of getting to Manila before dawn, Ali would arrive just after 6 a.m., which provided enough light for television cameras—and also coincided with the news hour back in the States. Hundreds of people crowded the runway to greet Ali, pushing against a cordon of soldiers armed with truncheons. As Ali stopped to address the crowd and the cameras, a disturbance broke out between the jostling spectators and the soldiers. “I don’t want any fighting here,” Ali said. He praised Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the president and first lady of the country, and bantered with the crowd, then launched into a poem he’d workshopped back home: “It will be a killa’, chilla’, thrilla’ / when I get that gorilla in Manila.” The rapturous arrival struck a chord with President Marcos, who aspired to build his own cult of personality in the Philippines. “I’d have to kill him,” he allegedly later said about Ali, “if he was a Filipino.” It was a joke, but only halfway.

Staged in a former U.S.