October 1, 2025: The Thrilla in Manila: Marcos and the U.S.

[50 years ago this week, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in Manila for their third and final professional boxing bout. So this week on the blog I’ll step into the ring with posts on a handful of contexts for that significant sports story, leading up to a tribute to one of our best sports scholars!]

On two distinct and equally important ways to AmericanStudy the corrupt leader behind the fight.

The Wikipedia page for “Thrilla in Manila” features a striking sentence: “The president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos sought to hold the bout and sponsor it in order to bring attention to the Philippines from around the world.” It would be a serious understatement to say that that sentence needs more contexts, starting with this crucial one: in October 1975 the Philippines were just over three years into an extended period of absolute and brutal martial law, which Marcos had declared in September 1972 and which would last until the authoritarian leader went into exile in February 1986 (with some slight modifications/superficial gestures toward democracy in January 1981). Marcos and his wife Imelda were also in the midst of their two-decade long looting of the country, a process which began shortly after he ascended to the presidency in 1965, which garnered its own name for the resulting excesses of ostentatious wealth they displayed (Imeldific), and in the course of which they stole at least $5 billion from the Central Bank of the Philippines.

So the reason why Ali and Frazier’s third fight took place in Manila is a pretty gross one—and also quite tellingly interconnected with American foreign policy during the Cold War. For example, when Marcos “won” the first presidential “election” held in a dozen years in June 1981 (I’m using those scare quotes very deliberately, but obviously I’m no expert on Filipino politics, so if this election was more genuine than it seems to me feel free to correct me in comments!), Vice President George H.W. Bush attended his inauguration and told him “We love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process.” Or, for an even more relevant example for this 1975 boxing match, between the 1972 declaration of martial law and the mid-1980s the U.S. provided more than $2.5 billion in military and economic aid to the Marcos administration. As with so many other dictatorial leaders and regimes around the world in this period, Marcos was seen by the U.S. government as a buttress against Communism in the region, particularly when it came to the reach of Communist China, and as they did time and time again in such cases, the U.S. forgave—and indeed actively encouraged and supported—his extreme excesses to maintain that realpolitik relationship.

I don’t want to minimize any of that—not any of Marcos’s own dictatorial awfulness, nor any of America’s alliances with him and it—but there’s simply no way to AmericanStudy a late 20^th century Filipino history without engaging with the central and destructive role of the United States toward the islands in the first half of the century. No single figure better embodies those histories than does another Filipino leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, who as I traced in that post started his political and military careers as an American ally and ended them, just a few short years later, leading insurgents against the illicit and violent U.S. occupation. I’m not suggesting for a moment that Marcos was anything like Aguinaldo, as the latter from what I can tell was very focused on what he could do to help the Filipino people, and the former just helped himself (in every sense). But as anyone who studies colonialism and postcolonial nations can tell you, those histories inevitably seem to produce corrupt and dictatorial governments as one of their main aftereffects—and to pretend that the rise of Ferdinand Marcos was unrelated to the U.S.’s imperial presence in the islands for half a century would be hugely disingenuous.   

Next Thrilla talk tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Contexts for this fight or other boxing histories you’d highlight?