REPORTING on the tense training days of Boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali for this week's cover story required a generous amount of footwork and feinting by Correspondents Robert Anson and Joseph Kane. Both men nearly suffered technical knockouts in the first round.

"Where were you two years ago?" demanded Frazier when Anson first approached him. "You go on now. I ain't going to talk to you." But he did talk eventually, for many hours and in many places. Anson found him "impossible to dislike. He's a warm, genuine human being who deserves better than to make his living by having his head knocked in." Anson at one point asked Frazier's manager, Yancey Durham, for permission to spar with the fighter. Informed that the last journalist to do so had been an ex-fighter who emerged from the ring with a broken leg, Anson contented himself with watching. A bigger disappointment was not getting a chance to ride on the back of Frazier's motorcycle. "But," said Anson, "he did let me push him down the driveway. It was just as well. I'm almost as afraid of motorcycles as I am of getting slugged."

Correspondent Kane found that Muhammad Ali was also difficult at first. "Appointments for interviews are unheard of. After four exasperating days, I simply followed him down the steps of Miami's Fifth Street Gym and piled into his limousine with him, told him who I was and we started talking." Ali finally talked for eight hours, much of the time while reading articles about himself in boxing magazines. He admitted that he is what he calls "a walnut personality." Says Kane: "By that he means he is hard on the outside, difficult to penetrate and wary of everyone trying to cut through the blizzard of publicity."

The material gathered by Anson and Kane went to Associate Editor Ray Kennedy, who wrote the cover story. It was edited by John Elson and researched by Alexandra Mezey, a sportswoman who has postponed her vacation in order to see the fight. Of the team, only Kennedy claimed to be the classic fight fan: "I'm a screamer and a yeller, a foot stomper, a seat pounder. I'll admit to a certain blood lust, a sense of impending disaster. I wait for the big punch that will end it all."

Kennedy, who boxed in college, ventured a prediction on the outcome: "Ali will win in the 13th round." Kennedy's colleagues also offered their individual prophecies. Elson: "Ali will win by decision"; Kane: "Ali, by a decision"; Anson: "Frazier will score a knockout in the 8th round"; Mezey: "Frazier will win--it's my female intuition."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.