For one fan, Frazier's big impact came outside the ring, on I-95

Paul Manion was steamed, still cursing as he got out of the car. Driving his father's Honda Accord on I-95 near Philadelphia International Airport, going home after finishing up his junior year at Penn, Manion had hit a massive pothole in the center lane, blowing out a tire.

After pulling over, Manion still was working through Hefty bags of unwashed laundry in his packed trunk, getting to a spare tire, when a white Jaguar pulled onto the shoulder in front of him. From the back, Manion could only see "a large full-brimmed hat made out of some sort of animal skin." He walked over to the car.

The driver, the man wearing the hat, asked: "You got a flat?"

"Yup, hit that pothole."

"You need some help?"

"Uh, sure, I have no idea what I'm doing."

"You got a jack?"

"I think. That's this thing, right?"

The man grabbed the jack, got the doughnut out from the trunk, got on the ground himself and took care of the rest. Another car had hit the same pothole, so the man told Manion to go ask if they needed help. (With two flat tires, they had already called AAA.) Afterward, Manion asked the man if he used to work on cars.

"Yeah . . . You ever hear of Joe Frazier?"

"Of course."

"You're looking at him."

Only then did Manion notice the T-shirt the man was wearing under his leather coat that said, "Smokin' Joe's Gym." (He also noticed the hat was deerskin.)

Manion remembers saying, "Smokin' Joe? What? Why? Thank you so much for stopping! Why would you do that?"

"Ah, a lot of people don't know what they're doing, and I know how to. You going to be OK getting home?"

That day in 1999 never left Manion, now a manager at Vanguard. He couldn't help but think back on it when he heard that Frazier, the former world heavyweight champion and costar of the Ali-Frazier trilogy, had died earlier this week of liver cancer.

"It was much more than a random celebrity encounter for me," Manion said in an e-mail. "It was amazing that someone so famous - a household name - and someone whose fame was based on strength and violence would humble himself to stop driving on a highway to help out a stranger. It's not like he was going 25 on a back road. It was I-95. He saw someone in need and stopped whatever he was doing. . . .

"Here's a guy who is famous for literally punching other people in the face, and he took time out of wherever he was going to help some idiot kid on the side of the road."

Manion said he's never been able to pay the deed forward by helping someone else with a flat, "but soon afterward, I did stop and help someone push a stalled vehicle out onto the shoulder on the Blue Route."

He has had a couple of flats since then, Manion said, and had learned how to change them himself - realizing that a guy like Smokin' Joe doesn't come along every day.