Thirty-five years ago, I sat on the sofa in my living room watching a tape of The Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali beside me. I was researching the book that ultimately became Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. Over the course of a year, Ali and I watched tapes of every one of his fights together.
Time plays funny tricks. Ali v George Foreman seemed like long ago history on that afternoon in 1989. And now …
This Wednesday will mark the 50th anniversary of Ali-Foreman. There have been other sporting events that captured the imagination of the world. But no athletic contest in history inspired as much global joy as Muhammad’s victory in Kinshasa, Zaire, during the pre-dawn hours of 30 October 1974. It was the classic tale of a handsome prince, unfairly stripped of his crown, who battles back against adversity to recapture what rightfully belongs to him. Let’s put that night in perspective.
Ali was a great fighter and possibly the most beautiful fighting machine ever. His victories over Sonny Liston were the stuff of legend. In the two years immediately after those triumphs, he dominated a pretty good crop of heavyweights, rarely losing a round.
But Ali was more than a fighter. He was a beacon of hope for oppressed people all over the world. Every time he looked in the mirror and preened, “I’m so pretty,” he was saying “Black is beautiful” at a time when many people of color thought it was better to be white. When he refused induction into the United States Army during the height of the war in Vietnam, he stood up for the principle that, unless there’s a very good reason for killing people, war is wrong.
It’s hard to understand the shockwaves that Muhammad sent through society in the 1960s unless one lived through those years and experienced them one day at a time.
“To say Ali is an original is to understate the truth,” Dave Kindred later wrote. “He is a universe of one. He is the first, the last, and the only. What he did, he did. Only he could have done it.”
But as the 1960s progressed, forces beyond Ali’s control weighed against him. He was indicted, tried, and convicted for refusing induction into the Army and faced five years imprisonment. He was stripped of his title and precluded from fighting for more than three years. Richard Nixon, who mocked everything that Ali stood for, ascended to the presidency. When, at last, Ali was allowed to return to the ring, his legs were no longer young. He lost to Joe Frazier and then to Ken Norton.
Ali avenged his defeats to Frazier and Norton. But by then, a new king had been crowned. George Foreman’s professional record stood at 40 wins with no losses and 37 knockouts. His eight most recent bouts had ended in the first or second round. His victims in those fights included Frazier and Norton. This was the mountain that Ali had to climb.
“My opponents don’t worry about losing,” Foreman bragged. “They worry about getting hurt.” That view was seconded by Dave Anderson of the New York Times who wrote, “George Foreman might be the heaviest puncher in the history of the heavyweight division. For a few rounds, Ali might be able to escape Foreman’s sledgehammer strength, but not for 15 rounds. Sooner or later, the champion will land one of his sledgehammer punches and, for the first time in his career, Muhammad Ali will be counted out. That could happen in the first round.”
The fight began in the early hours of the morning to accommodate closed-circuit audiences in the United States. Had Muhammad fought Foreman in Las Vegas or New York, the mystique of that night and the Ali legend would not have been the same. Foreman was a three-to-one betting favorite. Sixty thousand fans jammed Stade du 20 Mai (20th of May Stadium).
Heavy storm clouds had gathered overhead by the time the bell for round one rang. But the night was touched by stardust.
In round one, Ali tested Foreman at long range. Then, 30 seconds into the second stanza, he retreated to the ropes. Conventional wisdom dictated that the ropes were the last place an opponent wanted to be against the most feared puncher in boxing. Ali’s corner was screaming at him to dance. But Muhammad remained in place, determined to fight out of a defensive posture, blocking some punches, leaning back against the ropes to avoid others, and absorbing the sledgehammer blows that landed. For the next six rounds, that was how he fought. But Ali didn’t just take punches. He threw them as well. Fighting off the ropes, he won three of the first four rounds. Then, in round five, Foreman began landing thunderous right hands to Muhammad’s body. Ali looked tired. The end seemed near. But Muhammad rallied at the end of the round, survived rounds six and seven, and at the start of round eight, told Foreman, “Now it’s my turn.”
“I didn’t really plan what happened that night,” Ali told me as we watched the fight together. “But when a fighter gets in the ring, he has to adjust to the conditions he faces. Against George, the ring was slow. Dancing all night, my legs would have got tired. And George was following me too close, cutting off the ring. In the first round, I used more energy staying away from him than he used chasing me. I was tireder than I should have been with 14 rounds to go. I knew I couldn’t keep dancing, because by the middle of the fight I’d be really tired and George would get me. So between rounds, I decided to do what I did in training when I got tired. It was something Archie Moore used to do. He let younger men take their shots and blocked everything in scientific fashion. Then, when they got tired, Archie would attack. Not everyone can do that. It takes a lot of skill. But I figured I’d be able to handle George off the ropes early in the fight when I was fresh. And if he hit too hard, I’d just start dancing again.
“So starting in the second round, I gave George what he thought he wanted. And he hit hard. A couple of times, he shook me bad, especially with the right hand. But I blocked and dodged most of what he threw. And each round, his punches got slower and hurt less when they landed. Then I started talking to him. ‘Hit harder! Show me something, George. That don’t hurt. I thought you were supposed to be bad.’ And George was trapped. I was on the ropes, but he was trapped because attacking was all he knew how to do. By round six, I knew he was tired. His punches weren’t as hard as before. And because of the way George fought, one punch at a time with his head not moving, it was getting easy to hit him with counterpunches.”
Later, when I talked with Foreman about the fight, he had similar memories.
“Before the fight, I thought I’d knock him out easy,” George told me. “One round, two rounds. I was very confident. And what I remember most about the fight was, I went out and hit Muhammad with the hardest shot to the body I ever delivered to any opponent. Anybody else in the world would have crumbled. Muhammad cringed. I could see it hurt. And then he looked at me. He had that look in his eyes, like he was saying, ‘I’m not gonna let you hurt me.’ And to be honest, that’s the main thing I remember about the fight. Everything else happened too quick. I got burned out. Muhammad started talking to me. I remember Angelo shouting from the corner, ‘Muhammad, don’t play with that sucker.’ But Muhammad just kept playing. The ‘rope-a-dope’ was what he called it later, and it worked.
“You see, Muhammad’s antennas were built to look out for big punches. And with the style I had, my height, and my tendency to throw big punches – no matter how hard I hit, Muhammad had the instinct to get ready for each punch, ride it through, and be waiting for the next one. I was the aggressor. There was no doubt about that. I was throwing the most punches. But I knew that in some way I was losing. In fact, I remember thinking during the fight, ‘Hey, this guy wasn’t champion before because someone bought the title for him. He’s good.’”
The end came in round eight.
“The punch I knocked him out with, if I’d knocked him down in the first round, he would have gotten up,” Ali told me. “But by the time I got him, he was so exhausted that to pull himself up was just too much.”
Ten years after beating Sonny Liston, seven years after he’d been stripped of his title, Ali had reclaimed the heavyweight championship of the world.
“You’ll never know what this means to me,” Ali said afterward. “Now that I got my championship back, every day is something special. I wake up in the morning, and no matter what the weather is like, every day is a sunny day.”
Foreman, of course, experienced the aftermath of the fight differently.
“There is a process of grieving after a loss like that,” George acknowledged years later. “When you are the heavyweight champion of the world, it’s not like you have lost a fight. You have lost a part of yourself. One day, you’re going through the airport, going to Africa, and everybody is afraid of you. Then, coming back from Africa, they’re patting you on the back. ‘It’s all right. You’ll be OK.’ From praise to pity. I’ve never been so devastated in my life.”
But a bond had been formed. And after Ali died, George reminisced about telephone conversations that he and Muhammad had when they were much older men. Many of those conversations centered on religion.
“We agreed that good is good and bad is bad,” George recalled. “And most people, whatever their religion is or even if they don’t follow a particular religion, know the difference. When I heard his voice, it would always bring me happiness. It seemed with us there was something greater than religion – a longing to love and belonging to each other, a thankfulness we had each other.”
And looking back on Zaire, Foreman observed, “I think Muhammad needed that victory back then a lot more than I needed it.”
Ali concurred.
“The fight when I was at my best as a boxer was against Cleveland Williams,” Ali told me. “The fight that was the best for fans was against Joe Frazier in Manila. But the fight that meant the most to me was beating George Foreman to win the championship of the world again.”
And Ali offered the coda, “So many people come up to me and tell me they remember where they were when I whupped George Foreman. I remember where I was too.”