‘I didn’t really plan it’: what Ali told me when we rewatched The Rumble in the Jungle

TThirty-five years ago, I was sitting on my living room couch watching a tape of The Rumble in the Jungle, with Muhammad Ali next to me. I researched the book that eventually became Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. Over the course of a year, Ali and I watched tapes of all his fights together.

Time plays funny tricks. Ali vs. George Foreman seemed like history on that afternoon in 1989 long ago. And now…

This Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of Ali-Foreman’s existence. There have been other sporting events that have captured the imagination of the world. But no athletic competition in history inspired as much joy in the world as Muhammad’s victory in Kinshasa, Zaire, during the early morning hours of October 30, 1974. It was the classic story of a handsome prince, unfairly stripped of his crown, who fights back against adversity to reclaim what is rightfully his. Let’s put that night into perspective.

Ali was a great fighter and possibly the greatest fighting machine ever. His victories over Sonny Liston were legendary. In the two years immediately following those triumphs, he dominated a pretty good run of heavyweights, rarely losing a round.

But Ali was more than a fighter. He was a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world. Every time he looked in the mirror and said, “I’m so beautiful,” he was saying, “Black is beautiful” at a time when many people of color thought it was better to be white. When he refused to be drafted into the U.S. Army during the height of the Vietnam War, he stood up for the principle that war is wrong unless there is a very good reason to kill people.

It is difficult to understand the shock waves that Mohammed sent through society in the 1960s unless you lived through those years and experienced them day by day.

“To say Ali is an original is to underestimate 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 began to turn against him. He was charged, tried and convicted of refusing to be accepted into the army and sentenced to five years in prison. He was stripped of his title and banned from fighting for over three years. Richard Nixon, who made a mockery of everything Ali stood for, rose to become president. When Ali was finally 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 at Frazier and Norton. But by then a new king had been crowned. George Foreman’s professional record stood at 40 wins without losses and 37 knockouts. His eight most recent fights have ended in the first or second round. His victims in those battles included Frazier and Norton. This was the mountain Ali had to climb.

“My opponents don’t worry about losing,” Foreman boasted. “They’re afraid they’ll get hurt.” That view was echoed by Dave Anderson of the New York Times, who wrote: “George Foreman may be the heaviest puncher in the history of the heavyweight division. For a few rounds, Ali might be able to escape Foreman’s sledgehammer power, but not for fifteen 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 started in the early morning hours to accommodate a captive audience in the United States. If Muhammad had 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 in Stade du 20 Mai (May 20 Stadium).

By the time the bell sounded for the first round, heavy storm clouds had gathered above us. But the night was touched by stardust.

In the first round, Ali tested Foreman at long distance. Then, 30 seconds into the second verse, 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 yelled at him to dance. But Mohammed stayed put, determined to fight from a defensive stance, blocking some punches, leaning back against the ropes to avoid others and absorbing the sledgehammer blows that landed. That’s how he fought for the next six rounds. But Ali didn’t just get hit. He threw them too. He fought against the ropes and won three of the first four rounds. Then, in round five, Foreman started landing thunderous right hands to Muhammad’s body. Ali looked tired. The end seemed near. But Mohammed rallied at the end of the round, survived rounds six and seven, and at the start of round eight he 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 enters the ring, he must adapt to the circumstances he faces. The ring was slow against George. Dancing all night, my legs would have gotten tired. And George followed me too close and cut off the ring. In the first lap I used more energy to stay away from him than him chasing me. I was more tired than I should have been with fourteen laps to go. I knew I couldn’t keep dancing because I would be very tired in the middle of the fight and George would catch 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 scientifically blocked everything out. Then when they got tired, Archie would attack. Not everyone can do that. It takes a lot of skill. But I thought I could take George off the ropes early in the fight, while I was still fresh. And if he hit too hard, I’d just start dancing again.

“So from the second round I gave George what he thought he wanted. And he hit hard. A few times he shook me vigorously, especially with the right hand. But I blocked and dodged most of what he threw. And each round his punches became slower and hurt less when they landed. Then I started talking to him. ‘Hit harder! Show me something, George. That doesn’t hurt. I thought you’d be bad.’ And George was trapped. I was on the ropes, but he was stuck because attacking was the only thing he could do. By lap six I knew he was tired. His thrusts weren’t as hard as before. And because of the way George fought, one punch at a time with his head not moving, it became easy to hit him with counter punches.”

When I later talked to Foreman about the fight, he had similar memories.

“Before the fight I thought I would knock him out easily,” George told me. “One round, two rounds. I had a lot of confidence in it. And what I remember most about the fight was going out and hitting Mohammed with the hardest body shot I’ve ever delivered to an opponent. Anyone else in the world would have crumbled. Mohammed winced. I could tell it hurt. And then he looked at me. He had that look in his eyes, like he was saying, “I’m not going to let you hurt me.” And to be honest, that’s the main thing I remember from the fight. Everything else happened too quickly. I got burned out. Mohammed started talking to me. I remember Angelo shouting from the corner, “Mohammed, don’t play with that fool.” But Mohammed kept playing. He later called it the ‘rope-a-dope’, and it worked.

“You see, Mohammed’s antennae are built to watch for big punches. And with the style I had, my height and my tendency to throw big punches – no matter how hard I hit, Mohammed had the instinct to prepare for each punch, drive through it and wait for the next one. I was the aggressor. There was no doubt about that. I threw most of the punches. But I knew I was losing somehow. I even remember during the fight thinking, ‘Hey, this guy wasn’t a 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 had 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 it was just too much to pull himself up.”

Ten years after beating Sonny Liston, seven years after being stripped of his title, Ali had regained the world heavyweight championship.

“You’ll never know what this means to me,” Ali said afterwards. “Now that I have my championship back, every day is something special. I wake up in the morning and no matter what the weather is, it’s a sunny day every day.”

Of course, Foreman experienced the aftermath of the fight differently.

“There is a process of grieving after such a loss,” George acknowledged years later. “When you’re the heavyweight champion of the world, it’s not like you’ve lost a fight. You have lost a part of yourself. One day you go through the airport to Africa, and everyone is afraid of you. When they come back from Africa, they give you a pat on the back. ‘It’s okay. You’ll be fine.’ From praise to pity. I have never been so devastated in my life.”

But a bond had formed. And after Ali died, George reminisced about phone conversations he and Mohammed had when they were much older men. Many of those conversations were about religion.

“We agreed that good is good and bad is bad,” George remembers. “And most people, whatever their religion is or even if they don’t follow a particular religion, know the difference. Hearing his voice always brought me happiness. It seemed like there was something bigger in us than religion – a desire to love and belong together, a gratitude we had for each other.”

And looking back on Zaire, Foreman noted, “I think Mohammed needed that victory a lot more than I did at the time.”

Ali agreed.

“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 the fans was against Joe Frazier in Manila. But the fight that meant the most to me was beating George Foreman to win the world championship again.

And Ali offered the coda: “So many people come up to me and tell me they remember where they were when I punched George Foreman. I also remember where I was.”