Forty years ago, Muhammad Ali ? as much as a 10-1 underdog ? shocked the world by winning the heavyweight title from George Foreman. In all of sports, there had never been anything like it. It was the Marquis of Queenberry meets National Geographic and the triumph of Justice Deferred all rolled into one. This is the way I remember it.
I was a stranger in what, to me and my colleagues, was the strangest of foreign lands. We had come to Zaire that early autumn of 1974 because where Muhammad Ali went, we followed. And, now, Ali had come to Zaire to reclaim his rightful heavyweight championship from George Foreman in “The Rumble in the Jungle.”
The week before I left for Central Africa, I sat on a bench outside the United Nations complex in New York with Tshimpupu wa Tshimpupu. The conversation only heightened what I perceived to be the romance inherent in traveling to such an exotic locale to write about a sports event that, from the crudest of crumbling stadiums in Kinshasa, would be beamed to the world by what was then the most sophisticated of satellites.
I knew little about Zaire other than that it had been the Belgian Congo, then the Democratic People’s Republic of the Congo, and under Col. Joseph Mobutu had been named Zaire. I was also aware that it was there that a 19th-century journalist named Henry Stanley had focused much of his search for a missing British explorer, a journey that, legend has it, dramatically ended with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
Even though Tshimpupu was a political hack attached to the Zairian U.N. delegation, he knew how to push a writer’s emotional buttons. When he told me the ring would be pitched not far from the spot where Stanley had passed and that among Zaire’s ethnic groups were the Pygmies, he convinced me this was a story in search of an author.
Almost as an afterthought, I asked him to tell me a little about Col. Joseph Mobutu.
“Our president is named Mobutu Sese Seko,” he said. “He has built a nation for his children with hospitals and schools and television. He has given us pride. You must always honor his proper name.”
Actually, the name and title Mobuto had given himself was President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Wa Za Banga of Zaire, which translated as “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.”
Even that was incomplete.
In addition to his “endurance and inflexible will to win,” there was also his ability to murder, steal and maintain happy ties with the CIA. He had already been fingered by Amnesty International for the torture of political prisoners and had not hesitated to support episodes of strategic genocide in neighboring Rwanda when it served his purpose.
On the day Ali took me to meet him, dark glasses shielded Mobutu’s eyes. Knowing what I knew by then, it was clear they were not the windows of whatever passes for a soul.
Some 500 yards away from the palace ? away from the solid gold leopard cages, away from the excessive opulence ? shoeless children with bloated bellies surrounded us. For me, the whole agonizing spectrum of the history of Mobutu’s Zaire could be measured by those 500 yards. ‘George Forman is a Belgian!’ Africa.com
But today the fight itself remains an electric story of romance, history and justice deferred and finally obtained. In many ways, it is the benchmark of Ali’s career. It generated staggering myths through phony books by people who weren’t there or simply passed through.
Zaire ? roughly the size of that portion of the United States east of the Mississippi River ? a polyglot of more than 20 tribes with nothing in common (including their native tongues) other than the fact that somebody long ago claimed the whole land mass for Belgium … communicated with each other through a hybrid mercantile language known as Lingala, a kind of African Yiddish.
It was chaos from the moment the outside world arrived. As they got off the plane, Ali asked Gene Kilroy, a kind of major-domo of the Ali camp, “Who do these people hate?”
“I couldn’t say ‘white people,'” Kilroy explained, “because I was white and so was Angelo Dundee. So I said, ‘I guess the Belgians,’ who had occupied the country.
“So there was this scene. Thousands of people chanting, ‘Ali!’ and then the cry changed to ‘Ali, Boom-a-yay’ (in Lingala) and the interpreter told me it means, ‘Ali, kill him,’ and Ali turned that into a chant every day inside George Foreman’s head.
“Anyway, it was getting very dark and the noise got even louder, and suddenly Ali raised his hands and got total silence. Then he announced ‘George Foreman is a Belgian!’ “
In my view, in that instant, Africa began to clutter all of George Foreman’s thinking. “I’m gonna pop you to death, sucker. Warn all them suckers around you. I’m gonna pop … pop … POP … you hear me?” — Muhammad Ali to George Foreman
Kilroy jumped in with both feet. He went to the American Embassy and secured the right for the camp to do all food shopping at the American commissary. He got the embassy to clear all passports and visas for his camp and the visiting journalists. Without both concessions, there might not have been a fight. And then Ali went to work as only he could.
He leapfrogged directly into the head of George Foreman.
He played Foreman’s psyche until it tightened like an overwound violin string, exploiting myriad self-doubts that plagued the then-troubled heavyweight champion. Ali nicknamed him “The Mummy,” shouting each time he saw him in the days leading up to the fight: “No mummy gonna beat the great Muhammad Ali when we meet in the horror house.”
He dug deeply with the words, “George Foreman ain’t nothing but a bully,” And most of all, he turned the African venue against Foreman, capturing the affection of the people. He even altered genetics, turning Foreman into a white man by carefully explaining to the spectators at one training session: 1 / 9
Muhammad Ali is directed to a neutral corner by referee Zack Clayton moments after Ali caught an off-balance George Foreman flush on the button, knocking him to the mat and ending their title fight in the eighth round, in Kinshasa, Zaire on Oct. 30, 1974. (AP Photo) William Perlman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
“George come here with a dog. I don’t have to tell you all how many dogs were set against you over the years. What kind of a dog did he bring? A Belgian shepherd. And who was it who oppressed you? The Belgians. So what does that make him?”
When Foreman was cut over the right eye, delaying the fight for six weeks, Ali and Kilroy went to Mobuto’s people and told them: “George is gonna run away. You better put some army people in front of his hotel.”
They did, and George began to brood even more deeply after this insult. By fight night, he was a nervous wreck. ‘I’m … gonna … knock … that … sucker … out’
Because of time constraints dictated by the orbit of a communications satellite, the fight would not start until 3 a.m. They filled in the gap from midnight forward with traditional native dancers. A full moon hung over the proceedings. And through it all, the steady throb of the drums.
As the countdown melted away, I pondered something few others knew. Ali, then 32, had long suffered from arthritic hands. Painkillers had been a constant companion. But it was Kilroy who took the biggest single prefight step of all.
He took him to an orthopedist in Philadelphia named Dr. James Nixon, who ordered him off all of those shots and prescribed hot paraffin soaks for both hands three times a day. The hands began to come around.
A month later, the late Jerry Lisker, sports editor of the New York Post, and I journeyed to Deer Lake, Pa., to watch Ali’s final preparations. I couldn’t believe what we saw. For the first time in over a year his hands permitted him to bang away on the heavy bag. With each punch he chanted, “I’m … gonna … knock … that … sucker … out.”
Ali said he would knock out George Foreman and I believed him. Inside the ring before it began, Ali walked over to George and stood perhaps two feet away screaming at him:
“I’m gonna pop you to death, sucker. Warn all them suckers around you. I’m gonna pop … pop … POP … you hear me?” And just before they pulled him away, you could almost see the ferocity that was George’s stock and trade evaporate before your eyes.
I do not have to tell you about the rope-a-dope, considerably heightened in effectiveness when Ali elected to lie back on those ropes. I do not have to tell you how, in the eighth round, attrition, fatigue and frustration set George up for the short right-hand lead that shocked the world. Star-Ledger columnist emeritus Jerry Izenberg and Muhammad Ali clown around in 1991. (File photo)
Actually, there were two, but by the time the first landed, George was already stumbling and groping to find an invisible handle. He seemed to fall in sections.
That’s how it ended.
But the thing I remember most was a moment just after dawn, hard on the heels of one of those torrential African downpours. Ali had been the champion for just a couple of hours. Now, in the company of a handful of us, he walked down to the edge of the river and stared hard for at least five minutes. Clearly, he was seeing something or someone that we did not see. Maybe it was a montage of all he had been through. He has never told me.
But, framed by the first fresh rays of a new African sunshine, Ali turned slowly, and after what seemed like an eternity, said:
“Fellas, you will never know what this means to me.”
In that instant, 40 years ago, he was, indeed, the king of the world.
