At Deer Lake, in a moment of serenity, Ali predicted to Norman Mailer: “The fight will be easy. This man does not want to take a head whipping like Frazier just to beat you. He’s not as tough as Frazier. He’s soft and spoiled.”
Part of what made Ali the champion of champions was his intelligence, his middle-classness.
The romantic conceit is that great fighters have to grow up in poverty, filled with anger from slum deprivation. This theory fits Dempsey, Liston, Duran, Tyson, and Graziano. The theory says that the memory of growing up hungry with no options gives a boxer the so-called “killer instinct,” the unquenchable “will to win.”
But the two great modern boxers—Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard— are both high school graduates who grew up in the suburbs, not the ghetto. They had education, travel, and middle-class values before they were eighteen.
Ali and Leonard were smart fighters, with psychological levels to their intelligence. They also both had fortunate faces that motivated them to become skilled at defense, so as not to have those pretty faces marked and disfigured.
One of the biggest factors—invisible to outsiders—working in Ali’s favor in Zaire was the quality of his imagination.
Another invisible aspect to the fight was that Ali gained a spiritual lift just from being on the African continent, while Foreman never felt at home. Ali kept telling reporters, “This is my country. George is a stranger, an invader.”
Ali loved hanging out with the musicians who came to perform, especially James Brown and Lloyd Price. Ali was mobbed by the local population, even in areas that had no television. Somehow his face was known. Ali relished the blackness of the country. He was nourished by the environment of Africa in an almost mystical way, partly because of his active historical imagination.
In contrast, Foreman avoided interviews, ducked press conferences, and sensed the country was rooting for Ali. He slipped into a surly seclusion with his sparring partners and his dog. Feeling isolated, in a hostile atmosphere, did not improve the champion’s mental state.
Perhaps the deepest root of Ali’s genius was that he was able to absorb energy and inspiration from external forces. He drew strength from being black, from being a Muslim, from Allah, from being a rebel who opposed the Vietnam War, from being loved by the poorest of the poor, from visiting children in hospitals, from seeing himself as a leader of his people, from believing he was a vessel of a grander destiny.
In the most desperate moments of his career—blinded by an ointment burning his eyes against Liston, feeling unable to continue against Frazier in Manila—Ali would summon something extra from some secret gas tank of spiritual fuel. He drew motivation from sources much deeper than sport.
Just before the fight in Zaire, Ali delivered a stunning speech for Leon Gast’s camera and for posterity. The film has never been released, but this was Ali essence on the eve of battle:
“I’m fighting for God and my people. I’m not fighting for fame or money. I’m not fighting for me. I’m fighting for the black people on welfare, the black people who have no future, black people who are wineheads and dope addicts. I am a politician for Allah. I wish Lumumba was here to see me. I want to win so I can lead my people.”
On September 15, ten days before the fight, Foreman was sparring with Bill McMurray, a thirty-three-year-old journeyman who had lost almost half his seventy-five fights. McMurray raised his elbow to protect his face and George Foreman’s right eyebrow accidentally collided with the bone of the elbow. A gash over the eye immediately began to drip blood and Foreman grabbed a towel, pressing it against the slice on his skin.
This freak accident caused the fight to be postponed, creating five days of uncertainty and intrigue.
Since Hank Schwartz was in New York at the hour of the cut, Don King in Kinshasa was thrust into the first series of bilingual meetings to decide what to do, what to tell reporters, when to reschedule, how to keep the army and police relaxed. King was masterful in this crisis, a fact not lost on Ali and Herbert Muhammad, his manager.
Foreman, the most paranoid of fighters, wanted out of the country he never felt comfortable in, a country where he kept thinking his water or food would be poisoned or drugged. He wanted the fight shifted back to the United States. When Mobutu was told this, he had his soldiers pick up Foreman’s passport. The champion became a prisoner in Zaire, a condition that further preyed on his mind and mood.
For the first few hours Ali, too, said he wanted to switch the fight to the Los Angeles Coliseum or the Houston Astrodome, but he quickly realized staying in Zaire would place more psychological stress on Foreman, and he could wait five more weeks for the American pleasures of ice cream and miniskirts.
Hank Schwartz flew into Kinshasa the day after the cut and met with King and Mobutu to consider the options. At first Schwartz proposed switching the fight to America, where the live gate would be much bigger and the rainy season of torrential waterfalls would not be a factor. The rainy season was due anytime after October 21, and any new date in Zaire would be a risk. Mobutu, having spent $20 million, said this was out of the question. Next, Schwartz proposed moving the fight to a three-thousand-seat indoor arena, but Mobutu ruled this out, too. The dictator’s only concession was a promise to build a much larger roof over the ring to keep the television equipment and ringside seats dry and covered during the fight.
Reluctantly, Schwartz agreed to October 30 as the new date, in Zaire, placing the promotion right on the inside cusp of the rainy season, which always arrived with thunder and a tropical typhoon.
Would the African gods defer to Allah’s fighter?
After days of rumors, and Foreman’s being noncommunicative, Don King and Bula, the money man for Mobutu, announced the new date would be October 30, at 4:00 A.M. Zaire time, which was October 29, 10:00 P.M. New York time. It was the earliest possible compromise between the healing of Foreman’s skin and God’s calendar of rain.
But at a confusing press conference an hour later, Foreman and Dick Sadler refused to confirm what King had just announced as official and definite. Foreman told a reporter, who pressed him on the new date, to “shut up.” Foreman and Sadler told the media of the world they just weren’t sure the eyebrow would be all healed by October 30. They were actually still maneuvering to get the fight out of the country, or get out of the fight.
But King backed Foreman down with one of his steamroller filibusters in his hotel suite. And a few hours later, a contrite heavyweight champion sat in King’s suite and told the press he had just been “kidding,” and yes, the fight was definitely on for October 30, and he was sorry for any misunderstanding.
Hank Schwartz, who still admires King to this day, gives King all the credit for salvaging the fight. He says: “There is no doubt that Don saved the fight. He held the deal together. He knew how to talk to Foreman. He stopped Foreman from bolting. He was magnificent.”
But Hank Schwartz spent most of the five-week delay in New York, dealing with exhibitors, arenas, foreign rights, television executives, and technology experts. This left King alone with the two fighters and gave King the time to work on the fighters, cement bonds of black unity, share his future dreams with them, promise them how much more money they could make with him as their promoter, how they owed it to history to give a black brother a chance. King understood that whoever controlled the heavyweight champion was on his way to controlling the business of boxing.
Don King, who over the next twenty years would outnegotiate Donald Trump, Ferdinand Marcos, Roone Arledge, HBO, Showtime, Caesars Palace, and Steve Wynn, had no trouble at all outmaneuvering an absent Hank Schwartz. He soon had both Foreman and Ali saying they would be doing their next match for Don King Productions, not Video Techniques, even before they stepped into the ring in Kinshasa.
A jailhouse Barnum, a vulgar Machiavelli, Don King was already five moves ahead of everyone else.
In the spring of 1974 King and Lloyd Price shared an office in Manhattan and saw each other every day as th
ey planned the three-day music festival that would precede the big fight.
King liked music; he had top musicians like Jonah Jones play in his New Corner Tavern, and he had the best singers perform on his Forest City benefit card. It was logical for him to add such an event to the Rumble in the jungle, a name for the fight that Ali coined and King adopted and popularized. King, as a promoter, learned a lot about his art by being around Ali in the prime of his verbal wit. And Ali says he learned his self-promotion style by watching the wrestler Gorgeous George.
In the course of planning the music festival, King and Price also talked a lot about other future projects, and developed a general plan to form an umbrella corporation that would produce records and films and use Ali’s association to attract other black stars to the venture.
Since King and Price had pledged lifetime loyalty to each other in the emotion of King’s first day of freedom, Price never considered bringing in a lawyer and putting anything down in contract form. He loved King the way Don Elbaum had at the beginning, and felt friendship was the real bond, not a piece of paper.
Price trusted King so completely that he put his own career on hold for a year. At that point Price was doing concerts and clubs about three nights a week, grossing about $200,000 a year in bookings. He decided to devote all his time to helping his compadre with the fight and taking the main responsibility for the concert, from booking the talent, to performing himself, to making travel arrangements, to building the stage, to setting up the sound system.
A corporation was formed called Festival in Zaire (FIZ). It had three partners—Price was the president, and King and Hank Schwartz each had a one-third interest.
Price’s friend, the South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, helped convince the government of Liberia to fund another entity called International Films and Records (IFR) that signed a contract with filmmaker Leon Gast to make a documentary about the festival with exclusive access. IFR was registered in the Bahamas.
The money for IFR came from a company called Mesarado Mining, which was really a front for the government of Liberia, just as Risnelia was a front for the government of Zaire, and the funder of the fight itself. Masekela, who then was living in Liberia, knew the nation’s ruling family, especially the minister of finance, Steve Tolbert. Tolbert’s brother, William, was the president of the country. (Steve Tolbert would die in a plane crash in 1979, and his brother would be executed in a bloody coup in 1980.)
Once the minister of finance got involved, he assigned a mysterious British accountant named Keith Bradshaw to monitor his nation’s investment in the festival, which was about $2.6 million. Bradshaw was listed as the president of IFR and seemed to pop up everywhere in Zaire in the months before the fight.
And all of this money flow had to be kept secret from Zaire’s Mobutu, who was underwriting the fight but was insanely competitive with the Tolberts, who managed their neighboring nation in an equally corrupt fashion.
At the same time, a letter of credit was negotiated with the Chemical Bank in New York, so that Price would get paid $250,000 when the concert took place. This money was supposed to come from the Liberian government, funneled through Mesarado.
Price spent the summer months traveling across the country trying to get black superstars to commit to performing at the festival, scheduled for September 21, 22, and 23, on the eve of the fight in the May 20th Stadium. He quickly lined up James Brown, B. B. King, Etta James, Bill Withers, and the Spinners. Masekela lined up his ex-wife, Miriam Makeba, the Pointer Sisters, and several Latin salsa bands. It was going to be a “black Woodstock,” three days of soul music and good vibrations to celebrate two black men fighting for the championship for the first time in history on African land.
All the performers signed contracts with FIZ, and the company’s assets became the performing rights to the artists and the exclusive rights to the film footage of the festival.
According to the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was present for some of the meetings as a buddy of James Brown, “Don King talked so fast that James told him, ‘You must be with the Mafia.’ Then James demanded King get him $100,000 in cash before he got on the plane for Kinshasa. This was after all the banks had closed on a Friday afternoon. When Don came back with the $100,000 in cash after two hours, James said, ‘Now I know for sure you’re in the Mafia.’
“James also told Stevie Wonder not to trust King. He told Stevie (who is blind and has a fear of flying) that Don would take him up in a plane, fly him to Hollywood, drop him in a hut on a movie set, and tell him he was in Africa.”
All through 1974, Lloyd Price was only reimbursed for expenses by Bradshaw; he assumed the letter of credit would be cashed and he would be fully compensated after the fight.
“I first realized there might be a problem between me and Don,” Price says, “during a meeting in Zaire that was between me, Don, Steve Tolbert, and Keith Bradshaw. The meeting was a day or two after Foreman’s eye was cut.
“We were having a big problem that no tickets were being sold to the concerts. I mean none. Tolbert and Bradshaw couldn’t see how they were going to get back any of their $2.6 million without any live gate. And they had expected to gross about $1.5 million over the three nights.
“King and Bradshaw weren’t getting along at all. They were fighting about everything and calling each other names right in the meeting. So the minister of finance, trying to find a way to keep working together until the concerts, asked me if I could work cooperatively with Bradshaw. I said yes, I could get along with Keith Bradshaw for the sake of saving the project.
“But Don King was insulted by my answer. He jumped up and shouted, ‘Are you going to betray me right here in the middle of this meeting? Then you can go work with this motherfucker yourself.’
“And Don just walked out of the meeting and pouted for a few days. I thought I was just giving an honest answer to a pragmatic question from the minister of finance, but Don took it in a personal way.
“We remained friends after the meeting, but from that day on, our relationship never had the same warmth and love.”
The festival occurred on the scheduled dates, even though the fight had been postponed. The stadium was almost empty the first night, mostly because the tickets had been overpriced for a poor country, and most of the affluent Westerners had left when the fight was delayed. On the last night the government gave away all the tickets and the stadium was filled with freeloaders dancing in the aisles.
The music the last night was sensational, as recorded by Leon Gast’s camera crews. James Brown outdid himself; the Pointers were in peak form; and Price did a set of six songs, including “Stagger Lee,” which had Ali on his feet cheering for his friend and one of his favorite songs. Foreman did not attend.
Only after the concert was finished did Lloyd Price discover there was a loophole in the letter of credit and he would not get paid. The letter of credit was drafted in such a way that lawyers said it wasn’t valid if the fight was not held on the original date. It was the completion of the fight on September 25 that triggered the release of the $250,000 to FIZ.
All the stars he had recruited got paid in advance, but Price did not get paid. He was never paid. All the documentary footage shot by Gast and his crew of forty-seven people got tied up in litigation for years (and has never been released).
David Sonnenberg, Gast’s attorney, says, “Leon and Lloyd Price got one of the worst screwings I ever saw.”
“I just got screwed,” Price says without bitterness twenty years later. “I would say that Don King screwed me indirectly rather than directly. He just never lifted a finger to help me get paid. He never spoke to the minister of finance of Liberia to pay me, after the bank reneged.
“Don made money on the fight,” Price says. “I had helped him get Ali to do the fight. I had introduced him to Muhammad. Don made four percent of the profits. He told me we were partners for life. But he never offered me a dollar of his share after I got screwed….
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bsp; “In retrospect, I must have been naive. I think Don resented all the times that people came up to us in hotels, in airports, at fights, in restaurants, and asked me for my autograph and not his. In those days I was more famous than he was. But I always told the person to get Don’s signature, too, because he was going to be famous.
“I still like Don in a way. But he has screwed everybody who ever loved him.”
Don King also used the five-week delay to display his showmanship for the world’s press corps, waiting in Kinshasa as a captive audience with idle time.
This revolving group not only included the premiere American sports columnists like Jim Murray, Dave Anderson, Jerry Izenberg, Larry Merchant, and Dick Young. It also included writers bigger than boxing, literary heavyweights like Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg (who wrote the film On the Waterfront and the classic boxing novel The Harder They Fall), the aristocratic George Plimpton, and the gonzo Hunter Thompson, who added to his legend by missing the fight.
King tried to flatter and impress all of them. When he first encountered Mailer, King greeted him with: “You are a genius in tune with the higher consciousness, yet an instinctive exponent of the untiring search for aspiration in the warm earth embracing potential of exploited peoples.”
Mailer quoted this avalanche of words in his book The Fight, which is a small overlooked gem. After quoting King’s mouthful, Mailer observed, “King was letting you in on King’s view of himself—a genius in tune with the higher consciousness… it would be hard to prove King was not a genius.”
Mailer’s description of King in Kinshasa began: “A hustler of dimensions is a financier. How King could talk…. He was kuntu in full dialogue, and no verbal situation could be foreign to him.”
In one of his intoxications of rhetoric, King even informed the novelist with a bent toward the existential, “Ali even motivates the dead.” King then began to talk to Mailer about his years in prison.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 8