by Jonathan Eig
But stress rolled off Ali like water off a marble statue. He spoke only of winning, of being champ again, of getting back in the good graces of Elijah Muhammad.
“I have a dream,” Ali said, “in which I put on my suit and get my briefcase ready, and my suitcase packed, and I’m going to see what the Leader say my mission is going to be. The championship strengthens my reputation as a prophet. No more am I the onliest lil’ voice crying in the wilderness. The stage is set.”
41
Rumble in the Jungle
It was two in the morning on October 30, the day of the fight. Muhammad Ali stood by the side of the mighty Zaire River, formerly known as the Congo River. Fallen trees cascaded down the river like matchsticks. A pale moon shone. The air was warm and humid. Ali, dressed in black, stood surrounded by his most trusted men. They were quiet, like soldiers preparing to leave on a dangerous mission.
An hour later, in his dressing room at the stadium in Kinshasa, Ali tried to relieve the pressure.
“What’s wrong around here?” he asked. “Everybody scared?”
The horror film he had watched earlier in evening, Baron Blood, now that had been scary, he said; fighting George Foreman wasn’t. “This ain’t nothing but another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali!” He rolled his eyes in mock fear and switched his clothes for white boxing trunks with black stripes and a long white robe fringed with a black African pattern. Usually, Bundini designed Ali’s robes, and he had one in his arms — it was trimmed in Zairian colors and had a map of the country over the heart. But Ali didn’t want to wear Bundini’s robe.
“Look how much better this one looks,” Ali said, spinning in front of a mirror. “It’s African. Look in the mirror.”
Bundini refused to look.
Ali slapped him.
“You look when I tell you! Don’t ever do a thing like that.”
Bundini wouldn’t look.
Ali slapped him again.
Still, Bundini would not acknowledge Ali’s robe.
Ali shrugged and sat at the end of his training table under slowly spinning ceiling fans. In a low, singsong voice, he murmured to himself. He recited old rhymes and favorite catchphrases, as if in a review of his boxing career: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee . . . you can’t hit what you can’t see . . . I been broke . . . I been down . . . but not knocked out . . . it must be dark when you get knocked out . . . it’s strange getting stopped.” He concluded with “Now! Let’s rumble in the jungle!”
He hopped off the table and tried to make Bundini feel better. “Bundini!” he shouted. “We gonna dance?”
No answer.
“Ain’t we gonna dance, Bundini? You know I can’t dance without you.”
Bundini was still sad. Finally, he answered, “Aw, hell, Champ. All night long.”
“Are we going to dance with him?”
“All night long!”
Someone called out: “Ten minutes.”
Dundee taped Ali’s hands. The trainer checked to make sure he had everything he needed for the fight: Q-tips in his shirt pocket, a vial of smelling salts tucked behind his ear, coagulant powders and gauze in his left hip pocket, liquid coagulants and surgical scissors in his right hip pocket, and a kit stuffed with an ice bag, more gauze pads, an extra pair of shoelaces, an extra mouthpiece, and extra smelling salts.
Herbert Muhammad led Ali into a toilet stall — the only place where they could have privacy — and, together, the men prayed.
Ali walked calmly through the stadium and into the ring, surrounded by his usual coterie — Rahaman, Dundee, Herbert, Bundini, Kilroy — all of them bearing expressions suitable for pallbearers, plus dozens of Zairian soldiers in white helmets. A giant portrait of Mobutu loomed over the stadium. Ali smiled as he passed Joe Frazier seated at ringside, and then he climbed through the ropes and began to shuffle and shadowbox. He removed his robe, brown body shining in the ring lights as a panoply of brown faces watched him move. As he danced and waved his arms, the crowd chanted his name as if they’d rehearsed for this moment for months. In a sense, they had.
It was approaching 4 a.m. Thousands of seats sat empty near the ring, those priced at $250 each and reserved for the Americans and Europeans that Don King had hoped to entice. But beyond the inner circle, more than forty thousand Zairians stood waiting in a wide, low oval that stretched far from the ring. For those in the cheap seats, Ali and Foreman would be small, dark specks, their swift, subtle moves impossible to discern. A corrugated tin roof had been built over the ring to protect against a tropical downpour, which only further obstructed views from the outlying seats. The spectators didn’t seem to care that their views were partially blocked or that they’d all be drenched if it rained. They’d been up all night waiting. The time had finally come for action. “Ali boma ye!” they chanted. Ali waved his hand, leading them like an orchestra conductor.
All over the world, people sat down to watch. In many countries, the fight would appear live on free television in people’s homes. In the United States, Britain, and Canada, people went to theaters and paid to see it on big screens. About two thousand people were expected to fill the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria — where eighty-five dollars bought a ticket to view the fight as well as dinner and unlimited whiskey, and where the fight would begin at about 10 p.m. At drive-in movie theaters in the New York region, the price was about eighty dollars per carload. At Madison Square Garden, where former champs Jack Dempsey, Jimmy Braddock, and Gene Tunney would be watching, ticket prices topped out at thirty dollars. Even outside New York, tickets were expensive, at twenty dollars in Milwaukee, for example, and seventeen in Salt Lake City. At one point, Ali had bragged that 2 billion people would be watching around the world. That wasn’t going to happen. About 50 million would see the fight live, and another 300 to 500 million would watch a delayed tape. Still, 500 million qualified as an enormous number of spectators, and for many of those watching, Ali stood as more than an underdog boxer, more than an American black man, and more than a Muslim; he stood as a symbol of defiance.
In Kinshasa, the threat of rain weighed heavy in the air. There was the threat of violence, too. An entire nation had been waiting months for this moment. Hundreds of soldiers surrounded the ring and stood at strategic points throughout the stadium — enough to make a show of force but not enough to control forty thousand Zairians if the clouds opened and rain washed out the fight, or, worse, if Foreman finished Ali with one whopping punch.
Foreman arrived. The band played America’s national anthem, followed by that of Zaire. While Dundee slipped eight-ounce boxing gloves on his fighter’s hands, Ali shouted across the ring at Foreman, taunting the champion. He continued taunting as referee Zack Clayton called the men to the center of the ring for a review of the fight’s rules. “Chump!” Ali snapped at Foreman. “You’re gonna get yourself beat in front of all these Africans!”
The referee told Ali to shut up. Ali did not. “You been hearing about how bad I am since you were a little kid with mess in your pants,” he barked. “Tonight, I’m gonna whip you till you cry like a baby!”
The bell rang. After saying endlessly for months that he would dance, that the way to beat the slow-footed Foreman was to dance, and after repeating just moments earlier in his dressing room that, finally, at long last, the time had come to dance, Ali did not dance. Instead, he walked flat-footed to the center of the ring, like a man with a death wish, to meet George Foreman.
The reporters perched at the hem of the ring stood.
“Oh, Christ, it’s a fix,” Plimpton shouted, hardly able to hear himself in the oceanic roar. Plimpton thought Ali was going to stand still, take one punch from Foreman, and fall down as Sonny Liston had in Lewiston, Maine.
But Ali had something else in mind. Weeks before the fight, he had sought advice from the legendary trainer Cus D’Amato. D’Amato had told Ali that Foreman was a bully. The best way to fight a bully, D’Amato had said, is to hit him first and hit h
im hard. Show him you’re not scared.
That’s what Ali did. He landed the first two punches, and for thirty seconds he continued to swing away, too busy to think about dancing. When Foreman asserted control, forcing Ali into the corner, Ali’s corner men screamed wildly in warning, as if Ali were a swimmer who had accidentally drifted close to a shark. But, even then, instead of dancing away, Ali moved from the corner to the ropes, which, as Plimpton, writing for Sports Illustrated, put it, was “traditionally a sort of halfway house to the canvas for the exhausted fighter.” It looked like pugilistic suicide, except that most of Foreman’s punches were missing or catching Ali’s arms. Soon, Ali was back in the center of the ring, where he popped Foreman with a solid right lead to the head. Foreman repaid it with a stiff left to Ali’s face.
The round went on that way, two big men giving and taking tremendous punches, the crowd screaming, Ali surprising everyone by his willingness to stand up straight and fight, Foreman throwing big, round, inefficient punches, assuming he needed only one really good one. It was a furious, thrilling three minutes of action. When it was over, Foreman sat on his stool and smiled. This was his kind of fight. If Ali wanted to trade punches, Foreman would happily oblige. If Ali wanted to stand against the ropes and let Foreman take his best shots, Foreman would do that too, even more gladly.
Ali said later he wanted to see if Foreman knew how to fight his way out of the “half-dream room,” the place where a man goes when his brain signals get fuzzy. Given that Foreman had won most of his fights with ease, Ali suspected that Foreman might lack the ability to escape the room. But Ali’s surprising strategy caused panic in his corner at the end of the first round.
“What you doin’?”
“Why don’t you dance?”
“You got to dance!”
“Stay off the ropes . . .”
To which Ali replied: “Don’t talk. I know what I’m doing.”
Rounds two and three looked the same, only slower. Foreman bulled forward, sending Ali to the ropes. Ali leaned back, eyes popped wide, alert for danger, as Foreman swung away. Instead of sliding off the ropes and dancing around the ring, using speed to his advantage, Ali stayed put, settling for short, quick counterpunches, landing one punch for every two or three thrown by Foreman. Soon, Ali was shaking his head and hollering at Foreman — “Is that all you got? Is that all you got?” —just as he had against Joe Frazier in their first fight. Was that his plan? To let Foreman hit him? To absorb the best punches his opponent could throw and hope the man ran out of gas? The thought of it horrified the contingent in Ali’s corner. It was a strategy that had failed against Frazier and Norton, and it seemed even more likely to fail against the mighty Foreman.
“Dance! Dance!” came the shouts from Ali’s men.
In the third round, Ali stuck with the same approach, fighting off the ropes, grabbing Foreman around the head to slow him down, and whispering words of discouragement in his ear. With a minute remaining in the round, Foreman hit Ali with his best punches of the night, three good rights, each landing solidly on Ali’s head. Ali grabbed Foreman around the neck and talked to him again, no doubt belittling Foreman’s punching power before responding with rat-a-tat-tat concussive shots of his own in the round’s final ten seconds.
Ali’s punches hurt Foreman, even staggered him at times. But Foreman remained dangerous as he continued to stomp forward. When Foreman charged, Ali backed up against the ropes, letting his body hang over the typewriters in press row at the angle, Plimpton wrote, “of someone looking out his window to see if there’s a cat on his roof.”
“Is that the best you can do?” he taunted through his mouthpiece in round four. “You can’t punch . . . Show me something! . . . Give it back to me! It’s mine! Now it’s my turn!”
In the final thirty seconds of the round, it was indeed Ali’s turn. He came off the ropes and attacked, throwing stinging punches too fast for Foreman to block.
Foreman’s eyes puffed. He moved more and more slowly until he resembled a man in need of a nap.
Foreman had no backup plan. He knew but one way to fight. As Foreman’s punches slowed, Ali stayed on the ropes, patiently waiting to counterattack. After the fifth round, Foreman’s corner men, Dick Sadler and Archie Moore, began to complain that the ring ropes were too loose, that Ali was leaning so far back that their man couldn’t land punches. The complaints were useless. To casual observers, it may have looked as if Ali were letting Foreman do all the work. But it wasn’t so. In fact, Ali was landing almost as many punches as Foreman. The big difference was that Ali made his punches count while Foreman banged away wildly with shots that missed or merely struck Ali’s arms. The other big difference: Foreman was fighting for three minutes of each round while Ali conserved his energy and waited for the final thirty seconds to go all out. He knew Foreman would be tired from throwing and missing so many big punches and would be even more tired in the final seconds of each round. He knew his punches would hurt more by then. He knew George would have little time to counterattack. He knew his late flurries would impress judges. At one point, after emerging from his prone position and popping Foreman with a particularly sharp burst, Ali looked over at Jim Brown, who was serving as one of the announcers for the fight, and winked, as if to say, I’ve got this.
In the sixth, Ali surprised Foreman by coming to the center of the ring right away and shooting three crisp lefts to Foreman’s forehead. Each time he jabbed, the crowd screamed his name as if they were his personal chorus.
Jab.
“Ali!”
Jab.
“Ali!”
Jab.
“Ali!”
In the middle of the round, Ali went back to the ropes to rest. He set his rear end on the second strand from the top and waited for Foreman to come over and hit him. There’s an adage in boxing that if a fighter tries to go fifteen rounds with a heavy bag, the bag will win. Ali was the bag. Later, he and others would call this passive defense “the rope-a-dope,” suggesting that Ali had lured the dope Foreman into a trap. In truth, the rope-a-dope had not been planned and hardly qualified as a stroke of genius on Ali’s part. In truth, it made for a dull fight. But it was borne of necessity. It was a feat of masochism. Ali lacked the speed to escape and lacked the power and stamina to fight back for more than a fraction of each round. The best he could hope to do was outlast Foreman. “In the entire history of boxing,” Mike Silver wrote in The Arc of Boxing, “this non-strategy worked exactly once.” This was the one time.
“Is that all you got?” Ali asked Foreman.
That was all Foreman had.
By the end of the round, the biggest and scariest heavyweight since Sonny Liston was throwing punches that could barely knock over a vase. Foreman looked like the mummy Ali had made him out to be, a half-dead creature too slow to hurt anyone.
When the bell rang to start round seven, Ali went back to the ropes, taking a seat and waiting for Foreman to come over and start hitting. Once again, he attacked with thirty seconds left in the round. As the clock ticked down, Ali hit Foreman with a right cross that spun Foreman’s head almost 180 degrees. Perspiration flew in a halo from Foreman’s hair. The wounded fighter staggered and righted himself.
Ali shouted, “You got eight — EIGHT — long rounds to go, sucker!”
“I got a feeling that George is not gonna make it,” Joe Frazier told viewers around the world as the seventh round came to a close.
Foreman wobbled as he rose from his stool to start the eighth. In need of a knockout, he threw big, wild punches, most of which missed or landed with little effect.
Once again, Ali waited. With twenty-one seconds to go in the round, he let fly a left-right combination. Both shots landed. Ali covered up in anticipation of a counterpunch, stuck out the left, landed another right, and then threw another combination. A great burst of energy moved him now. He spun out of the corner and into the center of ring where he let loose a left, a right, and another left. Foreman fell off b
alance. His hands flew up in the air like a man facing an armed robber as Ali’s fifth unanswered punch came.
“Oh my Lawdy!” Bundini shouted. “He on Queer Street!”
The next shot was a right to the head. Foreman stumbled a few paces and reached wildly into empty space as he tumbled to the ground. Ali cocked his arm and circled around his opponent, but there was no need to punch again. Foreman collapsed to the canvas.
Ali raised his arms, and a moment later he was mobbed in the ring.
Years later, Foreman would say he’d been drugged before the fight by his own trainer. The decades gone by served to harden his certainty. He explained it this way: Before his fights he usually avoided drinking water, trying to dry out so that his body would look lean and rippled with muscle. He would wait until the fight was moments away from beginning and only then would he take a drink of water. In Zaire, Sadler gave him water moments before the start of the fight. To Foreman, the water tasted like medicine. But when he complained about it, Sadler told him he was crazy, that it was the same water he’d been drinking every day in Zaire. Foreman swallowed the rest. When he got in the ring, the fighter said he felt groggy. It wasn’t the heat or the humidity. This was a kind of sluggishness he’d never felt before. After the fight, he remembered the water and became convinced that he’d been drugged.