This Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the most extraordinary and perhaps far-reaching sports event of our time: the Rumble in the Jungle, Muhammad Ali versus George Foreman for the heavyweight championship of the world.
Not the greatest or even the best fight. As a fight per se, it doesn’t rank with the elemental collision of Ali-Frazier 3 in Manila a year later. But it was a drama and spectacle that transcended not only boxing but sport itself.
It went out live via satellite from the banks of the Congo, Joseph Conrad’s heart of darkness, a gaudy concoction of combat, showbiz and PR on behalf of Zaire’s President Mobutu, as grasping a kleptocrat as ever stuffed a Swiss bank vault with international aid money and CIA retainers.
And when Foreman fell in the eighth, the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay was back where he belonged, seven-and-a-half years after his illegitimate dethronement.
But that was almost incidental. The big picture was that a black kid from the wrong side of Louisville, Kentucky, supposedly possessing an IQ of 78 and variously regarded in his home country as an uppity Negro, a propagator of race hate and even a traitor, was now indisputably the most famous, most popular person on the planet.
Ali’s ascent began 10 years earlier when he confounded the experts by taking the championship off the glowering ex-con Sonny Liston, the George Foreman of his day.
Ali made the connection beforehand. As was often the case with his pronouncements, it mixed street taunts and discomforting truths: “Liston, he scared white people because they all thought he was so ugly.
“And you think Foreman is ugly and he scares you, too, because you all think black men are ugly. But I’m not scared because I’m black and I don’t think he’s as ugly as you do.”
That didn’t stop Ali, who was extremely handsome and proud of it, from dwelling rudely on the appearances of black opponents less blessed than he.
But then Ali was nothing if not contradictory: for a semi-literate who preached racial separatism, he enjoyed verbal sparring with honky men of letters, such as Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Hunter S. Thompson.
Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali - pictured in London in 1989. Photo / Photosport, Action Plus Sports Images
Ali’s martyrdom - being stripped of his title and his licence to box for refusing to serve in Vietnam - was central to his metamorphosis from sporting superstar to global phenomenon.
Despite the strenuous efforts of his many hagiographers, Ali wasn’t a sage. Although he had no idea where Vietnam was, his ingenuous comment that “No Vietcong ever called me nigger” was repackaged into a profound analogy between American immorality at home and abroad.
It’s actually more in keeping with his statement that black Muslims “believe what’s said in the Bible but not the King James translation; he was a homosexual”. One can’t dispute the core assertion, but the wider premise is certainly highly questionable.
To be a hero you must be, above all, brave. Notwithstanding his devotion to a corrupt and racist cause, his occasional cruelty (not finishing off Floyd Patterson in order to prolong the torment) and his sometimes tiresome triumphalism, Ali was unbelievably, recklessly brave.
Bill Faversham, one of 11 Louisville businessmen who managed Ali until the Black Muslims took over, said before the Foreman fight: “Cassius isn’t hitting with his left any more and he doesn’t dance after a couple of rounds. But nothing overwhelms Cass, not even if he met God.”
His bravery was his undoing. The difference between Ali pre-1967 and post-1970, when the Supreme Court overturned his ban, was that the later model was hit. By Frazier, by Ken Norton, by Ernie Shavers, by Larry Holmes, by Trevor Berbick.
The relationship between this blizzard of head shots and his Parkinson’s disease is a matter of conjecture. What we do know is that his doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, walked away from the whole giddy circus well before the end, convinced that Ali was damaged goods.
There’s an epic and tragic sweep to the life and times of Muhammad Ali. Long after his achievements as an athlete have been forgotten, he will be remembered as one of a handful of peaceful revolutionaries whose universal appeal forced Western society to re-examine its attitudes to race.
But in the end he was a fighter and the fight game has precious few happy endings. Perhaps Thompson summed him up best. Ali, he wrote, was “a brown Jay Gatsby” who wanted to be king of the world and came as close as anyone we’re likely to see.
