No fight in the running annals of time has been as talked about, mythologized, relived, documented, romanticized, and extracted of every ounce of ore as the Rumble in the Jungle. Fifty years ago today, on October 30, 1974, Muhammad Ali went into the heart of Africa and fought the scariest man on the planet at the time, George Foreman, for the heavyweight title, while close to a billion people around the world tuned in.
It took place at a neglected outdoor soccer stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire, in the wee hours on a night so black that it nearly overpowered the full moon. The lighting was poor. The threat of rain was pronounced, but it held off. The electricity of the environment was borderline ritualistic, as the sound of drums through the night drew Ali closer to his fate. As a 4-to-1 underdog, the thought that lived in the heads of many was that the 32-year-old Ali was headed for certain defeat. Yet he was cast as the hero to the story, as Foreman — the brutal puncher who knocked out Joe Frazier to win the heavyweight title — had the kind of immense power that left terrifying impressions on the heavy bag.
What would those punches mean to Ali’s ribcage? To his features? He’d be the first to tell you that he was too pretty for reconfiguration.
The chroniclers from all over the world who came to witness the event wrote abundantly on the fight and its unusual backdrop, which included a corrupt dictatorship under the rule of President Mobutu Sese Seko, crocodile-infested waters, the outsized presence of the game’s new player Don King, and thousands of fans shouting, “Ali, boom-a-yay,” which translated to “Ali, kill him!” Ali had won the people over, while Foreman was a stranger in a strange land.
George Plimpton was there, as was Norman Mailer, who focused his African adventure into his famous book, “The Fight.” Hunter S. Thompson, who always claimed Ali was a distant relative of his, flew 8,000 miles to Zaire and — infamously — didn’t file a damn thing. Instead, he went for a swim the night of the fight a couple of miles from the stadium, in a warm fog of forgiving quaaludes.
That in itself, over the last half-century, has gone into the Rumble in the Jungle’s ultimate lore.
One man who was there and saw all of it with his own eyes was Jerry Izenberg, Ali’s friend of 14 years at the time who was there covering the fight for the Newark Star-Ledger. To get a no-nonsense view of all that went on Halloween Eve in what’s now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Izenberg’s incredible book about the golden era of heavyweights, “Once There Were Giants,” is a handy companion.
“That day, October 30, 1974, the fight itself remained an electric story of romance, history and justice deferred and finally obtained,” Izenberg wrote in his chapter on Rumble entitled “Under the African Moon.” “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 who had simply passed through.”
Izenberg, who is 94, first met Ali at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. He remembers the 18-year-old kid known at the time by his birthname, Cassius Clay, sitting on the steps with his gold medal, barking to passerby that he was going to be a force as a heavyweight when he went back home.
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 who had simply passed through.Jerry Izenberg
“People forget, he’d won gold as a light heavyweight, but he was there saying, ‘I’m going to be heavyweight, I’m going to be… I’m going to be…’ And I would say maybe 70% of the people who walked by, the athletes, they couldn’t speak English. They didn’t know what the hell he was saying, but I noticed something, and it’s what attracted me to him.
“All of the female athletes walked by, took a few steps back and looked at him, and I said to myself, ‘Whatever he does, this is going to be a guy worth watching.’”
Fourteen years, a name change, a championship stint, a three-year banishment from boxing, and a full war in Vietnam later, Izenberg was in Zaire to watch Ali face the most dreaded name in the fight game. He saw firsthand Ali sagging back on the ropes while Foreman exerted himself punching away through the tangle of pillowy gloves and arms, which remained upturned with his head bowed down low as if in prayer. The famously dubbed “rope-a-dope” tactic was never part of the game plan, Izenberg says, no matter how much Ali took credit for outfoxing Foreman. It was actually a survival instinct that — at some point — became a revelation.
“He got hit in the throat in the first round and hurt,” Izenberg says. “He went back [to his corner] and said, ‘This guy can punch.’ Second round he went back to the ropes, put his hands up in front of his face, ‘I’ll figure out what’s going on.’ What was going on was that George was a willing accomplice, he kept trying to get through those gloves and he wasn’t going to get through them. When Ali went back after two rounds of that, [his corner] said, ‘Get off the damn ropes! Get off the ropes!'” And Ali looked at them all said, ‘Shut up,’ because he knew what he was going to do by then, and he knew how he was going to do it.”
What did he do? This was the moment when he made history. After taking Foreman’s best shots for seven rounds, absorbing everything he threw and transferring a share of the impact through the ropes — “Is that all you got, George?!” — the end came in the eighth round. Ali sprang forward off the ropes and downed Foreman with a combination ending with a big right hand, a sequence that has felt like a religious experience in sporting circles over the last 50 years.
“It doesn’t feel like 50 years for me because, I’m 94, and major events stay with me,” says Izenberg, who covered the first 53 Super Bowls. “I will tell you this, which will surprise you — this was not a great fight. If this fight had been held in New York or Cincinnati, I might’ve walked out after a while.
“But this was the greatest fight in Ali’s career — not as the greatest fight, but as a fight with the most impact. You had the war. You had the country divided previously. The setting was so exotic, they had to go on at 4 o’clock in the morning, so to kill time, they had native dancing, African drums under a full moon. You don’t forget if you’re there. It was very unusual.”
Asked why the fight has stood the test of time, and why it still means so much to so many people, you can understand why “Once There Were Giants” is among the best sports books ever written. Izenberg, who’s written 13 books overall and is a member of the Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey, doesn’t sugarcoat things, whether he’s talking about his encounters with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, Foreman (whom he still checks in on every couple of weeks), or especially his longtime friend Ali, whose deification in pop culture amuses him.
“It’s very simple,” he says, “most of these people weren’t born when the fight took place. It’s been sculpted as a statue to reality.”
The fight stands next to the “Thrilla in Manila,” the brutal end chapter to the Ali-Frazier trilogy which Izenberg also attended, as one of boxing’s greatest. The visual of Ali reclaiming the heavyweight title, with his hands raised in victory as the ring fills with humanity around, feels as fresh today as it did in 1974. Yet that’s not the lasting memory for Izenberg.
“Ali was my friend for 50 years, and I have two strong memories of him,” he says. “I will tell you about the one in Zaire that happened after the fight.”
This is where even he can’t escape the powerful mythos of Zaire, or tether the legend of Muhammad Ali to the Earth. And this is where we step aside and let one of the fight game’s great writers give us a glimpse of his friend, just as the sun came up in Kinshasa and a billion people turned away.
“The fight is over,” he says. “We have a tropical African rainstorm. If it had started an hour earlier, there’d have been no fight. I mean, the rain is coming down so hard, it’s arc-building rain.
“After it stopped raining, I’m riding on the bus with Dave Anderson of the New York Times back to our quarters. We were very good friends, and I said, ‘You know, Dave, I’m just disappointed. I don’t know what I wrote — I wrote so fast, because we had no time window. So, I want to find him tonight. I just want to take another shot at him.’ Dave says, ‘Well that’s alright with me, I’ll go with you, but there’s like 15,000 acres on these grounds. How are we going to find him?’ I said, ‘I know where he’ll be.’
“He always talked about the river being mystical — the Congo River. If he’s anywhere we can reach him, he’ll be looking at the river.
“We go over there, and sure enough, there he is. We’re on a hill, maybe 20 yards behind him. We can see his back. He’s yelling and screaming. We don’t know what he’s yelling, we don’t know what he’s screaming, but we know he’s staring across the river at French Congo, and he does not know we’re there. And we see his shoulders. We can see him yelling, but we don’t know what he’s saying. Then he stops. And he stares. And we both start toward him, but we stop because he takes both hands, shoots them up into the morning air — in the Rocky pose — and he’s yelling something else.
“Then he’s totally silent, and he stays that way. And I thought to myself, ‘He really did it.’ And in this moment with his arms reaching to heaven, in this moment, he is truly the king of the world. That’s how I remember him.”
