The heavyweight championship of the world changed hands at four o'clock in the morning. The hour was set for American television, the venue was a dictatorship's showpiece stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire, and the date — 30 October 1974 — marked the night Muhammad Ali completed the greatest comeback in boxing by doing precisely what every expert begged him not to do: standing still.
The fight existed because three unlikely forces aligned. Don King, a former Cleveland numbers racketeer newly turned promoter, secured both fighters by promising each an unheard-of five million dollars he did not have. The money came from Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's kleptocratic ruler, who calculated that hosting the world's biggest sporting event would buy his regime glamour and legitimacy. And Ali needed the stage: stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing the Vietnam draft and banned from boxing for three and a half years in his prime, he had since lost to Joe Frazier and Ken Norton and was widely considered finished at 32. The champion, George Foreman, was 25, unbeaten in 40 fights, and terrifying: he had knocked out Frazier in two rounds — putting him down six times — and demolished Norton in two more. The consensus was not that Ali would lose, but that he might be seriously hurt.
Ali got to Zaire and did what Foreman could not: he campaigned. He learned the Lingala chant that followed him everywhere — "Ali, bomaye", "Ali, kill him" — and jogged among crowds while the brooding Foreman kept to his compound with his German shepherd, a breed associated in Zaire with the Belgian colonial police. A cut over Foreman's eye in sparring postponed the fight by more than a month; both camps stewed in the heat. Around the fight grew Zaire 74, a three-night music festival starring James Brown, B.B. King and Miriam Makeba, conceived to bind African-American music to Africa itself.
The trick nobody saw coming
Ali's trainer Angelo Dundee and everyone in his corner expected him to dance — to use the speed that had once made him untouchable and stay off the ropes at all costs. Ali danced for a round. Then, to universal horror, he backed onto the ropes and invited the hardest puncher in history to hit him. The ring ropes in the humid night had slackened; Ali leaned far back over them, covered his head, absorbed or deflected Foreman's enormous swings with his arms and body, and let the champion punch. Between assaults he talked: "That all you got, George? They told me you could punch." The tactic — christened rope-a-dope afterwards — was partly improvised in the ring, and it worked because Foreman, a devastating but short-burst fighter, had rarely been past round four. By the middle rounds his blows were becoming pushes. In the eighth, Ali came off the ropes, landed a short combination climaxing in a right hand, and Foreman toppled in a slow circle to the canvas. He rose a fraction too late. At 32, seven years after being stripped of it, Ali was heavyweight champion of the world again — only the second man, after Floyd Patterson, to regain the title.
After the rain
Minutes after the finish, a seasonal deluge flooded the Stade du 20 Mai, where some 60,000 had watched; had it come an hour earlier there would have been no fight. The bout's afterlife has been as durable as the result. Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, "The Fight"; the 1996 documentary "When We Were Kings" won the Academy Award and fixed the event for later generations, right down to Ali's surreal pre-fight boasts that he had "wrestled with an alligator" and "handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail". Foreman sank into a decade of brooding, retired, became a preacher — and then produced boxing's other great resurrection, regaining the heavyweight title in 1994 at 45, wearing the same red trunks he had worn in Kinshasa, becoming the oldest heavyweight champion ever. The two men, enemies by promotion rather than nature, became genuinely close friends; Foreman would call Ali the greatest man he ever knew. Mobutu got his spectacle and looted his country for another generation regardless. The fight outlived the propaganda: what endures from that Kinshasa morning is eight rounds of a fading genius solving an unsolvable problem with his back on the ropes and his mouth running.
Quiz nuggets
- Ali knocked out the undefeated George Foreman in the eighth round in Kinshasa, Zaire, on 30 October 1974, regaining the title seven years after being stripped of it.
- The 4am start suited US television; Mobutu Sese Seko funded the $5 million-per-fighter purses arranged by promoter Don King.
- The Kinshasa crowd's chant was "Ali, bomaye" — "Ali, kill him" — in Lingala.
- Ali's ropes-leaning tactic became known as the rope-a-dope; the accompanying music festival was Zaire 74, with James Brown and B.B. King.
- The documentary about the fight, "When We Were Kings" (1996), won an Oscar; Foreman later regained the title in 1994 aged 45.