The Art of Cunning: Rope-a-Dope and the Brer Rabbit Offense
Because of a boxing match’s physical aggression, many people get little pleasure imagining one. So I ask your brief indulgence in a description of what ABC-TV declared as the greatest event in the forty-five-year history of its Wide World of Sports.
By 1974, Mohammed Ali had established himself as one of the best heavyweight boxers of all time. In 1964, at twenty-two years old and still known as Cassius Clay, he won the world heavyweight championship in a stunning upset of Sonny Liston and then defended his title against former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson in 1965. He lost his boxing license in 1967 for refusing to enter the armed forces during the Vietnam War and did not fight again until 1970. A series of wins placed Ali as the top contender against heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, and their March 1971 fight in Madison Square Garden was nicknamed “The Fight of the Century.” Ali lost his first professional fight that night. He won his next ten fights and lost again in 1973 to Ken Norton. He beat Norton later that year and finally took down Joe Frazier in January 1974.
A bout was set for October 30, 1974, between Ali and heavyweight champion George Foreman in Zaire, Africa, called the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Ali was his usual cocky and colorful self before the fight.
“I’ve done something new for this fight. I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”
But exuding confidence and taunting his opponent before the fight would not be enough to win this one. While Ali had struggled against Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, and lost two of those four fights, Foreman had beaten Frazier and Norton easily in second-round knockouts. Plus, Ali was an ancient thirty-two years old, while twenty-four-year-old Foreman was in his prime and considered an awesome and dangerous boxer who throws some of the hardest punches in heavyweight history. No one gave the former champion a chance of winning.
Against all odds, Ali won that fight, and here’s how he did it.
For months before the fight, both men lived in Zaire as they trained. While Foreman worked out in isolation, Ali built a visible relationship with the people of Zaire with his strong pro-African beliefs and his flamboyant charm. By the time the two boxers entered the ring, Ali had the cheering crowd firmly on his side.
Ali’s prefight boasting and taunting included how he was too fast for Foreman to keep up with. And he opened the first round of the fight with a flurry of punches to reinforce that message. Coming out of his corner in the second round, Foreman expected to step forward in a toe-to-toe battle. Instead, Ali retreated to the ropes and taunted one of the hardest hitters in boxing to hit him repeatedly while he only protected his face. Foreman became angry and continued to give his best shots to Ali’s midsection. Ali responded, “Is that all you got, George? They told me you could hit.” Many of Foreman’s punches were deflected or didn’t land squarely. Ali allowed the ropes to absorb some of the energy of the blows so as to reduce their damage. Occasionally Ali would counter with a flurry of punches to Foreman’s face, which electrified the crowd. Then right back to defensive mode, protecting his face and body leaning against the ropes. The move would later become known as rope-a-dope.
By the seventh round, Foreman began tiring and occasionally dropped his arms to his side. Late in the fight, Foreman smashed Ali with a thundering blow to the body, and Ali whispered to him, “Is that all you got, George?” And Foreman thought to himself, Yep, that’s about it.
Ali started dominating Foreman with his speed and energy. At the closing thirty seconds of the eighth round, Ali dropped Foreman at center ring and won the fight.
As I opened this chapter, I asked that you indulge my story of the Ali-Foreman fight, since their sport is so physically aggressive. Feel free to entertain a less violent imagery. Maybe a triathlon. Field hockey. Duplicate bridge, even. But I want you to know that you need to engage in this process as though it is an aggressive sport. This work is hard, and you won’t be comfortable. The good news is that it’s not complex and these tactics will help you.
Ali did not win because he was stronger or because he was a fighter in his prime. It was his challenger who was in his prime. Foreman was a three-to-one favorite. Ali was cunning, and he serves as a good example of “know your challenger,” just as champion poker player Annette Obrestad from Chapter 2 studied her competitors. That’s why Ali bragged ahead of time that he was going to be too fast for George. That’s why Ali whispered in Foreman’s ear at the same time George was pounding away on him. He was trying to get him mad. He was trying to get him to punch with all his strength. Ali set up Foreman, and then he took him down.
You and I are going to use the same tactic for Anxiety. We will create an offensive strategy that will set it up. And then we’re going to take it down. But you need to be willing to absorb some blows. You may not experience any blows, but you need to have the attitude of “I’m willing.”
And you will need a good dose of craftiness. I have just the model for you.
The Brer Rabbit Offense
Brer Rabbit is a likeable enough character in the canon of American folktales . . . but I wouldn’t want him to date my daughter. I wouldn’t ask him to housesit when I leave town. In fact, I don’t want to have any negotiations with Brer Rabbit. He’s a trickster.
But his wit and his wiles are a model for us. So let’s not discount him quite yet.
The tales of Uncle Remus as compiled by Joel Chandler Harris are older than any of us on this planet, featuring a rotating cast of characters—Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, Brer Fox, among other Brer creatures—going about their merry lives in the woods, bogs, and cornfields of the postbellum South. Looking past the archaic language (the text was written in the dialect of the Southern plantation folk who shared these tales with Harris), the plots of the various stories center around some form of mischief, with Brer Rabbit being the most mischievous of the group. Often he will want something someone else has, or he’ll get caught in a trap and need to outwit his captor. Whatever the scenario, because he is the wittiest and wiliest of the creatures, Brer Rabbit uses the art of manipulation to get what he wants.
In Brer Fox an de Stolen Goobers, a thieving Brer Rabbit picks Fox’s goober patch clean despite the wooden fence that Fox has built around his little plot. Brer Fox is furious, of course, and finds the gap in the fence where that scoundrel (whoever he might be) managed to sneak in. So he fastens a rope to a tree and sets a spring trap just outside that gap in the fence. Sure enough, the next morning, as Brer Rabbit slips into Brer Fox’s goober patch, he steps right into the trap, the rope tightens around his hind legs, and he’s propelled into the air and left dangling over the goobers with no chance of escape.
When Brer Bear happens by the goober patch, Brer Rabbit makes no mention of his predicament. He doesn’t plead with the bear to release him. Rather, he tells the gullible bear that he’s working a job for the fox. “Skeer-crow sorter work,” he tells him, and Brer Fox is giving him a dollar a minute to hang there and do nothing. Brer Bear is intrigued—he’s never made a dollar a minute in his life! And Brer Rabbit reminds him that he could use the cash. If he doesn’t take this job, “Den how you goin’ ter buy your fambly der Christmas presents?” asks the rabbit. “Ain’t you gon’ ter have no turkey?” Moments before Brer Fox arrives to catch his culprit, Brer Rabbit convinces Brer Bear to assume his skeer-crow responsibility, so the bear frees the rabbit and climbs up there to willingly take his place. “Looks like Brer Bear’s been stealin’ your goobers,” Brer Rabbit tells the fox. “I see you got him ketched here in your trap!”
In the same vein, the cunning rabbit deceives a susceptible fox in Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit, and de Well. Brer Rabbit gets caught down in the well behind his home. Brer Fox hears the commotion and peers down into the well to investigate. Brer Rabbit, knowing full well that outsmarting the fox is his one-way ticket out of this pickle, tells the fox that he’s down in the water scooping out the fishes: the fitsy-fotsy-figgaloo fishes that sell for fifty dollars a pound. There are scores of them, he tells the fox. “De water is just natchally alive wid um!” Not one to turn down the chance to make a quick buck, Brer Fox jumps into the bucket at the top of the well, sending him down toward the dark, fish-less water, and sending Brer Rabbit, who’s sitting in the lower bucket, back up to freedom.
The various tales include some that are more outlandish than others (as in the one where Brer Rabbit convinces Brer Bear that the wheels on the wagon produce silver coins) and others that are more malicious (convincing bear and fox to stick their heads into a beehive), but what is consistent through all of them is Brer Rabbit’s craftiness.
Whenever Brer Rabbit is in a pickle, it is this craftiness that helps him escape. In De Tar Baby, Brer Bear and Brer Fox have created a trap to capture and kill Brer Rabbit once and for all (this would be one of the more malicious tales). Through a rather simple ruse, bear and fox snare the rabbit in a wad of tar, rendering him helpless and immobile. “We sure ketched you dis time.” They celebrate and cook up plans on how they intend to make the rabbit suffer. When Brer Fox threatens to roast the rabbit, Brer Rabbit fires back, “Roast me just ez hot ez you please, but don’t fling me in dat brier-patch.” When Brer Fox reconsiders and threatens to drown the rabbit, Brer Rabbit replies, “Drown me just ez deep ez you please . . . but please, please don’t fling me in dat brier-patch!” In his guile, Brer Rabbit plants the seed that the worst possible punishment, the most heinous death he can imagine, is getting tossed into that brier-patch. “It ain’t goin’ ter be much fun ter skin Brer Rabbit, cause he ain’t skeered of bein’ skinned,” surmises the bear. “But he sure is skeered of dat brier-patch!” declares the fox, and with that he tosses the rabbit right into the thorn bushes. Of course, this is what Brer Rabbit wanted all along. He “wuz born” in the brier-patch, and he can navigate around the thicket without a single scrape.
Through this paradoxical manipulation, Brer Rabbit manages to get precisely what he wanted. Notice that Brer Rabbit is never candid and is rarely sincere. He could very well ask the bear and the fox to let him go, to forgive all of his transgressions, and free him from the tar out of the goodness of their hearts, but that’s not his style. It’s much craftier (and far more enjoyable) to toy with their expectations, let them believe they have the upper hand, and then ultimately come out on top.
More significant (and even more appropriate for our work here) is Brer Rabbit’s tenacity. He knows what he wants and sets about to get it, by hook or by crook, because there is, in each of Uncle Remus’s tales, some desirable outcome, whether it is freedom or food. When Brer Bear bumbles down the road with a bag of ready-to-eat turkeys, Brer Rabbit will do anything to get them, even if it means concocting a preposterous scheme and playing dead—not once but twice—in the middle of the road. Each of these interactions with Brer Bear and Brer Fox is a challenge, and once that challenge begins, he will do whatever it takes to win.
Your challenger may seem bigger and stronger than you, since it has been winning most of the battles in the past. You might already feel beaten down by Anxiety. But we are going to use completely different tactics than you’ve been relying on. You will no longer have to go toe-to-toe with your challenger. You don’t have to be bigger or badder than your challenger. We’re going for cunning, just like our model competitors Brer Rabbit and Mohammed Ali. To be cunning requires that you are daring. And brave, bold, audacious. You may even need to feel foolhardy. I recommend that you emulate Brer Rabbit’s tenacity. He knows what he wants, and through his clever and paradoxical manipulation, he sets about to get it.
As I’ve said from the beginning, we’re here to change your attitude, your disposition, your mind-set, and your basic belief about how to get stronger. And then, with this specific tactic, we will manifest that change through messages you deliver to your challenger. You’re going to ask for more of what you have been afraid of. Let’s find out how your challenger handles that.