Zaire is going to be remembered for a long, long time for this fight.
JERRY IZENBERG, SPORT, SEPTEMBER 1974
Two great warriors will return to the heart of the Motherland. It is goin’ home time. It is destiny.
DON KING
On October 30, 1974, heavyweight champion of the world George Foreman and former champion Muhammad Ali squared off against each other in the ring in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the improbable hour of 4 a.m. With great anticipation and excitement that had been building for months, an estimated sixty thousand Zaïroises looked on while millions more boxing fans in over 120 nations tuned in via home and theater television as well as radio. For Ali this was a desperate bid to reclaim the title from the current champion, the younger, more powerful, and seemingly invincible Foreman. Ten years earlier, a much younger Cassius Clay had won the title from another seemingly invincible champion, Sonny Liston, in Miami Beach, Florida, only to have his championship stripped from him in 1967 after he had joined the Nation of Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and refused to serve in the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. Having endured exile from boxing for three and a half years while he appealed his conviction for draft evasion, he faced an uphill battle in perhaps his last shot to reclaim his title. The stakes were high for Foreman as well. He would need to defeat the best-known boxer of his generation in order to be considered the true champion.
Despite the long odds against him, however, Ali shook up the world, just as he had against Liston ten years earlier. Utilizing a strategy that came to be known as the “rope-a-dope,” Ali surprised everyone by abandoning the fleet-footed, dancing style of speed and movement that had defined his career and electrified fight fans everywhere. Instead of floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, he lay on the ropes in a defensive posture and let Foreman pound away at him until Foreman punched himself out. In the eighth round Ali came off the ropes to knock out the champion with a series of lightning punches. It was a stunning upset, and one that solidified Ali’s reputation as “the greatest” of all time, only the second heavyweight champion in history to reclaim his title.
Then and now the “Rumble in the Jungle,” as it was indelicately dubbed by Ali much to the chagrin of Zaire’s government, took on oversized importance as a global event that transcended boxing and sport itself. Not only was the fight broadcast around the globe via satellite to millions of boxing fans, including those in Africa and the Middle East who had previously shown little interest in American sports; the bout also earned extensive coverage in newspapers and magazines for months, especially across the African continent. As a sign of its importance, the match also drew the attention of major novelists, journalists, and filmmakers. Assigned by Esquire magazine to cover the bout, famed novelist Norman Mailer detailed the moment in his book The Fight in 1975. At Mailer’s side, another proponent of the new journalism, George Plimpton, dispatched a series of articles in Sports Illustrated, followed by his longer assessment in Shadow Box, published in 1977. Novelist and boxing fan Budd Schulberg was there for Newsday; not to be outdone, Rolling Stone assigned journalist Hunter Thompson to deliver his countercultural take on the spectacle. We shall never know what he thought. As a result of his famed overindulgence in drugs and alcohol, he managed to miss the bout in its entirety. Later, the 1997 Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings reminded another generation of the importance of the Ali-Foreman confrontation.1
As historian Michael Ezra argues, much of the mythology of the bout as a major global sporting spectacle was rooted in Ali’s personal redemption against his enemies after years of exile and vilification. Yet according to Ezra, this mythology places too much emphasis on Ali as “the transcendent conquering hero.” While the personal fates of Ali—and, I would add, Foreman—were definitely at stake, one thing is certain: the fight attracted worldwide attention in part because it was one of the strangest events in boxing history. Not only was the $10 million dollar purse (almost $50 million dollars by 2017 standards) by far the most lucrative prize for a single title fight to that date, but to top it off, the match was also the first heavyweight title bout anywhere in Africa. Accompanied by a three-day music festival, Zaire 74, the Rumble in the Jungle proved to be the most spectacular global event in boxing history.2
While the match carried deep personal meanings for both combatants, the bout’s symbolic importance transcended the mundane world of sport. More than a prizefight, the Rumble in the Jungle represented a turning point in American culture, as the contentious forces at home and abroad came to a head in a global sporting event. With the US role in the Vietnam War just recently concluded and the civil rights movement in disarray, it was not just Ali who sought vindication in the eyes of the world. Rather, it was also the political forces at war with each other during the 1960s and 1970s and the contending models of the black athlete and black manhood. In this regard, Foreman and Ali stood in opposite corners. Foreman symbolized the liberal establishment and Cold War civil rights along with what Robert O. Self has called breadwinner liberalism, the set of government programs established under President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to provide job skills, instill self-discipline for young men—large numbers of whom were black—and help them escape from poverty. Saved by the Great Society’s Job Corps program from a life of grinding ghetto poverty and crime, Foreman remained grateful to an America that had helped him pursue the American dream of wealth, fame, and success. While other black athletes raised their fists in protest at the Mexico City Olympic Games in 1968, Foreman will always be remembered for waving a small American flag after he won a gold medal for the United States in the heavyweight boxing division. Ali, in contrast, continued to represent the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, which included athletes in revolt against racism and against the idea of sports as a color-blind arena. While he too welcomed the creation of strong black men, as a member of the Nation of Islam, Ali did not favor putting their fate in the hands of a white-dominated government.3
As figures of physical strength and athletic success, both boxers became masculine heroes in an era when, as William Van Deburg’s Black Camelot posits, there was a proliferation of African American cultural icons unleashed by the African American struggle for freedom. Each fighter embodied different concepts of masculinity in an era when achieving full manhood was a major goal of the civil rights movement. Foreman was the hardworking, quiet young man grateful to American society, a juvenile delinquent who came in from the cold to express his gratitude to America for his rise. At the same time, Foreman’s appeal lay in his imposing brawn, while Ali appeared to embody brains and, in his mind, religious enlightenment, along with the rebellious martyrdom of many 1960s heroes. Ali was more the angry jokester who rejected the notions that his country came before race and that he had to be modest and grateful, the demeanor of just about every other black heavyweight champion, including Foreman, since Jack Johnson. Instead, like many 1960s icons, Ali was outspoken and expressed the deep-seated anger of many African Americans toward white society’s continuing efforts to keep black people down. To be a black man, he and many of his black fans asserted, was to stand up and be counted despite the risks. He rejected patriotic masculinity and sought his identity with the non-Christian, nonwhites in American society and across the globe.4
Black nationalism, civil rights, patriotism, and anticolonialism all had their sporting champions during the 1960s and early 1970s—not only in boxing but also in all fields of athletic endeavor. Ali’s defiance of the boxing establishment, the American government, and a huge swath of the American public was perhaps the most notable instance of the heightened politicization of American sport, but hardly the only one. The attempt to boycott the 1968 Olympics, for instance, drew on the international movement to ban Rhodesia and South Africa from the Olympics because of apartheid. At the same time, many whites were wondering why African Americans were so upset, since so many aspects of American sports had been racially integrated. Would “they” never be satisfied? Why weren’t “they” grateful for all America had done for them, as Foreman and other black champions before him were?5
The fusion of sport and politics in global media spectacles during the 1960s and 1970s resonated with millions of people worldwide, especially in the person of a Pan-African hero who embodied a form of black nationalism at home and anticolonialism abroad. The freedom movement and the Vietnam War transformed sport from an escapist playground to an arena in which divisive social, political, and racial issues battled for supremacy. In this environment, African American boxers like Ali and Foreman became cultural and political symbols as they stepped into the ring for their epic battle.
Satellite communications played an important role in the battle, transforming an event staged in an isolated locale far from the eyes of the world into a global confrontation that carried the hopes and fears of people across the planet. For most of the Cold War, American officials believed that as a counterweight to Soviet propaganda, their influence over world media allowed them to create a powerful narrative in which black athletes and entertainers served as patriotic examples of national progress in race relations. At the Olympics and in State Department–arranged tours to the “Third World,” black athletes could be living examples of racial progress in the United States and powerful symbols of democracy in action. In a global media age, however, with the satellite no longer fully under government control, Ali’s public defiance of American racism and its foreign policy could be broadcast everywhere.6
Satellite technology, however, was just one factor in the creation of a global spectacle. In fact, the success of the international closed-circuit theater phenomenon rested on Ali’s international popularity. Whereas earlier championship bouts staged abroad featuring Foreman garnered money or attention, fans around the world flocked to the theaters in record numbers to see Ali in action. At home and abroad, Ali’s adherence to Islam, defiance of white supremacy, and opposition to the Vietnam War made him a global anticolonial symbol. With Ali as a global attraction, promoters were able to stage title bouts anywhere in the world and reach fans worldwide.7
As happened every time he fought, Ali shaped the bout’s drama, this time with international significance apropos the African locale. “This is going to be a holy war,” he declared. “I’m the freedom fighter and Foreman will be fighting for the establishment.” In fact, Ali claimed to represent “all the African people who are fighting for their freedom and independence.” As a result, across Black Africa, the Rumble in the Jungle reincarnated the struggles of newly independent nations and those fighting for independence, with Foreman unhappily cast in the role of imperial oppressor. As a consequence, excitement was high in Africa, and local newspapers and magazines covered the event in great detail. Equally important, in the United States as in Africa and the Middle East, the fact that the match was taking place in a black African country, ruled by a black president, fought by two black fighters, supervised by a black referee, and promoted by a black promoter proved a source of great pride and a symbol of worldwide black power to those of African descent. Staging the championship fight in Africa, along with the three-day music festival featuring black musicians from Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean as part of the spectacle, enabled black Americans and people of color around the globe to vicariously experience the coming together of the black diaspora at a time when so many Africans and African Americans were searching for their roots and their power as part of a global majority.8
That boxing carried such strong political and cultural themes should not be surprising. Traditionally, in fact, in the early years of the twentieth century heavyweight prizefighting served as a testing ground for male aggression and masculinity played out in racial and ethnic terms. As Theresa Runstedtler demonstrates, the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, was one of a cohort of black boxers, musicians, and laborers who traveled the globe in search of greater freedom, better rewards, and unprejudiced judging. As the first officially recognized black heavyweight champion, Johnson challenged the notion of white physical and mental superiority. In addition, as the “strongest man in the world,” he availed himself of the rewards of victory by taking a series of white lovers and wives, established and patronized racially mixed cabarets, and defied the political and cultural authorities that eventually forced him into exile. Johnson’s physical prowess and his overt challenge to white fears of racial miscegenation excited the animus of white Americans who were creating and deepening the system of second-class citizenship for black Americans, symbolized by their persecution of Johnson and their barring of other black heavyweights from contending for the title. This practice was defended as necessary to prevent race riots, protect white women, and defend a national system of white supremacy. For the next twenty-two years, the heavyweight champion of the world was guaranteed to be white. On the run from federal officials after being convicted for violating the Mann Act in 1913, Johnson traveled the world during the 1910s as an early example of a global symbol of racial defiance. For this very reason he set off an even greater desire among European powers to create and maintain a global color line that would keep their “colored” imperial subjects from presuming to be equal or superior to their powerful masters.9
Twenty-two years later, in 1937, Joe Louis became the second black heavyweight boxing champion. Unlike Johnson, Louis emerged as a national symbol of American racial and ethnic pluralism in his two battles of international import against the German boxer Max Schmeling. With the rise of fascism in Europe, Louis and Schmeling tested whether fascist theories of racial supremacy or American pluralism would triumph. During World War II both men served in the armed forces and both were held up as symbols of national prowess and identity. Ironically, the African American Louis became an American hero despite American society’s maintenance of segregation and white supremacy at that time. Unlike Johnson, Louis was expected to be a model athlete and a superior human being—a credit to his race—who accepted his place in America’s racial order in exchange for the promise of eventual equal status of African Americans in American life. As part of this promise, black boxers were expected to be tigers in the ring but pussycats outside the ropes.10
During the Cold War, the American government sponsored international sports programs in which black and white athletes were to be examples of American physical and cultural progress against the Soviet Union and other communist states. The Olympics became a battleground for competing nations in a war for the allegiance of newly emergent Third World nations whose citizenry was made up of people of color. In addition, the State Department sent American black and white athletes and musicians on international tours as examples of the strength of American democracy. To counter Soviet propaganda aimed at American policies of racial segregation and white supremacy, black athletes especially were expected to follow in Joe Louis’s example as living proof of eventual racial progress and inclusion. Olympic boxing champions from Floyd Patterson in 1952 to Cassius Clay in 1960, Joe Frazier in 1964, and George Foreman in 1968 all advertised the strength of the American ideal through their physical accomplishments and their presence on the American Olympic team itself.
Long forgotten, Jack Johnson enjoyed a revival of interest in the late 1960s and early 1970s as Muhammad Ali broke from the ideal of Cold War or patriotic civil rights to challenge white supremacy, American foreign policy, and the American government. Much as Johnson was, he was punished for his efforts. Unlike Johnson, however, Ali received a second chance to fight in the United States, raising the question of what had changed during the 1960s and 1970s that allowed him to go on to even greater heights as a global boxing celebrity. His comeback after years of persecution revived the importance of boxing as an international sport and of black boxers as important cultural figures across the globe. Perhaps these changes occurred as a result of challenges to American white supremacy, the global color line, and Western imperialism on every front. At home and abroad, a new racial and anti-imperial politics made it possible for Ali and Foreman to reenact the new global politics in an era when the global color line was in the process of crumbling.
Although many of the fight’s themes were rooted in the 1960s, the fact that the match occurred in 1974 requires that we pay attention to the 1970s as a turning point in American culture. Indeed, the Rumble in the Jungle took place just as the nation’s politics, economic life, and cultural attitudes stood on the cusp of a profound transformation. As Thomas Borstelmann argues in The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, the 1970s were notable for two major trends: the spread of egalitarianism between nations and among peoples, and the growing dominance of market values, both of which the Zaire match exemplified. Both black fighters were given due respect and commanded great sums of money, while an African nation seeking parity with countries of the West went out of its way to enter the arena of fight promotion. At the same time, the amount of money the fighters earned threatened to dwarf social and racial concerns and establish the dominance of market values above all others. As Walter LaFeber points out in Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, moreover, it was the emergence in the 1970s of satellites and computers that would enable athletic stars like Michael Jordan and shoe companies like Nike to spread American capitalism around the globe. That satellites played a huge role in the success of the Ali-Foreman fight in 1974: the transcending of national boundaries and regulations underscores the truth of LaFeber’s observation, but the political overtones of the bout suggest that the competing values of two different eras in sport and capitalism were still held in balance. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the balance had shifted away from an overt politics of dissent to one where an apolitical, thoroughly business-oriented Jordan dominated sports and advertising. As one commentator put it in a 1999 headline, “Mr. Jordan, You’re No Muhammad Ali.”11
While the Rumble in the Jungle was the climactic meeting of these two complicated heavyweight champions, what do their subsequent fates reveal about American society and culture during the later years of the twentieth century? While it is clear Ali was a 1960s symbol, he was also champion again during the late 1970s. But after one disappointing, sluggish win after another, he seemed to embody the flagging of rebellious 1960s energy as he went for the big money in international bouts of little consequence, or at least with more hype than substance. No longer a sterling political or religious hero, he seemed to be just “staying alive,” a survivor, as William Graebner put it, of one near disaster after another, in parallel to the dominant theme of late 1970s popular culture. Ali did enjoy a revival in the 1990s, however, as a pitchman for consumer goods and a broad humanism stripped of any overt politics. By the turn of the century, any antiwhite criticism of American politics and race relations by athletes had been whitewashed.12
In this shifting atmosphere, Foreman enjoyed one of the greatest reversals of fortune in American sport. After suffering a particularly dispiriting loss on the comeback trail in 1977, three years after his humiliating defeat in Zaire, Foreman retired from boxing and became a born-again Christian. Ten years later, overaged and paunchy, the mature former champion defied the experts by returning to boxing. In 1994, he reclaimed the title he lost to Ali, and at age forty-five he became the oldest heavyweight champion in history and a symbol for the baby-boom generation that one’s dreams did not have to stop at forty. He too became a benevolent wealthy pitchman for Jesus, barbeque grills, and the American way of life.
The paths of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman thus intersected from the late 1960s through the turn of the twenty-first century, and both men will forever be linked. Ever since the Rumble in the Jungle, Foreman told BBC Sport, in an interview marking the thirty-year anniversary of the fight, the two men were bound together inextricably. “We’re so tied in together you can’t say rope-a-dope, you can’t say ‘The Greatest,’ you can’t say Muhammad Ali without saying George Foreman,” Foreman declared. “Thirty years ago and I still hear about it. If I had known it was going to be such a big event I would have enjoyed myself a lot more, even in defeat.” The event was a big deal and the two champions were so tied together because each represented different “spirits of the 1960s,” different fates during the 1970s, and the trajectory of sports and American culture in recent decades.13