Under an aluminum canopy in an 80,000 seat soccer stadium, the gladiators will serve as the most expensive public relations men in the history of world government.
NEW YORK TIMES, 27 OCTOBER 1974
Just days before George Foreman defended his title against Ken Norton in Caracas in March 1974, promoter Hank Schwartz surprised the boxing world with the announcement that Foreman’s next defense would take place in Zaire, the former Belgian Congo, with a record $5 million prize for each combatant. His opponent would be the former champion Muhammad Ali, in what Amsterdam News reporter and columnist Elombe Brath called “the most historic meeting of two internationally renowned men in the heart of Africa since Henry M. Stanley uttered those still famous words, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume.’” While fans of the sport had grown accustomed to championship bouts being staged in different parts of the world, few could understand why such a global spectacle would occur in a country unknown to the vast majority of Americans and on a continent so far away that for Americans to view the closed-circuit television broadcast in prime time, the bout had to be scheduled for the early-morning hours of the next day. The choice of Zaire seemed downright bizarre. Creating a global spectacle in Zaire would require the efforts of many people, some of whom were new to the sport, as well as new technologies that facilitated the portability of information and people, and new international political realities. First, however, Muhammad Ali had to return from exile.1
Ali’s road to Kinshasa proved long and tortuous. While George Foreman’s rapid ascent to the heavyweight title was certainly impressive, it was overshadowed by the return of Muhammad Ali from three and a half years of exile. His expressed desire to resume his boxing career because he needed money to pay his legal bills and support his family earned the censure of Elijah Muhammad, who suspended him from the Nation of Islam for a year. Ali had become a more sympathetic public figure as public opinion shifted against the Vietnam War, and his suspension from the black nationalist religious group made him even more acceptable to white fans. In the face of Richard Nixon’s election and a powerful white backlash against black demands and government programs meant to address them, mainstream African American leaders and more moderate blacks began to reevaluate Ali as an example of enduring black strength and defiance toward American racism. His return to the ring was a sign that the public was in the process of reinterpreting his role in American culture. In addition, whereas he had been barred from boxing by every state commission, by 1970 those legal obstacles began to give way. Once more he stood as a major presence on the boxing scene.2
Ali’s reappearance took on the quality of a second coming. As the Vietnam War dragged on, the defiant former champion framed his matches as highly symbolic battles against his political, religious, and racial foes. His first fight on October 26, 1970, against Jerry Quarry was greeted as the resurrection of a black folk hero who defied an oppressive government and American racism on behalf of all African Americans. Even before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in his appeal in 1971, black politicians in Atlanta, where the fight would be held, mobilized their formidable power to pressure the city’s Jewish mayor into breaking the ban on his fights and sanction the Quarry match. “This is goin’ to be the biggest night in ring history,” Ali declared. “Every eye in the world’s gonna be on me to see if the government beat me.” The bout became a battle between a white hope and a symbol of black pride. Jet saw it as a major civil rights victory, as it occurred in Georgia, where the KKK president lived, Lester Maddox was governor, Martin Luther King was buried, and Ali was “resurrected.” Equated with King and Christ, Ali had become a monumental hero whose every fight carried political, racial, and religious import for his many black and white fans at home and across the globe.3
As fans filed into the arena, the event was transformed into a celebration of Ali’s resurrection as well as a victory celebration by the black community, especially the Atlanta black political elite that staged the bout in the face of Governor Maddox’s fierce opposition. As a sign of Ali’s importance to the black community, the bout was attended by the black sporting, political, and entertainment elites, many of whom were led by Jesse Jackson in throwing up Black Power clenched-fist salutes before the match even began. Among the celebrities were entertainers Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Diana Ross, the Supremes (Mary Wilson, Cindy Birdsong, and Jean Terrell), and Curtis Mayfield; Motown head Berry Gordy and comedian Stepin Fetchit; baseball great Hank Aaron; and boxers Ike Williams, José Torres, Jimmy Ellis, and Henry Armstrong. Black politicians were also prominent given Ali’s role as a political symbol of black independence, as well as defiance against federal government suppression of black militants. In the crowd were SCLC’s president Ralph Abernathy, Operation Breadbasket’s Jesse Jackson, Georgia state representative Julian Bond, local alderman Q. V. Williamson, vice mayor Maynard Jackson, congressional representative Adam Clayton Powell, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, Atlanta congressional candidate Andrew Young, former SNCC chairman John Lewis, and Chicago mortgage banker Dempsey Travis. In addition, the match was turned into a black happening celebration by a flamboyant array of black hustlers, pimps, players, and their ladies.4
The predominantly black crowd came to share in Ali’s victory over America’s racist justice system. As Jet’s Ronald Kisner put it, fans gaped as Ali “pranced to the center of the ring and simultaneously looked Jerry Quarry, the United States Army, other American cities, and Georgia Governor Lester Maddox squarely in their faces.” Governor Maddox, “a historic impediment to Black liberation movements in the South,” tried but failed to cancel the match, calling for “a Day of Mourning” and summoning “patriotic” Georgians to boycott the event. On the evening news the governor declared, “I don’t see how this fight, with a man who disgraced this country’s uniform by refusing to be drafted, could be held in this city—or any other city in this country.” As a sign of his defeat, the governor was the sole prominent local politician absent from the fight. Atlanta’s mayor Sam Massell, who had sanctioned the bout, had a prominent seat. Even the chief of police was there.5
As for the fight, Kisner noted that the audience watched “a man who may possibly be the greatest fighter to don a pair of gloves,” slice up Quarry for a bloody third-round TKO. Apparently, Ali had defied Father Time and was as good as ever. “But,” Kisner concluded, “viewers were also witness to an important victory for Atlanta and US blacks.” That bomb threats were called into Ali’s suburban Philadelphia home where his wife and three daughters waited out the match underscored the fact that violent white opposition remained a constant for Ali and the black community; their struggles were intertwined. As Ali declared, they were there to celebrate “one nigger the white man didn’t get.” In recognition of his symbolic importance, after his victory Coretta Scott King and SCLC president Ralph Abernathy awarded him the Martin Luther King Memorial Award “for his contributions to human dignity.” Mrs. King proclaimed him “a champion of justice and peace and unity,” while Abernathy called him “a living example of soul power, the March on Washington in two fists.”6
The battle of the John Henry–like Ali versus boxing’s white establishment continued apace six weeks later when the deposed champion stepped into the ring against Argentine contender Oscar Bonavena at Madison Square Garden. Ali’s right to fight in Atlanta came about because of the lack of a Georgia state boxing commission and the power of black politicians in the city. Everywhere else, however, the right to a boxing license depended on state commissions, including the most important one, the New York State Athletic Commission. The latter was the first state commission to withdraw Ali’s boxing license in 1967 immediately after he refused to be drafted into the armed forces. New York’s action established the precedent for other state commissions. However, the right to fight against Bonavena in New York was made possible as a result of a successful yearlong suit by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund against the state commission, charging that, in denying him a license to box in the state despite granting licenses to more than ninety convicted felons (including Sonny Liston and Rocky Graziano), it had denied Ali his Fourteenth Amendment rights on political grounds. Veterans’ groups protested the fight’s being held on December 7, a date that lived in infamy for the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but the fight over the right to a boxing license in New York was over. The match itself, however, proved dull. Ali’s jab lacked power, his legs deserted him, and it took a dramatic fifteenth-round KO to seal a victory. Nevertheless, historian Michael Ezra notes, Ali’s victory “endeared him to the public, because it embodied the same kind of resolve, endurance, and determination that had fueled him throughout his exile.”7
Almost four years after his banishment from boxing, Ali faced champion Joe Frazier in “the Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in March 1971. For the first time two undefeated heavyweight champions fought each other for the right to be the true champion. A gold medalist at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, Smokin’ Joe won the heavyweight crown against Jimmy Ellis on February 16, 1970, and now stood as the major obstacle to Ali’s recapturing “his” title. As a Supreme Court ruling on Ali’s draft case was imminent, the fight reached deeply symbolic levels. While the Vietnam War and racial unrest continued to divide American society, the bout pitted a black nationalist antiwar hero against a pro-war proponent of law and order. The lingering resentments over race and the war transformed Frazier into a white man’s hero. “What kind of man is this,” asked Frazier, who enjoyed a draft deferment for being the sole financial support for his family, “who doesn’t want to fight for his country? If he was in Russia, or someplace else, they’d put him up against the wall. He walks around like he’s one kind of a big hero, but he’s just a phony, a disgrace.” A proud champion who had fled the segregated South Carolina Sea Islands for Philadelphia, Frazier resented Ali’s charge that he was an Uncle Tom, and ugly besides, and he retaliated by always referring to Ali as “Clay.” This went over well with many whites who were tired of Ali’s black nationalist rants and his antiwar stance, and wanted him beaten—by whoever was Ali’s opponent. As a more traditional masculine champion, sick of fighting in Clay’s shadow, Frazier vowed to “do his talking in the ring” and shut Clay’s mouth forever. As a resident of suburban Philadelphia, moreover, Frazier endorsed hard-line police commissioner Frank Rizzo, the law-and-order candidate for mayor. Many blacks “might even get mad and call me a ‘Tom,’ but I think Rizzo would make a good mayor.”8
Conversely, many fans saw Ali as the first free black champion up against “the house nigger of the white chauvinist pigs.” For black sports commentator Bryant Gumbel, Ali symbolized 1960s racial and political rebelliousness versus a more complacent black man. If Ali lost, “it was as if everything I believed in was wrong.” To young antiestablishment blacks, “[Ali] was a heroic figure, plain and simple . . . the very symbol of black pride, parading black feelings about black heritage, speaking out against racial injustice.” Frazier, however, “was more like your parents were. He just kind of went along. He did his job.” No fan of the old order, “he didn’t fight it either.” Vietnam was the litmus test. Ali “was dead set against the war”; Frazier was supported by those who backed it. Public opinion had shifted in Ali’s favor as opposition to the war grew, but he still faced massive disapproval among whites, particularly white Southerners and working-class white “ethnics.” If Ali no longer held the title officially, he was considered “the people’s champion,” the antiwar “symbol of national dissent” who defied the government and the establishment by following his conscience and giving up millions of dollars in the process.9
Despite a valiant effort, however, Ali lost a fifteen-round decision in the fight. After a slow start, Frazier unleashed a brutal body attack with powerful left hooks in the middle rounds, nearly knocking Ali down in the eleventh and decking him with a powerful left hook to the jaw in the fifteenth. Ali proved his mettle by getting up, but Frazier won the decision and established himself as the official champion and the man who ruined Ali’s comeback. Fans, however, were divided over who won, influenced as much by their views on the war as by the action in the ring. “I got my money’s worth,” declared one Vietnam veteran. “I saw the Muslim get a beating just short of a KO.” Further, he had come “back alive with a fungus which is driving me nuts, and this guy Clay gets $2,500,000. . . . I despise Clay for what he is.” Conversely, many fans expressed sympathy for Ali’s position on the war. Another veteran wished he had “his money and strong arguments to stay out of the Army myself. I am . . . not a CO. Merely a draftee who has no desire to fight in Viet Nam.”10
Legions of fans at home and abroad were devastated by the decision. In Ali’s loss, Gumbel saw the promise of the 1960s turn sour. Others were equally disappointed. Several years after he got his passport back, Ali was in Tripoli, Libya, where President Muammar Gaddafi told him of the Muslim world’s great disappointment over his loss, especially in Libya, where it had been a day of mourning. In fact, Ali claimed he heard the same thing across the Islamic world. A British black nationalist declared, “Tonight the black world weeps that their king has passed away.” Whites, he lamented, “had willed that the king should die. But it took the might of the most powerful, most designing judicial system in the world to bring the king down.” Frazier, he charged, “was the unreckoning tool of that design.” Frazier resented that characterization to his dying day, but it emboldened Ali’s fans to believe that it was not Frazier’s left hooks that defeated Ali but his forced exile at the hands of the government. Ali had come back too soon and just needed more time to regain his old form.11
As a result, Ali survived to fight on as a symbol of the 1960s, helped enormously by the Supreme Court decision on June 28, 1971, that overturned his conviction on a technicality—the Justice Department had erred in failing to give a reason for rejecting Ali’s initial claim to conscientious objector status—and enabled him to pursue the title without worries of going to jail. Bent on a return match with Frazier to reclaim “his” title, however, the “people’s champion” found the crown ever elusive. Bitter over Ali’s depiction of him as an Uncle Tom, Frazier put Ali off, preferring easier foes like Terry Daniels, Ron Stander, and George Foreman. Foreman’s upset victory put off an Ali title fight even further. Even more discouraging for Ali, on March 31, 1973, he suffered a broken jaw and lost to unheralded Ken Norton, an ex-marine and a symbol of patriotism, in the conservative navy bastion San Diego, California. Most boxing observers assumed Ali was through.12
For the moment, Ali’s two defeats rendered a title fight with Foreman in Zaire or anywhere on the planet highly unlikely. At the same time, any future match between the two heavyweights in Kinshasa required that Foreman subdue his demons and retain his crown. With Ali out of action while his jaw healed and Frazier licking his wounds, Foreman enjoyed a brief moment in the spotlight as the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Despite making his ascension to the championship look brutally easy and enjoying the public acclaim he received as a patriotic defender of the American way, however, Foreman increasingly isolated himself from friends and family, still warily anticipating negative reaction to his flag-waving episode. Once he won the heavyweight title from Joe Frazier in January 1973, he lost his moral direction, found himself immersed in contract disputes and legal battles, spent his money unwisely, and saw his marriage fall apart, in good measure because of repeated infidelities. By his own admission he became the “stereotypical heavyweight champion—surly and angry.” His own mother was forced to go through an answering service when she wanted to speak to him. While he retained goodwill among black and white fans because of his admirable Job Corps stint and his demonstrated patriotism, Foreman often acted surly toward boxing fans and the press, withdrew from public life, and stoked his anger toward his opponents.13
Despite his personal problems, Foreman retained his title with brutal ease. In his first defense in Tokyo in September 1973, he knocked out the unknown Joe Roman in the first round, delivering the final blow while Roman was on the canvas. The awesome knockout made Foreman feel omnipotent: “All I could think about was my punching power. I’m the hardest puncher I’ve ever seen.” The bout lost money for the promoters, however. According to Keiji Koyama, a member of the promotion team: “If George had been more cooperative we would have done better. He wouldn’t give the interviews we asked for. George is very strange, don’t you think? He has the cleverness of a lonesome man.” Indeed, beneath Foreman’s outer power old insecurities reappeared. After demolishing Frazier and obliterating Roman, he bristled at criticism of his skills and the lack of quality opponents. In fact, one observer called the Roman fight “a hoax.”14
Comparisons to Ali only added to Foreman’s angst. As in his Fifth Ward days, he yearned “to be king of the jungle” and convince every last doubter. As his next victim Foreman picked Ken Norton, who had just broken Ali’s jaw in a twelfth-round victory, and lost a narrow decision in the rematch with Ali on September 10, 1973. The ex-marine was in for trouble. George trained hard and gave up sex for seventy-five days. Henry Clark, one of his sparring partners, told reporters he felt sorry for Norton: “Right now George is so mad about the divorce and the way a lot of his money’s been going down the drain in those crazy contract deals, he’s ready to drop somebody with one punch.” Plus, “George is still trying to prove that he’s champion,” not Ali or Frazier. If he beat Norton, there was a good chance Foreman would next face Ali, who was sitting at ringside providing color commentary. “I want to send Muhammad Ali and his mouth into retirement.” Many boxing fans applauded this sentiment.15
Foreman was at his meanest in March 1974 against Norton at Caracas, Venezuela, in South America’s first world heavyweight title fight. As the two boxers awaited the referee’s instructions, Foreman “stared at Norton with the intensity of that laser beam Goldfinger aimed at James Bond.” When round one began, the champion stalked his opponent, “savoring the anticipation of the conquest.” Norton tried two hooks and missed. Foreman hit him in the side with a solid shot. Another Norton miss was followed by a Foreman right to the head. “Down he went. As he fell against the ropes I swung and connected again,” Foreman recalled. The referee issued a warning and the crowd booed. Norton barely survived the first round. In the second round, “I became a vicious thug, swinging wildly, connecting with almost every punch,” said Foreman. After a second knockdown, the referee stopped it. He had leveled his senseless foe three times and won by TKO in the second round. Foreman’s powerful showing recalled his destruction of Frazier. He seemed invincible.16
Ali’s presence at the Norton-Foreman title fight in Caracas was no accident. By the time of Foreman’s second title defense, Ali had won his case against the US government and had surprised most boxing observers, who had thought he was washed up after his bitter losses to Frazier and Norton. Showing his own brand of determination, Ali beat both men in tough rematches to work his way back to number-one contender, the logical opponent for Foreman and the only fighter capable of guaranteeing a large payday. Even before Foreman demolished Norton, a showdown loomed between the formidable champion and Ali. The stage was set for one of the greatest spectacles in boxing history. Surprisingly, the Ali-Foreman fight was announced in Caracas before the Norton-Foreman contest had even begun.
As soon as the fight was announced, Ali began demeaning his future opponent in his comments from ringside. Speaking to the assembled press and fight fans around the globe, Ali picked Norton because “Foreman don’t hit hard.” Claiming credit for having weakened Frazier in their first fight, Ali declared that Foreman “fights like a girl. George Foreman is a tramp. He’s got no class, no skill. . . . I’m the resurrection, the prophet, the savior of boxing.” At the same time, Ali framed the fight in grandiose political terms. Set for September 25, 1974, the fight would take place in the Congo, where “them Africans like me better than George Foreman” because “he gallop in the Olympics carrying that flag. He crazy to go to Africa. They’ll cook him in a pot.” Tired of Ali stealing the spotlight with his outrageous boasting, Foreman looked down from the ring after quickly dispatching Norton and declared, “I’m going to kill you.” Many at ringside feared that this was more than likely.17
That the fight was announced in Caracas and would take place in Africa highlights the fact that heavyweight championship boxing went global during the 1970s. Several key factors made this internationalization of the sport possible, among them the emergence of new technologies that facilitated the spread of information and images from anywhere in the world as well as making it easier for people to move about the globe. Equally important were the new political and racial realities of the freedom movement at home and anticolonialism abroad that made it possible for new individuals and newly independent countries in Africa and the Third World to play significant roles in international sport. The declaration that Zaire’s president Mobutu Sese Seko would host the first-ever heavyweight title match in Africa, for instance, transformed the fight into an international cultural and political spectacle that promoter Don King called “a symbolic black happening,” one in which the world would learn “that there is more to Africa than beads, bones, and beating drums.” A major part of the drama of the match lay in what King initially called “From the Slave Ship to the Championship.” Although the Zaire government disapproved of the slogan and forced King to abandon its use, it suggested that black Americans who had left Africa in chains were now returning to the site of massive black enslavement in triumph and pride as well as in unity with their African past, a theme that resonated with the uprising of colonial peoples across the globe.18
The slogan also acknowledged that the global spectacles of the 1960s and 1970s could be staged anywhere—even remote Zaire—and broadcast across the globe via satellite technology. While professional sport had long attracted fighters from various countries around the world to major American and European capitals, the globalization of boxing in the 1970s represented a new egalitarianism that was sweeping the world as more and more former colonies achieved their independence. Instead of a tightly controlled New York–dominated boxing business centered on Madison Square Garden, in the United States prizefighting witnessed the rise of new centers for the sport that reflected the move to the Sun Belt: Miami, Houston, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles staged championship bouts with great success. Similarly, nations that had never hosted major sporting events were competing with US locations for the right to stage spectacles, just as Tokyo in 1964 and Mexico City in 1968 had competed successfully for the Olympics. In an attempt to confirm their stature as newly independent states, the leaders of “developing” countries realized that sports, especially boxing, with its universal appeal, was uniquely suited to their aspirations.19
The careers of both Foreman and Ali coincided with the spread of highly visible championship boxing matches around the globe. For the first time national governments competed with each other and with individual groups of investors to promote international title matches. Foreman won his crown in Jamaica and defended it in Tokyo and Caracas. Still, the emergence of boxing as a global spectacle drew on Ali’s worldwide popularity as an anticolonial hero. His Islamic religion, defiance of white supremacy, and opposition to the Vietnam War coincided with the revolt against colonialism across the globe. Equally important, his sympathy for black and Muslim nations and his frequent travels to visit them gave bouts in developing countries a fighting chance to succeed and earn great profits. Governments in developing countries like Zaire were eager to promote their independence, showcase their stability, and attract tourism and international investment. To do so, they were willing to use national treasuries to guarantee huge paydays for the fighters. For the first time in sports history, Ali noted in his autobiography, “Fights supported by governments, as in Zaire, Malaysia and the Philippines, attracted bids from countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Santo Domingo and Haiti; and set up promotions and matches in Ireland, Switzerland, Japan, Indonesia and Canada.” Ali credited manager Herbert Muhammad for this development, although others were definitely involved. Herbert had a poem for the new strategy: “Invite Muhammad Ali to fight / And your country will share the world spotlight.”20
Still, there was more at work than Ali’s individual story. The mythology of the Rumble in the Jungle as a global event was rooted in Ali’s personal search for redemption against his enemies. Yet according to historian Michael Ezra, this puts too much emphasis on Ali as “the transcendent conquering hero.” Although Ali—and Foreman—was at the center of a global event, the transformation of the heavyweight title match into a global spectacle of black liberation would not have happened without President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and African American promoter Don King. More important initially were Barry Burnstein and Hank Schwartz, the closed-circuit television and communications impresarios and partners in the company Video Techniques who employed King and helped bring him to prominence. Schwartz also pioneered the communications systems that helped decentralize sports promotion. While these individuals were key players, they were part of the larger process of the globalization of boxing during the 1960s and 1970s. Because of satellite technology, major sporting events could be held anywhere in the world and broadcast to more than 120 nations. The expansion of closed-circuit television, moreover, made more lucrative prizes possible for the combatants, which in turn meant that only governments could afford to sponsor these matches. Yet technology and international promotion could not have produced such a spectacular event without a global media star like Ali, a pan-African hero who embodied black nationalism at home and anticolonialism abroad versus Foreman and his media image as a patriotic defender of the American way.21
New York’s boxing power was being decentralized to regional centers and globalized with the spread of satellite communication systems. As The Ring’s Nat Loubet editorialized, “We find fight promotions originating in strange places,” led by promoters less interested in the fights themselves, but “as sources of closed circuit television spurred by the vast possibilities of satellite assistance.” In 1957 the US government had launched its initial military satellite, and by the early 1970s commercial satellites increased the speed at which communications could circle the globe. This is where Schwartz came in. Born in Brooklyn, Hank Schwartz served in the military during World War II, where he learned groundbreaking approaches to video communications. On the GI Bill after the war, he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Brooklyn Polytechnic, with a basic grasp of how TV signals were developed and transmitted. Eventually, he figured out how to use satellite and microwave technology to revolutionize how sports fans experienced major boxing matches in real time from all over the globe. By 1971, his firm, Video Techniques, was hired to transmit political and sports events, and it began to install new microwave systems to broadcast heavyweight championship fights to network TV and select theaters in the United States and other developed nations. Promoters had long recognized that they could make more money selling the rights to television stations or closed-circuit theaters via TV rather than ticket sales at actual arenas. Initially, Schwartz worked for Madison Square Garden to broadcast boxing matches to closed-circuit locations. By the time of Ali’s comeback bouts against Quarry and Bonavena, Video Techniques led the industry in TV distribution technologies and pioneered in broadcasting international sporting events, including Ali’s international fights.22
When Ali fought Mac Foster in Tokyo on April 1, 1972, for example, Japanese TV hired the company to provide television camera positions and advise on setting up exciting camera shots within the arena. The Japanese executives ignored Schwartz’s advice, failed to make use of modern production techniques, and produced a dull event, but Schwartz learned from this experience how to improve television broadcasts. If he had the ring canvases painted blue instead of white, Ali’s dancing feet would no longer be washed out. “If we could make it more ‘real,’ for the viewer” he reasoned, “the program was more saleable.” He also realized that if he packaged “together all the technical services, including well-equipped television production, a communication infrastructure able to reach the newer satellites, and proper site selection, then I could change everything.” As a result, he reinvented Video Techniques’ business model to include the technological and communication infrastructures necessary for producing international sporting events rather than only ancillary services for other companies.23
Shortly thereafter, in the fall of 1972, agents of the Jamaican government contacted Schwartz about producing the Frazier-Foreman title match in January 1973. Similar to what would transpire in Zaire two years later, the Jamaican government wanted to use a major championship fight for its own purposes, in this case to build up its tourist industry. In 1972 Jamaica advertised itself as an island paradise, but bad publicity about its high murder rate and rampant street crime undermined tourism. Schwartz traveled to Kingston to meet with government officials, inspect the arena, install a ring, and decide where to put the TV cameras and light towers. He also had to figure out how to transmit the television signal up to Jamaica’s satellite JAMINTEL, which he did by climbing the tower of JAMINTEL under the suspicious eyes of Jamaican military guards. Atop the tower he discovered that a microwave antenna installed at the tower’s highest point could receive microwave signals from an antenna installed at the stadium’s highest point. With this knowledge he convinced Prime Minister Michael Manley that Video Techniques deserved the contract to produce the high-profile event, distribute it worldwide, collect the revenues from outside Jamaica, and provide the public relations work necessary to promote the match and boost Jamaican tourism. As part of the company’s new business model, moreover, he sold some of the TV theater rights abroad while contracting with the new cable entity HBO to show the fight on home subscriber TV.24
Just as the company adjusted after Tokyo, so too Schwartz realized that control over global communications potentially gave him greater power over international boxing events. One thing he did was to bring viewers closer to the action in the ring by having his top cameraman circle the ring with a new shoulder-mount camera to capture the fight from a variety of angles, ones not previously possible. A second decision proved even more important. “We needed to focus our efforts on getting contracts signed with the top fighters,” he recalled. “We needed to be the promoter. No more middlemen! Work directly with the fighters.” It was at this crucial juncture in international boxing that Don King entered the picture as a key Schwartz ally. On his return from Jamaica in February 1973, Schwartz kept getting calls from promoter Don Elbaum urging him to hire King if he wanted to sign the top black fighters, because they would not sign contracts with a Jewish college graduate who did not speak their language. At their first meeting Schwartz noted that King’s “quick change from the scholarly discourse to the cadence of the streets of Harlem . . . or Cleveland” made him a “valuable resource.”25
One of the most remarkable figures involved in the promotion was Don King, then new to boxing. His road to Kinshasa took him from prison to international celebrity. Almost from the start, Americans viewed the outsized figure with his electrified hair, flamboyant attire, and verbal bombast as the major face of the event. As vice president of Video Techniques, King served as the company’s contact with black fighters who dominated the heavier weight divisions in the 1960s and 1970s. An ex–numbers boss and tavern owner in Cleveland, King embodied his own variant of Black Power as a man who went from ghetto criminal to the heights of boxing promotion. With great intelligence and mob ties, a gargantuan gift of gab, and a hustler’s will, he struck gold when Hank Schwartz hired him to help with the Norton-Foreman fight in Caracas and after that with the Ali and Foreman battle in Africa. As Schwartz recalled, the company needed a black front man like King. “Video Techniques had the capability of using the latest technology connecting into the developing satellite and microwave networks. I was confident we could deliver the best sporting event worldwide,” Schwartz noted, “but I needed King’s skill to pull it off. He could deliver the fighters.” In an era when racial pride had become a rallying cry, and for many in government, entertainment, and sport a positive attribute, the top heavyweight boxers were black and aware of their subordination to the white boxing establishment. King appeared to be someone they would listen to. With King on board, Video Techniques could function as the promoter for an entire event rather than serving only as the contractor to someone else by providing the TV production, marketing, and distribution. Schwartz and King formed a strong, if ultimately fragile, partnership.26
Although often derided as an unscrupulous hustler, there is more to King. According to historian Jeffrey Sammons, his independence, race consciousness, and defiance of boxing’s white power structure made him the Ali of boxing promoters. In fact, King maintained that hustler was “a mediocre word when applied to my talents. . . . I am a solitary black man up against the weapons of the white power structure, a bow and arrow against an atom bomb.” Until King, blacks might have been accepted as superb athletes, but nowhere in the white-dominated offices of American sport were they believed to have the brains and organizational ability to work at executive and managerial levels. In its discussion of the newfound power of African Americans in the realms of sport and entertainment, Black Enterprise noted, “Until King, there had never been any Blacks who had major roles, behind the scenes, in the closed-door rooms where the deals are made and the power lies.” According to Sports Illustrated’s Mark Kram, he snatched what could be the richest prize in sports “right out from under the smirks of those who never have anything taken from them—especially by a black man without a club in his hand.”27
Although King’s role in the event was initially minor, as soon as they learned of his participation in promoting the Rumble in the Jungle, black fans applauded King’s pioneering role as a black promoter in a white-run business. No matter the outcome in Zaire, noted Howard Woods in the Chicago Defender, “the glamour of the two gladiators will be matched by the color of the man—a gregarious black man—who managed to put the whole thing together,” and who portrayed the fight as an example of black unity and pride. Nation of Islam official Jeremiah Shabazz agreed: “[We] had a promoter we could be proud of, because Zaire was where Don King made his mark.” Later, Shabazz realized King cared about only money, but in Zaire “I thought Don King was all right,” as he represented the Nation of Islam’s message of black empowerment and racial pride. King demonstrated to whites and blacks far beyond the ring world that black boxing entrepreneurs could negotiate complex business deals with the heads of banks, major corporations, and nation-states. King may have been in the game for the money, the power, and the action, but he also represented the kind of hustler-to-businessman success story that appealed to the black community at a time when many blacks were demanding Black Power.28
When King first appeared on the boxing scene in 1972, he had just been released from prison, where he had served a nearly four-year sentence for manslaughter. What landed him in jail was a particularly vicious crime. It was not his first brush with violence. Like Foreman he grew up in an impoverished urban ghetto, but in the Midwestern industrial city of Cleveland. Born on August 20, 1931, the first thing he recalled about where he grew up was “realizing I wanted to get the hell out. . . . It was a microcosm of the filth and despair that black people have had to live with all their lives.” The only positive, he said, was, “It taught me how to survive. You’d have to fight for your life every minute because there was always someone wanting to take it.” When King was twelve his father died in an explosion at the tool and die factory where he worked. His mother used the insurance money to move to Mount Pleasant, a bit nicer neighborhood, but “still a ghetto.” Like other enterprising youth he graduated to the numbers racket, which brought him into the heart of the black nightlife district, with its share of gamblers, pimps, and hoods. Eventually he became Cleveland’s numbers kingpin. Like other numbers racketeers, King saw himself a benefactor of the ghetto, not its enemy, since he helped finance the college and professional education of doctors, lawyers, and scientists, and also donated to many black charities. By the late 1950s, he was, noted his friend the R&B singer Lloyd Price, “a guy you had to know if you wanted to make it in that town. He could push you to the top or see to it you got nowhere.”29
In the nightlife world, a gun was a necessity. On December 2, 1954, King had to use his weapon when three white criminals from Detroit tried to rob one of his gambling houses. In the fray King killed one of the robbers, but it was ruled self-defense and he escaped a jail term. He was not so lucky twelve years later. On April 20, 1966, King got into a violent argument with Sam Garrett at a bar over $600 that King believed his numbers runner was holding out on him. At six foot four and 240 pounds, King far outmatched the 134-pound Garrett. King beat his opponent while holding a gun on the unarmed man and then stomped him to death in full view of the bar’s patrons. He claimed self-defense but was indicted for second-degree murder. According to reporter Jack Newfield, King attempted to bribe the police and threaten witnesses, four of whom changed their stories while another was run out of town. He was convicted of second-degree murder, but the judge suspended the life sentence pending a private hearing, attended only by the judge and King’s lawyer. The beneficiary of an obvious fix, King was sentenced to three years and eleven months for manslaughter.30
Prison was the turning point of King’s life. Jail gave him time to read and think about changing his life—with astounding results. “The experience was a soul cleanser,” King declared. “I went in with a toothpick and came out with a nuclear bomb.” Among the authors he read were Shakespeare, Maupassant, Machiavelli, and Frantz Fanon. He recalled: “When I left that fucking plantation with its straw bosses I was more dangerous than ever before. Now I’ve risen like the ashes of the Phoenix.” Yet King was ever cognizant that he was black in a white man’s world: “I’ll be a number, a nigger, and an ex-convict until I die. I wanted to be a lawyer, but I knew that was white man’s stuff. Look at me, this ain’t no Horatio Alger story where you get to marry the boss’s daughter. There ain’t no boss’s daughter for me, Jack.”31
By the time King left the Marion, Ohio, prison at the age of forty on September 30, 1971, he had a firm understanding of the role that racism played in the black psyche. His views were similar to those of Ali and the Nation of Islam. “Our image as a people has a lot to be desired,” King told the Black Collegian in 1980. “We have an inferiority complex. I think the greatest job our white counterparts done on us is the impairment of the Black psyche. He has made us feel so unworthy . . . to such a degree that when we look in the mirror and look at ourselves, we don’t like ourselves.” To overcome the sickness, black Americans needed a new, positive identity. “Black is more than beautiful,” but saying it was not enough. Traditionally, black people looked to God, “but I recognize that God helps those who help themselves. Until we are able to deal with ourselves and to deal collectively for the betterment of the whole, we’re always going to be on the short end of the stick.” King’s answer was economics, because “it’s life itself.” The road to success, he preached, required “self-help, self-determination, self-reliance.”32
King certainly was determined when he left prison, but his quick rise to become boxing’s first and most powerful black promoter in three short years could not have occurred without the help of others, not all of them black. After watching Frazier defeat Ali on the prison TV in March 1971, King vowed to go into boxing, an arena that promised huge paydays, exciting physical confrontations, and large numbers of black fighters and fans. Singer Lloyd Price had known King since 1959, when his band first played at King’s New Corner Tavern. When King agreed to put on a boxing exhibition and music performance in 1972 to benefit Cleveland’s Forest City Hospital, a financially troubled, predominantly black institution, Price put him in touch with Ali, who agreed to box for free. To help him put on such a production, King called on Don Elbaum, a local matchmaker and promoter in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Although he had never heard of King, Elbaum was mesmerized by his smooth-talking enthusiasm and agreed to serve as his mentor; he could see that King was a natural promoter. With help from Price, Elbaum, and Ali the benefit sold out. In a pattern that would renew itself often, King tried to stiff one of the black fighters, siphoned off most of the money, and eventually betrayed Elbaum too. Still, with his first boxing success and his connection with Ali, King realized that promotion provided a road to wealth and social legitimacy.33
King’s path to becoming boxing’s first successful black promoter was smoothed further by Elbaum, who recognized that “boxing needs a black promoter” who knew how to relate to black boxers. After a brief stab at managing fighters, King realized the money was in promotion. Among the many boxing figures to whom Elbaum introduced King, the most important was Hank Schwartz, executive vice president of Video Techniques, a rising company in satellite sports communications. Not long before King appeared on the scene, Schwartz was pioneering the transmission of world heavyweight boxing matches from all over the globe. He could play such a role because of the power vacuum in boxing in the early 1970s. Ali’s exile had killed Main Bout promotions, and when he came back, there was no one promoter who enjoyed a monopoly on heavyweight champions. Madison Square Garden was still a player in boxing promotions, but its power had diminished with the rise of venues in Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles. Except for Jerry Quarry, the top heavyweights were black, and the promoters, led by Bob Arum and his company, Top Rank, were white. The way was open for a black promoter to take over boxing.34
Despite his prison record, King seemed honest and focused, and Schwartz believed they could work well together. They especially proved good at brainstorming to come up with strategies for promotions beset by numerous competitors as well as financial and promotional obstacles. Schwartz made King a vice president. In Schwartz’s eyes, this was the beginning of an exciting partnership. As for King, he initially said that Video Techniques “weren’t the run-of-the-mill white guys who wanted to emasculate black guys.” Later he amended that to “I was their token nigger. . . . A black face to deal with the blacks.” As part of their deal, King kept his Don King Productions company, which he had established as the vehicle for his own promotion enterprise, alive as a business entity but would give Video Techniques 100 percent of his time. Schwartz offered to teach King broadcast technology in exchange for King teaching him how to negotiate with boxers. According to Schwartz, King replied, “You can teach me what you know about satellites and distribution, but you will never learn how to talk to these black fighters.”35
With Schwartz’s knowledge of satellites and King’s ability to negotiate with black fighters, Video Techniques set about creating an Ali-Foreman heavyweight fight somewhere in the new wide world of global boxing. The Zaire bout started with a truly international cast of promoters: Americans Schwartz and King; Great Britain’s John Daly; Telemedia de Panamá, a financial front organization later revealed to be controlled by Schwartz; and Risnelia, a little-known company based in Switzerland but incorporated in Panama. The world would eventually learn that Risnelia was actually controlled by the government of Zaire and its president Mobutu Sese Seko. The participation of a variety of international entities would require a level of international negotiations unseen before in boxing.36
One reason for going offshore to Zaire and other international locations was to avoid the heavy tax bite that New York State and the IRS demanded of championship fighters. In addition, Foreman was reluctant to fight in the United States because of his personal financial difficulties. While Schwartz focused on negotiating with the Venezuelan government for the Norton-Foreman match in Caracas, King dealt with signing the two fighters for the future championship match that would eventually end up in Zaire. In the process, King learned that Foreman was mired in divorce proceedings and a series of lawsuits against his manager, Dick Sadler, who had sold off more pieces of him than he possessed. As King told Schwartz, Foreman insisted on being paid outside the country “to keep the money outside the reach of these legal proceedings.” To solve Foreman’s problems, Schwartz set up Telemedia de Panamá for $1,000. “I can do the whole promotional deal off shore . . . in Brazil or . . .” in Venezuela, where the Norton-Foreman bout was to take place. “That way Foreman’s money could be funneled through our Panamanian company. George can draw down the money he has earned where and when he wants to.” This offshore arrangement convinced Foreman to fight Norton in Caracas. When Foreman demanded more money to sign with Video Techniques, King came up with $50,000 from his Cleveland “associates.”37
Putting the Caracas fight between Foreman and Ken Norton together proved a dry run for Schwartz and King’s strenuous efforts to promote the Rumble in the Jungle. After Ali defeated Joe Frazier in January 1974 at Madison Square Garden in a much-anticipated rematch, he became the logical and most lucrative challenger to face Foreman, the locale yet to be determined. The primary difficulty lay in signing both men. In this regard King proved invaluable. Schwartz thought he had an in with Foreman because they had worked together in Jamaica, so he went after Foreman and assigned King to sign Ali. This proved King’s great opportunity and he went all out to land the richest fight in history and beat out the other promoters, such as New York’s Bob Arum, Houston’s Hofheinz family, and Jerry Perenchio and Jack Kent Cooke in Los Angeles, all eager to do the same thing. King was especially effective with Ali and his manager Herbert Muhammad, son of the leader of the Nation of Islam, by dangling in front of the fighter a prize of $5 million, which would be the biggest payday in boxing history up to that time. King also had to convince Ali and Herbert Muhammad not to go through with an Arum-run third match with Jerry Quarry. “The mere fact Arum tries to lead you down this path demonstrates his inability to relate to your blackness and the cause you’ve struggled for,” King declared. “This isn’t just another fight! Consider the monumental magnitude, the symbolic impact. Your regaining your title would do more for the cause of freedom and justice and equality than anything.” If that were not enough, King used NOI rhetoric to remind Herbert: “You have to help the black man. This white man Arum is evil. He doesn’t care for your man, even tried to set up matches finding a successor when they stripped him of his title. . . . This fight is the biggest, a chance for him to get that belt back. And it’s being put together by me. A black man.” The appeal to black pride worked. Ali turned down Quarry and agreed to fight Foreman if the promise of $5 million dollars was certain and Foreman could be signed.38
When it became evident that Schwartz was unable to sign Foreman, King went after the wary champion. Once it was clear that Foreman would receive his $5 million outside the United States, King brought in the big guns. At a time of heightened black consciousness, King persuaded Foreman that black promoters would “show all blacks around the world that we can succeed like no one has ever believed we could. I am black and this is my promotion. No white man gonna rip you off. My word is my soul.” King stressed the greatness of the fight’s “impact on black people and the whites,” but the clincher proved to be King’s assertion that “until you beat Muhammad Ali, the world will never recognize you as The Champion. As long as he’s alive and fighting and you don’t show the world who’s the best, they’ll look at Ali as the master.” According to King, Foreman responded: “I never done this before but I’m giving you my word. You got the fight.” Somehow King managed to get Foreman to sign three blank pieces of paper in lieu of a formal contract.39
King also proved invaluable immediately after Foreman demolished Norton in Caracas. Despite his spectacular victory, the champion was furious that the Venezuelan government prevented him from leaving the country until he paid a huge amount in taxes. He blamed Video Techniques. Instead of returning to New York from Caracas as planned, King accompanied Foreman to Houston, where he soothed the disgruntled champion, who by then had vowed that he would not fight Ali after all. Only by promising Foreman to get him whatever he desired did King manage to settle him down. What did Foreman want? A German shepherd that he named “Digo.”40
Although King had managed to sign both fighters there was as yet no financing and no arena. King and Schwartz had promised letters of credit to both fighters by February 15 and the deadline was looming. This is where the real nature of global boxing is revealed and where Schwartz managed to put the complicated international deal together. Veteran British promoter Jack Solomons claimed he had the $10 million promised to the two fighters and invited Schwartz to London to finalize the deal. With only two days to go, Schwartz needed the money for the letters of credit and a financial backer of the fight so his offshore company, Telemedia de Panamá, could keep the contracts in place and so that Video Techniques would not lose all its ancillary rights and the right to promote and broadcast the very fight itself. At the last minute, Solomons’s group pulled out; the fight and Video Techniques were on the line. At his wit’s end, Schwartz wandered London trying to find a solution. By chance he passed the brownstone of Hemdale Leisure Corporation, headed by John Daly, a promoter of small-time closed-circuit venues and the son of a former boxer. Daly saved the day, agreeing to provide the initial $100,000 for each fighter. However, a group that Daly assembled to come up with the $10 million in prize money tried to ace Video Techniques out of the picture. Schwartz turned them down. Once more he faced the collapse of the promotion and perhaps his company.41
At this point, a powerful international fixer, Bermuda-based Fred Weymar, called to say that a little-known Switzerland-based company, Risnelia, was interested in putting up the money for the fight, but only if it took place in Zaire. Weymar had the perfect credentials for boxing as it entered its age of government-financed multimillion-dollar promotions and hidden profits. He was a former German American supporter of the Nazi Bund who was banned from the United States, and a former investor implicated in the scandals of financiers Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Vesco, who were under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most important, he was an agent for President Mobutu of Zaire and managed his Swiss bank accounts. According to Schwartz, Weymar told him that Mobutu “wants the world to consider him a major leader and an icon for all of Africa.” For that to happen, he “wants to stage this championship as the world’s most important sporting event and he wants it to happen in the stadium in his capital, Kinshasa.” Since Weymar was barred from the United States, the meeting took place in Paris. Along with Schwartz, King, Daly, and Weymar, the meeting was attended by Mandungu Bula, another Mobutu financial adviser based in Brussels, who would eventually oversee the fight for Zaire. Rounding out the group was Geneva attorney Raymond Nicolet, who represented Risnelia Inc. Like Telemedia, Risnelia was a shell company chartered in Panama for Mobutu to transfer secretly Zaire’s money for his own use and profit.42
Although Schwartz handled the financial negotiations, King played a crucial role. Over dinner, Mandungu asked how King could trust a Jew like Schwartz. King vouched for his boss. “You can trust this one,” he replied. As a result of these negotiations, Risnelia agreed to put up two letters of credit for $4.8 million dollars for each of the fighters and Schwartz consented to hold the fight in Africa. Risnelia would get 42 percent of the profits, Hemdale 28 percent, and Telemedia, Schwartz’s own offshore company, 10 percent. Video Techniques and Don King Enterprises would receive 20 percent, with the latter earning 4.33 percent, which King took in Video Techniques stock. Eventually, the TV personality David Frost, an Australian working in Great Britain and the United States, bought the promotion rights to Australia and New Zealand.43
Zaire’s ground satellite station proved essential for the nation to stage the event for the rest of the world. Located twenty-six miles from Kinshasa, the station would transmit the signal up to Intelsat No. 4, which would then relay it to a ground station in Eaton, West Virginia. From there the signal went to the Telco Distribution Cable line in New York and throughout the United States. The broadcast to Europe and the United Kingdom would come direct from Kinshasa’s ground station or be relayed from New York. The action in the ring would be transmitted instantaneously at 186,000 miles per second around the globe. Given the centrality of the satellite and closed-circuit television to the spectacle, one estimate projected that 75 percent of total revenue would come from live closed-circuit TV in up to 450 US venues. According to Hemdale’s John Daly, the promoters expected to gross a minimum of $20 million, which would come to $8 million in profits, and a maximum take of $40 million. King was equally optimistic. “More people will see Foreman and Ali mix styles than any previous sporting event in history,” he declared. A “total audience at more than a billion people is not a gross exaggeration.”44
While Zaire’s satellite station made it possible to stage a global spectacle, advances in airplane technology made it much easier to move people and sophisticated equipment around the world at incredible speed. Schwartz and King, for instance, were frequent flyers to and from Caracas to New York and Houston, and to and from New York and London and Paris, or to and from New York and Zaire. The modern jet airplane made it possible for Ali to train and fight in the United States and abroad and then interrupt his training to follow Foreman to Tokyo and Caracas to goad him into a fight. Similarly, as a symbol of his power and a sign of his modernity, plus evidence of his willingness to use the nation’s money to enhance his prestige, President Mobutu of Zaire was the only black African leader to own a Boeing jumbo jet, which he used to travel the world for diplomacy and pleasure. Furthermore, for the Norton-Foreman match in Caracas, Video Techniques needed to move so much high-level TV equipment that Schwartz rented a Hercules C-103A transport plane from the US Air Force. High-speed jet travel was so integral to modern globalized boxing that as Schwartz and King discovered, jet lag had become a cost doing business.45
As soon as the boxing world learned that the fight would take place in Zaire, a country few Americans had even heard of, collective head scratching commenced. Why was such a bizarre locale chosen over American or European sites? Alan Hubbard, editor of Britain’s Sportsworld, had a ready answer that spoke to the globalization of sport: “Is there any difference between holding the world heavyweight bout in Kinshasa and the Olympics in Mexico City?” As he put it, “the truth is promoting the ‘richest prize in sport’ is no longer the prerogative of America.” As Hubbard concluded, distance no longer mattered; live satellite transmission obliterated issues of space and time. “The ‘live’ audience is relatively immaterial—with the bulk of the profits from closed-circuit television, an arena is required really as a studio,” he said. In that case, “Kinshasa’s ‘Stadium of the 20th May’ is as good as anywhere—if the communications work.” Communications were indeed crucial, which explains Schwartz’s decision to fly in US and European equipment and technicians to supplement local facilities. Eager to impress the world, the Zaire government wanted everything to come off as planned.46
What lay behind President Mobutu’s decision to make sure that Kinshasa would be the place where all roads came together? Why did he decide to gamble his prestige on such a risky and expensive venture? An early account of the fight suggests that Mobutu conceived of hosting the match when he and Ali met by chance in Abu Dhabi in summer of 1973, or perhaps in Kuwait in February 1974. Mobutu’s visit was part of a successful diplomatic effort to create rapprochement with Arab leaders. Ali, meanwhile, was in the Middle East to bolster his ties to Islamic nations and to support various causes in the Arab world. Their discussion in the Middle East of a possible title match underscores the rise of new nations across the globe and the entry of new players in boxing. “My ancestors lived in Zaire . . . I want to regain the title that was stolen from me,” Ali told Mobutu. “This will be the greatest spectacle of modern times. I want to offer it to Africa.” It is impossible to say what Mobutu replied to Ali at this juncture, but he, like leaders of other developing countries, viewed control of boxing as a sign of American power and prestige. Challenging the American monopoly over boxing offered Mobutu an opportunity to raise his nation’s stature and shift power and assets to the Third World. When the opportunity arose six months later in February 1974, he ordered his agents to arrange for the spectacle to be held in Zaire.47
At the time of the Rumble in the Jungle, President Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Zaire with an iron hand. As part of a broader “authenticity” campaign, he wanted a grand international spectacle, a “Super Fight of the Century,” to promote his country as a successful example of black liberation from European colonialism. Only fourteen years after independence, the fight would showcase an independent African state capable of rivaling the developed world with its own economic, social, and political progress. Mandungu Bula, the Zairian official in charge of the fight, put it succinctly: “The fight is the most suitable way to get our country known. The nature of the fighters is the reason. A man like Ali. I don’t think you’ll have the same type of fight for another 20 years.” The New York Times concurred: “The gladiators will serve as the most expensive public relations men in the history of world government.” Unlike Jamaica’s Manley, Mobutu was less interested in tourism and more concerned with attracting foreign investment in Zaire’s vast mineral wealth of copper, diamonds, cobalt, and uranium. Mobutu also wanted to burnish his image as the independent enlightened leader of a modern nation, to cement his control over a far-flung, ethnically and linguistically diverse country, thus helping him outshine rivals for the leadership of Africa.48
In 1974, Zaire was at the height of its prosperity, just before the oil boycott and the dramatic decline in copper prices decimated the country’s economy. As the Chicago Tribune put it in August 1974, under Mobutu “Zaire enjoys a stability and prosperity that would have surprised anyone who was there for the chaotic days following independence. The city of Kinshasa, for example, is noticeably wealthier than most other cities in West and Central Africa.” Mandungu Bula concurred. “It is because of the peace and contentment in Zaire that the fight is possible for us.” Not only would the fight provide an opportunity to showcase Mobutu’s leadership; it would also present a portrait of a modern African nation far different from the common and racist view of the Congo as “the Heart of Darkness.”49
Mobutu grew up in the Belgian Congo, one of the most brutal and backward European colonies in Africa. Born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu on October 14, 1930, he belonged to the Ngbandi tribe, one of the smallest of the Congo’s more than two hundred ethnic groups. His humble roots and deep-seated resentment of his betters drove his ambition. His father died when he was eight, his mother had a dubious reputation, and an uncle in the administrative center of Coquilhatville sent him to a school run by white priests, where he was known as a good student but also a troublemaker. As punishment for running away to the capital of Léopoldville in 1949, the priests enrolled him in the country’s military force, the Force Publique, for seven years. As the black army of the Belgian colonial power, the Force brutally helped its white colonial officers keep order and ensure that the valuable rubber and ivory supplies kept flowing.50
Just as prison turned King around and the Job Corps changed Foreman, the army transformed Mobutu’s prospects. In the Force Publique he found a stern but caring mentor and a sense of self-discipline. He read widely, passed an accountancy course, and wrote for the local press. When his hitch ended, he took up journalism. In 1958 he traveled to the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, a tribute to Belgian colonialism, and stayed on for further journalism training. There he interacted with young Congolese intellectuals opposed to Belgian rule, among them Patrice Lumumba, who made Mobutu his secretary. A hard worker and a pragmatic restraint on his more impassioned friend, Mobutu was also courageous, staring down an army mutiny single-handed after independence. At the same time, the CIA was wooing Mobutu as a potential source of information and a future leader should the Congo exhibit “communist” sympathies.
Independence occurred abruptly in 1960, resulting in five years of chaos and political instability. Unlike the British, the Belgians had little interest in anything other than rubber and minerals. They failed to create an indigenous leadership class or bureaucracy; nor did they unify the Congo’s disparate ethnic groups and vast territorial expanse into a coherent nation. Four separate governments vied for power, a Belgian-led invasion battled to retake diamond rich Katanga province, and UN peacekeepers struggled to maintain order. Spurned by the United States as a dangerous and mentally unstable revolutionary, Lumumba, leader of one of the competing governments, turned to the Soviet Union for aid, thereby further alienating the US. With Mobutu in charge of the army in 1961, and at the urging of the CIA, Lumumba was assassinated by political rivals, which Mobutu knew about in advance, and in all probability he was an active conspirator in Lumumba’s murder. The next four years saw political turmoil, threats of armed secession, and Marxist rebellion. In 1965, again with the aid of the CIA, Mobutu led a coup that made him president and head of the army. He was welcomed as president by the US and European governments, which were desperate for a pro-Western leader, and he also received CIA support and remuneration. While the new regime repressed, exiled, and jailed the opposition, banning all political parties but Mobutu’s, his authoritarian government did manage to restore a semblance of stability after five years of armed struggle.51
While repression did its work, Mobutu turned to the creation of an ideology to unify the fragmented nation and distinguish it from its colonial past. To remedy the continuing sway of psychological, cultural, and economic colonialism, many new black African states worked to develop a distinctive African sensibility, from Kwame Nkrumah’s black consciousness in Ghana to Léopold Senghor’s Negritude in Senegal, and Aimé Césaire of Martinique. Confident by the early 1970s of Zaire’s independence and potential for prosperity, Mobutu launched his own “authenticity program,” a vision of postcolonial Black Power that underlay his desire to host major sporting events and other regional and global spectacles. As with disparate concepts of Black Power flourishing in the United States, authenticity sought to recover a black African identity eviscerated by years of colonial rule. As Zaire modernized, Mobutu declared, it needed to do so with African spiritual values, not be ruled by western materialism. “Authenticity is the realization by the Zairian people that it must return to its origins, seek out the values of its ancestors, to discover those which contribute to its harmonious and natural development,” he said in a speech to the United Nations. “It is the refusal to blindly embrace imported ideologies.”52
In creating “authenticity,” Mobutu and his advisers attempted to overcome a colonial discourse that deemed Africans—especially the Congolese—as backward primitives who lagged millennia behind a more powerful, enlightened West and needed white rule to evolve to civilized status. Henry M. Stanley, the famous white Congo explorer, articulated the central ideas of colonial discourse in The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State. “On August 14th 1879,” he wrote, “I arrived at the mouth of this river to ascend it, with the novel mission of sowing along its banks civilized settlements, to peacefully conquer and subdue it, to remould it in harmony with modern ideas into National States, within whose limits the European merchants shall go hand in hand with the dark African trader, and justice and law and order shall prevail, and murder and lawlessness and the cruel barter of slaves shall forever cease.” Whether it was Christianity or Reason, enlightened Western powers had a duty to define a geographic entity and raise prehistoric savages to civilized standards. It went without saying that to subdue a primitive people without history or traditions often required brutality on the part of “more highly evolved” white Europeans.53
When the Congo achieved its independence in 1960, white Americans viewed the political infighting through a Cold War lens deeply influenced by the colonial discourse. Molded by books and movies such as Tarzan of the Apes (1912), King Solomon’s Mines (1950), Watusi (1959), Something of Value (1957), and Congo Crossing (1956), white—and many black—Americans continued to see black Africans as naked, illiterate, and emotional savages prone to irrational revolt. Indeed, US officials depicted Lumumba, who rejected the colonial discourse of white paternalistic leadership, as the devil and equated him with a history of black African savagery and chaos. Without a strong man friendly to the United States in charge, the Russians would have taken over. After all, Africans could not rule themselves.54
Assuming power in 1965, Mobutu moved to overcome Congo’s colonial past. As part of authenticity he changed the country’s name and the river that coursed through it, the Congo, to Zaire, and he ordered Christian names be replaced with “authentic” African ones, including his own—from Joseph-Désiré Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. The government tore down colonial-era statues; renamed roads and squares after key independence struggles; and designated Léopoldville, named for the Belgian king responsible for the death of millions, as Kinshasa. Honorific titles and madam and monsieur were replaced by the more egalitarian-sounding citoyen and citoyenne. In addition, the national flag and the national anthem no longer reflected the Belgian past, and the twenty-one-gun salute for foreign heads of state was replaced by tribal drumming. The regime declared European dress inauthentic, ordering men to replace Western suits with the abacost, a Mao-style, high-collared coat of blue or brown wool, worn without a tie, also considered a colonial relic. More restrictive rules governed women’s attire. Women could not wear miniskirts but had to dress in more dignified and traditional pagnes, or wraps. The government also penalized the use of lipstick and other cosmetics, and strongly discouraged wigs in favor of more natural hairstyles, which paralleled American black nationalist beliefs that skin lighteners and wigs were pathetic attempts to copy white forms of beauty.55
The emphasis on authentic African traditions might incite tribal loyalties, however, so the regime focused on inventing common traditions to unify the nation. Huge “animation” festivals of song, dance, and parades attempted to concretize invented traditions and consecrate a national spirit. However, the “words of traditional songs and chants [were changed],” according to political scientist Kenneth Adelman, “so as to praise the President and the national party, rather than the founding ancestors or the goodness of life.” In his desire to make himself the undisputed leader of a fractured nation, Mobutu placed himself at the center of these rituals attired in an abacost, wearing a leopard-skin headdress, and carrying a staff like a traditional village chief, that is, as the complete embodiment of the nation. Because he believed himself fully in tune with the populace, he saw no need for opposition political parties or the chaos of democratic rule.56
Authenticity was also intended for international consumption. Much of the nationalist rhetoric was meant to alter Mobutu’s reputation in the eyes of other African and developing nations, which saw him as a tool of the CIA and Western economic interests, and as a symbol of Western intervention in their independence struggles. To establish his credibility as an independent Third World leader, he expropriated the language and symbols of other Third World nationalisms and built a cult around the much-admired Lumumba. Zairianization, for example, was announced in 1974 as a radical economic plan to refurbish Mobutu’s credibility in the developing world. Nationalization of the economy was borrowed from China, North Korea, and radical African countries, and from North Korea he adapted the concept of national pilgrimage points to which Zairians could travel and where they could pledge their allegiance to the country and its leader. Authenticity’s debt to Senghor and Césaire’s Negritude was obvious. He also drew on Western images of the Congo and transformed them into a Zairian national identity acceptable to the West. Most notably, he used the West’s image of the autocratic village chief to justify his despotic rule, which passed US scrutiny, since most American leaders believed the Congo not ready for democracy. By the early 1970s, Mobutu had succeeded in raising the regime’s international status. He received credit at home and abroad for elevating the Congo’s economic prosperity and political stability.57
As a key element of his authenticity campaign, the Rumble in the Jungle was intended to bolster his popularity at home, strengthen his position in black Africa, and launch his nation onto the world stage. The Super Fight of the Century, to distinguish it from mere Fights of the Century, would take place on September 25, at the height of the authenticity campaign and was the most spectacular of many high-prestige events designed to raise the regime’s stature at home and abroad. Equally satisfying to Mobutu, other nations took his campaign for authenticity seriously. Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Togo copied his ideas, and Dahomey, Burundi, and Togo adopted the abacost. Meanwhile, the presidents of Panama and Uruguay published Mobutu’s speeches and ordered party officials to study them. As the Zairian newspaper Taifa put it, “The political sense of the Ali-Foreman fight is to give homage to President Mobutu.” This explains why the original date of the match coincided with the Quinzaine de Mobutuisme, a two-week celebration of “Mobutu’s thought,” which encompassed public meetings, traditional dancing, and the opening of his political party’s school. As late as the 1990s, many Congolese still expressed thanks to Mobutu for hosting the fight. Such a unique global event gave them a larger sense of national identity that transcended tribal and geographic particularities.58
Mobutu’s willingness to spend more than $20 million to stage Africa’s first heavyweight title fight revealed his desire to advertise Zaire and himself. Months before the fight, he seemed to have succeeded. Press coverage depicted Zaire as a stable, wealthy country under his benevolent autocracy. Chicago Tribune reporter Jim Mann, for example, argued that “journalists who will come here for the heavyweight championship fight will probably find this to be a pretty strange place,” a nation poor by Western standards, “but which is quite wealthy by African standards” and “enjoys a stability and prosperity that would have surprised anyone who was there for the chaotic days following independence.” Looking forward, the government wanted more corporate investment. Even more, noted the Christian Science Monitor, no matter who wins, President Mobutu has already won. The fight “has helped put this tremendous yet little-known country on the map, internationally speaking.” According to one high foreign official, “It has made its impact overseas. And domestically it has caused a lot of excitement and activity too.” The Super Fight had made Zaire and its proud president international household names.59
President Mobutu constructed an African setting for one of the century’s great international spectacles, packed with huge symbolic baggage. As Mandungu Bula told American audiences: “Here is a country ruled by black men where there is no racial prejudice. We have no chauvinism. . . . We would like to show what a black nation can do. Especially a black nation that has been ruled by whites with aggression for so long. People who didn’t believe we were human beings. There is no desire for revenge. There is a desire to work in peace.”60
For their part, Schwartz and King ballyhooed the fight and its African setting as an international spectacle awash in the symbolic trappings of global Black Power. As the black American face of the production, King had a gift for providing narratives for major sporting events. In his hands, the bout became a way for black Americans to return symbolically to their homeland at a time when many of them were seeking their cultural roots in Africa. The return to Africa, “From the Slave Ship to the Championship,” was a theme he enunciated repeatedly. This “symbolic black happening,” he declared, would help transform the world’s image of Africa.61
King was not alone in promoting the fight’s African themes. At a press party on May 15 to formally announce the fight in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, Schwartz displayed African art he had collected in Zaire and pieces from New York’s Tribal Art Gallery to define the theme of the fight. As a result, the Rainbow Room was adorned with “wooden statues, tribal masks, drums, and other African art. These had been arranged as a background display so that all the photographs included glimpses of the artifacts behind Ali at the microphone.” While Schwartz emphasized the African setting and King stressed the symbolic return of former slaves to their ancestral homeland, with Mobutu’s participation symbols of Black Power and anticolonialism were broadcast worldwide. As Griffin Booker declared in the Amsterdam News, the Mobutu regime saw the fight as the beginning of the new era of Pan-African brotherhood. “The pride of Black people the world over is at stake here and most Blacks have pledged an undying devotion to make this one a success.”62
To emphasize his powerful black leadership, atop the stadium as the focal point that fans would see was a thirty- by fifteen-foot poster of a benevolent President Mobutu in leopard-skin hat and scarf. As representatives of the international media traveled from the airport to their downtown hotels, huge billboards hid from sight squalid squatters’ shanties while proclaiming the regime’s modernity and linking Africans and African Americans together against white supremacy. “BLACK POWER IS SOUGHT EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD,” announced one sign, “BUT IT IS REALIZED HERE IN ZAIRE.” Other signs amplified the message: “A FIGHT BETWEEN TWO BLACKS IN A BLACK NATION, ORGANIZED BY BLACKS AND SEEN BY THE WHOLE WORLD; THAT IS A VICTORY OF MOBUTUISM.” Still another protested colonialism and proclaimed that Zaire should be the leader of liberation in Africa: “THE COUNTRY OF ZAIRE WHICH HAS BEEN BLED BECAUSE OF PILLAGE AND SYSTEMATIC EXPLOITATION,” this billboard read, “MUST BECOME A FORTRESS AGAINST IMPERIALISM AND A SPEARHEAD FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT.” Still another declared: “IT IS NOT ENOUGH FOR US TO CONDEMN COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM AND RACISM, IT IS ALSO NECESSARY TO MEASURE OUR CAPACITY AND OUR WEAKNESS AND BE UNITED IN ORDER TO FACE THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPMENT.”63
At the press conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on September 9, 1974, the day Ali was to leave for Zaire, King announced another key component of the fight, a three-day music festival to showcase the musical culture of the African diaspora. Zaire 74 was scheduled to open for what King called “the greatest sporting event in the history of the world.” When the microphone was turned over to Ali, he asked reporters who they picked to win. Most of them said Foreman. As a result, Ali would be the underdog for only the third time in his career. If he was considered an underdog, so too was the entire African fight promotion, including the music fest. Until the bout actually occurred, most observers remained skeptical it would ever come off, whether the music festival would take place, whether the events would attract any tourists, and whether there would be enough accommodations if they did come. Could a black African former colony pull off such a modern, sophisticated global event?64
In fact, massive problems abounded. In March 1974, only a month after the deal was finalized, Schwartz’s inspection of Kinshasa’s facilities left him severely depressed. Mobutu’s claims of modernity fell far short of American standards. Schwartz discovered a Third World country lacking hotel rooms. Also lacking was the infrastructure needed to put on the fight, such as proper satellite technology, media facilities, and the people capable of mounting such a global spectacle. “The country,” Schwartz recalled, “looked like a shithole.” The route to Mai 20 Stadium was a dirt road, he recalled. “We approached a large vine-covered structure. I assumed it was an architectural ruin, perhaps a holy place” rather than the stadium for the fight. He told Jack Newfield: “I felt like I had made a terrible mistake. I went into a panic. It wasn’t usable.” Even more astonishing, Schwartz found crumbling seats and human feces on the floor of the stadium where local athletes changed their clothes. “There wasn’t even a roof over the ring,” he added. Most troubling, Schwartz discovered there was no microwave connection to the satellite earth station. “Physically sick,” he told Zaire officials that “the fight couldn’t go ahead with the contract.”65
Whatever Schwartz wanted built or fixed, they would do in time with money from the national treasury. But Zaire’s government insisted on using the stadium because of its symbolic import. Built in the 1930s under Belgian rule, the stadium was an example of colonial injustice. The stands for the whites were well appointed, but those for the indigenous lacked even latrines. It was after a soccer game here in 1959 that mass protests against Belgium erupted, and it was where Mobutu announced his authenticity programs. Indeed, the regime proved eager to renovate it so it would rank as the most modern stadium in Africa, a sign of the regime’s own modernity and independence from colonialism. The government “is virtually rebuilding its largest stadium for the fight,” noted the New York Times’ Thomas A. Johnson in July. The government built a new runway at the airport to handle the jumbo jets that would bring in performers, fighters, equipment, technical personnel, journalists, and however many brave fight fans would decide to attend. The government also invested in a four-lane highway from the airport to downtown hotels, built a bar for the world press, and hired French technical experts to put in a hundred telephones that would link up to the satellite station fifty miles away. In addition, the government refitted the microwave system to enable television signals to travel from the stadium to the uplink dish. According to Schwartz, Mobutu fulfilled his promises: “He converted a shithole into a first-class facility and he did it in six months.” In all this, though, little was said about the regime’s use of the stadium’s basement as a place where political opponents and criminals were tortured and killed.66
Still, doubts abounded. One skeptic was British promoter Jack Solomons, who had failed to come up with the money when Schwartz needed it most. He now planned to bring European tourists to Zaire, but his inspection trip to Kinshasa left him disappointed. “I stayed eight days,” he said, “and when I returned I had still not seen” the stadium or the relevant officials. “I had the presidential suite at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kinshasa, and even then it took me ten minutes to get my key in the lobby. Imagine the turmoil on fight night.” Solomons also doubted that security would be sufficient: “I can see chaos there as the fight builds up and in the stadium on fight night. . . . Unless they get a real pro working with them all I can do is wish them the best of luck.” The Daily Mail’s John Edwards, who covered Kinshasa’s soccer team, also expressed doubts: “I just don’t see how they can do it. Corruption is rife and communications are impossible. The telephone, for all practical purposes, is non-existent.” With images of African chaos and the stereotypical view of Africa as “the heart of darkness,” it seemed like the entire promotion was as much an underdog as Ali was when the focus of the boxing world and a global public turned toward Africa on September 10, 1974.67
When Ali and his huge entourage deplaned at Kinshasa’s airport on September 10, however, optimism and high spirits reigned as twenty-four women in colorful dress greeted them with traditional welcome dances performed to the beat of drummers. On the way to the terminal, where they were met by government officials, Ali’s party walked between an honor guard of helmeted soldiers standing at attention. Upon exiting the airport, there were five thousand Zaïroises who had been waiting for hours to see their hero. Many had walked miles, arrived on bicycle, or in old jalopies. According to Schwartz, Ali was greeted not only as a sports icon but also as “a young, charismatic African American who represented them in the global landscape.” As soon as they saw him the crowd began chanting his name.68
Standing on a bench with his arms raised to the sky, Ali shushed the crowd and announced that Foreman was “a white Belgian,” adding that “I feel Foreman is a stranger coming to my home to fight me.” This was part of his strategy to make independent Zaire his home turf and Foreman a foreign interloper on par with their former Belgian colonial rulers. This tactic was easy, noted Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s doctor, since there were “a lot more a lot more people in Kinshasa with the name Muhammad or Ali than George or Foreman.” Nor was it hard to turn Ali into the hero and Foreman the villain—in Zaire and all of black Africa, Ali was the best-known American, and his fame rested on his courageous defiance of the American government and the racist nature of American society. Wherever he went in Zaire, Ali was greeted by the roar of massive crowds. He proclaimed himself an African and they accepted him totally, spontaneously cheering him on with the chant, “Ali, bomaye!” (Ali, kill him!).69
When a supremely confident George Foreman arrived two days later, he had no idea that Ali was already engaged in winning the hearts and minds of Zairians, and he played right into the latter’s hands. Without a clue of what would follow, the champion deplaned to polite applause. Only Mandungu Bula and three government officials were there to meet him. The crowds that had turned out to cheer Ali were gone. To the reception committee’s shock, Foreman led Digo, his German shepherd, down the steps. Little did Foreman know that this type of dog had been used by the Belgian police for crowd control and had become a symbol of police brutality and colonial oppression. After Belgian authorities departed the Congo, in fact, the newly independent Congolese killed as many of the dogs as they could. Apparently, the champion took his dog everywhere, which gave Ali the opportunity to remind Zairians that the Belgian imperialists set such dogs on them. For example, during one of Ali’s sparring sessions, noted reporter Jerry Izenberg, he would yell to the crowd, “Do you know that dog is white?” Everyone responded, “Oui.” “Do you remember when the Belgians were here and they set their dogs on your people?” Ali asked again, and the excited crowd yelled back, “Oui.” “Do you know that this dog is a citizen of Belgian [sic]?” Everyone was yelling and dancing, even urging Ali to kill the dog. By his actions, noted trainer Angelo Dundee, Foreman “hardly endeared himself to the local populace.”70
“It was indeed Ali country,” continued Dundee, “and he was playing the underdog card brilliantly.” The extent that this was true can be seen in the different living quarters assigned to the two combatants. The fact that Ali and his entourage were housed in luxurious villas at the Presidential Palace at N’Sele, overlooking the mighty Zaire River, said it all. Foreman, conversely, found his quarters “less than deluxe,” five kilometers from N’Sele on an old military base filled with rats, lizards, insects, and enclosed by cyclone fences and barbed wire. Rowdy soldiers armed with rifles and fueled by large quantities of beer patrolled the base. Bill Caplan, Foreman’s publicist, told Chicago Tribune sports columnist Rick Talley that George’s dog was the reason for being in a separate camp. “These people hate dogs,” Caplan explained. “They were afraid Foreman’s dog might cause an incident.” As a result, the champion found himself up on a hill behind a fence isolated from everyone while the challenger awaited the fight in a riverside villa set aside for visiting dignitaries.71
As the fighters settled into their camps two weeks before the scheduled fight date of September 25, sportswriters began trickling into the country, and fans worldwide eagerly awaited the much-anticipated title match. Nine days before the fight, however, on September 16, a chance event jolted everyone’s plans. Foreman was battering his sparring partner around the ring when the journeyman Bill McMurray threw up his arms to protect himself from the champion’s savage blows. In doing so his elbow opened up a nasty cut a quarter inch deep and through two layers of skin above Foreman’s right eye. According to Dundee: “Foreman was bleeding all over the place. The fight was off.” Months of planning and hard work vanished. Foreman distrusted the local doctors and feared needles and stitches, and he had his trainer Dick Sadler temporarily close the cut with a butterfly bandage until he could fly to Belgium or Paris for proper medical attention. According to a Zairian doctor, “in one week’s time, a moderate blow could reopen the cut.” To the consternation of government authorities, Sadler immediately asked for a postponement: “And the promoters, trying to make chicken salad out of the chicken droppings they were suddenly left with, were seen scurrying around in an attempt to salvage the promotion.”72
Fearing that Foreman would not return if he were allowed to leave the country for medical treatment, the Mobutu regime prohibited both fighters from departing Zaire. After all, the developing African nation had already invested nearly $10 million in purses for the fighters and another $12 million in infrastructure. Government officials may have been prompted by a plea Ali released to the press. Convinced that if Foreman left, he would not come back, Ali sent a message to Mobutu via the press: “I appeal to the President not to let anybody connected with the fight out of the country. . . . Be careful. George might sneak out at night. Watch the airports. Watch the train stations. Watch the elephant trails. Send boats to patrol the rivers. Do whatever you have to do, Mr. President, but don’t let George leave the country. He’ll never come back if you let him out. . . . Because he knows I can’t lose!” To prevent the disastrous news from getting out, the Zairian authorities closed down all international telex and telephone communications to the United States, with the exception of John Vinocur of AP and the New York Post’s Larry Merchant, who had filed their stories before Zaire’s officials realized the significance of the cut. “For several days it was unclear whether the fight would be postponed or canceled.”73
In their initial attempts to avoid postponing the fight, Zairian officials ensured the enmity of the American press with their heavy-handed treatment. Mandungu Bula initially told the press: “You must not publicize” the cut. “It will be improperly understood in your country. This cut is nothing. I suggest you forget about this story. Go for a swim.” To find out what was really happening and end the confusion and government obfuscation, several reporters and a US Information Agency officer traveled to Foreman’s training camp at N’Sele to get the word from the champion and his manager. As they approached Sadler and Foreman, who appeared welcoming, security officers ordered them to get out: “You are bothering the champion.” When the newsmen objected that this was untrue, the security men said, “You’re bothering me.” Suddenly soldiers armed with machine guns forced the visitors to retreat. This “general breakdown” of international communications led Dick Young, of the New York Daily News, to call Zaire a “police state.” The American embassy concluded that it was fortunate for Zaire that only a handful of American reporters were in Kinshasa when the cut occurred.74
In an attempt to salvage the situation, a ninety-minute closed-door meeting was called on the afternoon of September 18 at the Inter-Continental Hotel. In a telex to the State Department, the American ambassador described the hard infighting that eventually resulted in an agreed-on postponement until October 30. Zaire’s government representatives, Mandungu Bula, president of the Ali-Foreman Fight Commission, and his deputy, Tshimpumpu Kanyika, were made to realize that their desire for only a one-week postponement was unrealistic given the seriousness of the injury. Fearful of losing the fight to other countries, Zaire officials insisted that the match could not be canceled. It had to take place in Zaire. King also wanted the fight to remain in Zaire for financial reasons—and perhaps reasons of personal and black pride. After all, his reputation as a promoter was on the line, and he had emphasized the importance of a black-run spectacle in a black African nation. As a result, King helped Mandungu Bula ram through the date of October 22, although Sadler kept insisting that it was “premature” to set a fixed date. Mandungu reiterated that as far as Zaire’s government was concerned, October 22 was the date. However, everyone soon agreed to October 30, as suggested by Schwartz, because it would more realistically give Foreman’s cut a chance to heal. Still, both Foreman and Sadler left the impression that Foreman would fight only when he was ready. For more than a week, the vagueness drove the promoters crazy.75
The roads to Kinshasa proved bumpy, but there were still more obstacles to overcome before the fight would actually take place. Mobutu’s officials became increasingly upset over foreign criticism of their handling of the fight, and the promoters scrambled to rearrange scheduling with closed-circuit television outlets across the globe and strove to whip up publicity all over again. For the fighters, an initial two-week stay in a foreign country had stretched to seven weeks. Boredom became a common enemy. Needless to say, doubts that Zaire could pull off a global spectacle of this magnitude increased, especially since the postponement pushed the event into monsoon season. Would torrential rains wash away the efforts of all the participants? Meanwhile, Zaire 74, the three-day music festival designed to precede the title match, would still take place on schedule, now five weeks before the fight.