“I had to learn how to meditate in a room full of violent men,” King said. “It was sheer hell to go to the hole. You could wake up in the middle of the night and have to take a leak. What a sight in the urinals. Prisoners sucking guards…. Guards going down on prisoners. One man taking another’s ass. Hell, man, you got to get your head in order.”
As this rap subsided, Mailer heard Hunter Thompson whisper, “Bad Genet.” King continued to perform for Mailer.
“I read Karl Marx, a cold motherfucker,” he said. “I learned a lot from him. Hitler and Marx—I think of them in relation to some of the things they’re doing here, you know, the country is the family, concentrate on the young.”
At the next table Mailer overheard Thompson refine his opinion to “Very bad Genet.”
King also told the writer with an interest in manhood and violence another anecdote from his past. Mailer described it this way: “Once when one of his lesser known fighters hinted that a contract was unsatisfactory, and King could get hurt, Don leaned forward— fond was he of telling this story—and said, ‘Let’s not bullshit each other. You can leave here, make a call, and have me killed in a half hour. I can pick up the phone as you leave and have you offed in five minutes.’ That was expression appropriate to the point.”
At a lavish cocktail party, George Plimpton, who was covering the fight for Sports Illustrated, had an exchange with King that was captured by one of Leon Gast’s camera crews. Plimpton seemed to surprise King by asking why he didn’t donate a small portion of the profits from the fight to assist poor black people in the United States.
King replied, “I need white counterparts to do this here. I have to put money in the sun, so it can germinate, blossom, and grow.”
Plimpton looked perplexed by the words without meaning, and King changed the subject away from social responsibility.
* * *
The outdoor weigh-in for the fight was a Mobutu-Don King extravaganza that became a parody of Western decadence coming to enlighten Africa. The event became an absurdist ritual, staged for American television at midnight in the outdoor stadium, with twenty thousand Africans who had never seen a weigh-in before let in for free.
First Foreman ran out onto the stadium floor like an African imposter in a tribal robe. He was waving to the crowd, which was chanting, “Ali, bomaye,” which meant Ali should kill Foreman.
Ali then came out leading a parade of about five hundred supporters, who all seemed to be fighting to be the seventh in line, behind his brother Rachman, Bundini (Drew Brown), Angelo Dundee, Gene Kilroy, Walter Youngblood, and Ferdie Pacheco. There was pushing and scuffles as the column snaked toward the scales and television cameras, looking like a moving mosh pit.
Foreman had his beloved dog with him, and while the champion was slipping out of his tribal robe, preparing to step on the scale, some prankster in Ali’s faction tried to steal the dog. This made Foreman go berserk.
The undefeated champion of the world was screaming like a little child, “Where’s my dog? Where’s my dog?”
King was also in an African robe (the money men like Bradshaw and Bula were wearing Western suits), and he seemed immune to the absurdity of the scene around him. King was just smiling for the cameras, making sure the ABC-TV crew would get its interview because the interviews would help sell tickets to the hundreds of closed-circuit locations in the United States.
The whole event became even more absurd when the television feed from the satellite went dead for a few minutes, delaying everything in the stadium, while Howard Cosell filled time on live television.
When the satellite feed was restored, Ali told the American audience, “Don King is the world’s greatest promoter, and if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be fighting here in Africa.” The challenger also apologized for what sounded like a bad sore throat, explaining, “I’ve been debatin’ all day.”
Before he gave this interview, Ali had gone into the ring and carefully measured it, counting off the steps between the ropes, to get the sense of distance imprinted on his mind. Boxing is geometry. Everything depends on distances and angles. And Ali, the Einstein of the Sweet Science, wanted to know exactly how many steps he and Foreman had to take to reach the ropes.
For months Ali had set the trap, telling every reporter he was going to dance all night. That was his feint. By now Ali knew he would have to hurt Foreman in the first round, and that the question was what distance from Foreman to position himself, to be close enough to strike a damaging punch. His “dance, dance, dance” mantra was a ploy to mislead the robotic Foreman.
When it was Foreman’s turn to be interviewed on American television, with King hovering next to him, the champion lied like a politician.
“I love Zaire,” he said. “It’s the cradle of democracy. I’m enjoying this country.”
The fight itself was an epic, a miracle, a revolution. It became one of those sporting events that grows bigger with the passage of time, like Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, or Ted Williams hitting .406 in 1941, or the Jets upset of the Colts in 1969.
It was a miracle because of the way Ali won, and because nobody expected him to prevail. It was a revolution because it made Don King the king of boxing.
Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s personal doctor who worked in his corner, didn’t merely expect his own fighter to lose. He feared so strongly for Ali’s life that he had quietly made advance arrangements for a plane to be waiting to fly Ali to Lisbon, in case he needed brain surgery from Foreman’s blows.
Gene Kilroy was in Foreman’s dressing room before the fight to watch his hands get wrapped. He heard Foreman say, “I’m going to kill him,” and his trainer, Archie Moore, say, “I feel death is in the air.” Moore later disclosed that he said a silent prayer “that Ali not die in the fight.”
There was a sense of dread in Ali’s dressing room, although he was serene and playful. Sensing this defeatist mood at a moment when his ego should be getting maximum reinforcement, Ali told Norman Mailer, who was allowed into the room: “Nothing to be scared about. It’s just another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali. Just one more workout in the gym to me. I’m afraid of horror films and thunderstorms. Jet planes shake me up. But there is no need to be afraid of anything you can control with your skill.”
Then Ali retreated into the bathroom to pray to Allah with Herbert Muhammad.
The final thing Ali did before departing for his destiny was to play one last mind game with Doc Broadus, Foreman’s observer in his dressing room.
“We’re going to dance,” Ali said. “You tell him to get ready.” Then he added, “Tell him to hit me in the belly,” an Ali attempt to doublethink or triple-think Foreman, who might do the opposite, or might not, but would think about what the message meant.
Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu, who had depleted his nation’s treasury of $20 million to get the fight, didn’t even come to the stadium to watch it. Although he ordered a forty-foot portrait of himself hung over the grandstand, Mobutu was so paranoid about being in the open air with seventy thousand of his countrymen that he watched the fight in his mansion, on closed circuit, with Idi Amin, the mad tyrant of Uganda, as his guest.
The fight would become known for Ali’s use of the “rope-a-dope” defense, a tactic he later said he first learned from watching Archie Moore, Foreman’s trainer. But there was much more to the miracle of the African night than just Ali lying on the ropes. There was a greater psychological dimension to this fight than any other I have ever seen.
It began as the referee, Zack Clayton, gave the two fighters their final instructions in center ring. Ali, his mouth inches from Foreman’s ear, talked over the referee’s words. He told Foreman: “You have heard of me since you were young. You’ve been following me since you were a little boy. Now, you must meet me, your master.”
At the opening bell, Ali followed the counsel of Cus D’Amato. He circled, he did not retreat. He stayed within Foreman’s hitting range, his eyes searching for
an opening.
One minute into the fight Ali hit Foreman with a fast, straight right to the head. The look in Foreman’s eyes made Cus a prophet.
A minute later Ali hit the bully with a second right, straight as an arrow, to a head that did not move. It had bad intentions, and it had to make Foreman think, which was not healthy for Foreman.
In the second round Ali retreated to the ropes and Foreman started to bomb away, missing some but landing enough to make many fans think they were watching Ali in the process of losing.
Even Dundee, Bundini, and Pacheco in Ali’s own corner did not immediately recognize they were seeing Ali winning, not losing.
“Dance, champ, dance,” Bundini screamed in his hoarse, soulful, musical voice.
At the end of the round Dundee told Ali to get off the ropes, and Ali told him, “Shut up, I know what I’m doing.”
An ingredient of Ali’s genius was improvisation, his ability to invent tactics spontaneously, from his soul, like the best jazzmen. Ali was like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. He made daring, thinking, and surprise part of his art.
He alone could bend time to his imagination. He alone could sense during the fight what creativity was needed to defeat Foreman. Although he had trained to endure pain, his minute-to-minute, round-to-round movements were like a long jazz solo. They were composed by instinct, mood, spirit, and the rhythm inside his mind. Ali had had to improvise when to change the speed of his punches, when to lie on the ropes, when to go for the kill. Like a jazzman, the spontaneous performance was everything, with no margin for error.
Ali may have invented the modern tradition of trash-talking during this fight, thinking up new psychological jabs and taunts each round. Ali had to imagine a structure to the fight in his mind, a tempo, a harmony, a coda. Ali had to feel all this in the moment, in the ring.
Zaire would be Ali’s Birdland, and this fight would have to be his existential solo.
In the third and fourth rounds Ali kept talking to Foreman, playing Ping-Pong with his mind, telling him his best punches were nothing. Couldn’t he hit any harder than this? Why was he swinging like a girl?
Soon Foreman began to doubt his own power. Ali, who did feel severe pain, was conning the champion. His taunting disdain was breaking down Foreman’s will.
This was the miracle—geometry was melting brute force; the human imagination was making power and confidence doubt itself; mind games were snapping a champion’s mind. Ali’s ability to survive pain was subverting Foreman’s durability to deliver pain.
After a savage fifth round, in which both were hurt, Foreman fell apart. His punches became looping and slow-motion. Ali, the geometrist, stayed exactly the right distance and pumped in accurate rights between Foreman’s gloves, puffing his face, glazing his eyes till he looked drunk. Ali’s timing and mastery of distance made his punches seem guided by radar.
In the eighth round Ali hit Foreman with seven devastating head punches in a row, and Foreman lost his equilibrium, spun around, and went down for the count. It was 4:00 A.M. in Africa, the hour of witch doctors and voodoo magic.
The rainy season finally arrived about an hour after the fight ended, with roaring thunder and blinding sheets of tropical rain. If it had come during the fight, with Ali’s fear of thunder, who knows what might have happened?
The torrential rainstorm knocked out all the satellite communications between Kinshasa and the outside world. The city of joy was isolated. The rain stopped after an hour, and Ali arrived at his villa on the banks of the Congo River. Jerry Izenberg and a few writers were waiting there and glimpsed paradise in his eyes.
“You will never know what this night has meant to me,” Ali told Izenberg.
Twenty years later I would ask Ali what the biggest thrill of his career had been.
“Zaire,” he answered in his Parkinson’s whisper, his hand trembling but his mind as sharp as ever. “Foreman. Got my title back. In Africa,” he said.
The fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman will always endure as a boxing landmark. As Ali said, it would never have happened if it wasn’t for Don King. King will always have this honor associated with his name.
The great tragedy is that if Don King had gone straight after this fight, he could have become one of the great black role models in contemporary history. He could have been the black Horatio Alger hero.
King could have become a universal inspiration, a black man given a second chance, who rose from prison to the pinnacle of entrepreneurship by hard work, desperado bravado, grand ambition, evangelical salesmanship, and by the mean standards of boxing—merit.
Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in Don King’s masterpiece, “The Rumble in the Jungle.” Norman Mailer and George Plimpton can be seen in the second row, their mouths open as Foreman falls. BOXING ILLUSTRATED
5. “So he went to see some mob guys in Cleveland”
It was December 1974 and Muhammad Ali was starting to think about his first title defense. Don King was certainly in the picture, but he had to compete against Madison Square Garden, Bob Arum, and several countries that wanted the honor of hosting Ali’s first fight after his Zaire triumph.
Don King, three years out of prison, was not an institution like the Garden. He was not a big corporation with a line of credit at a major bank, although he always could produce cash. King did not have resources, or partners, or an organization with assistants and specialists. All he had in this competition, as he would say many times, was “wit, grit, and bullshit.”
Boxing is not just unregulated, it is unstructured. There are no leagues with schedules enforced by a commissioner. Boxing has always been closer to eighteenth-century piracy than to an organized sport. In football, the playing field is one hundred yards, but in boxing the size of the ring can be negotiated. In baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers have to play the San Francisco Giants. In basketball, the Bulls have to play the Knicks. In football, the Cowboys have to play the Redskins.
But in boxing no champion ever has to fight a particular contender unless an ad hoc deal is made. Every fight is a freelance negotiation. There is no schedule that says Ali had to fight the Number 1 or 2 contender. He could fight whomever he and a promoter wanted.
Ali always remained a free agent. He never signed an exclusive long-term contract with any promoter. He never signed option contracts with any promoter. This is how Herbert Muhammad always got the best price for all of Ali’s fights—each one was put up for bid to the highest bidder. And after the Foreman fight, Ali was at the peak of his marketability.
In December 1974 Herbert Muhammad began negotiating with Mike Burke, the president of Madison Square Garden, and matchmaker Teddy Brenner, for Ali to defend his title in the Garden against the Number 3 contender, Ron Lyle. Lyle had lost only one of thirty-two fights and was a heavy puncher.
The Garden had also brought into the deal John Daly of the British Hemdale Leisure Corporation as a partner. Daly had put up the front money for the Zaire match, and he had useful ties to the byzantine camp of the champion.
The negotiations between the Garden and Ali reached the stage where contracts were being drawn up and terms and conditions had been orally agreed to. News of the match began to appear in the New York and London papers.
That’s when Don King, who never sleeps, began to pick Madison Square Garden’s pocket. In a one-week period, King flew to London, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kingston, Jamaica.
Mostly King was searching for “OPM”—other people’s money—to underwrite the Ali defense. The contender King had in mind was a thirty-five-year-old bouncer and liquor salesman named Chuck Wepner, who had lost nine fights and was not among the top seven legitimate contenders (Foreman, Frazier, Lyle, Jerry Quarry, Ken Norton, Oscar Bonavena, and Earnie Shavers). Wepner had already been knocked out by Joe Bugner and Jerry Judge, as well as Liston and Foreman. He was so famous for the scar tissue around his eyes, he was nicknamed the Bayonne Bleeder. He already had over three
hundred stitches in his eyebrows.
In London, King tried to meet with John Daly, to win his former partner and his money over to his side. King believed he had an appointment and went to Daly’s office and waited several hours. Daly finally stuck his head out and said he would see King at his hotel for cocktails at 7:00 P.M. Daly never showed and King left London in a fury over being snubbed.
“Daly treated me like scum,” King told reporters in New York.
In Chicago, King made his appeal directly to Herbert Muhammad, once again quoting Herbert’s father to him about the obligation to give the struggling brother an extra chance. Herbert, a religious and private person, was put off by King’s loud style of heavy gold jewelry, hyperbole, and vulgarity, but he also respected King’s understanding of economics and gifts as a salesman and deal-maker.
King also flew, with Ali, to Jamaica to try to persuade the government there to put up its own money to underwrite the fight.
Through all of this, Teddy Brenner, the Garden matchmaker, still believed he would get the Ali–Lyle fight for March 24. He had actually arranged a meeting for January 6, 1975, where all the contracts were supposed to be signed. But John Daly had to fly back to London with the unsigned contracts still in his briefcase. Herbert Muhammad had stood up Daly, just as Daly had stood up King.
The appeal of King’s offer was that he was talking the most money for the least risk. He was offering Ali $1.5 million to fight someone who was not a competitive threat, a club fighter with little professional skill.
The mystery was that the fight at that price did not make any sense in the context of boxing economics. Ali should be getting only about $500,000 for meeting a challenger of Wepner’s caliber. Only hard-core Ali fans would pay to see what amounted to a glorified gym workout. Why would anyone invest $1.5 million in a fight that seemed unlikely to gross $750,000? Where would King find a mark, or a sucker, or a friend, to underwrite his game?
Carl Lombardo agreed to put up the money for the fight.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 9
