by Jonathan Eig
In his fight with Foreman, Ali would get one more shot at relevance. He would find himself at the center of one of the biggest entertainment events the world had ever seen, one that would do more than perhaps anything to set his legacy not only as a fighter but as a heroic black man.
Now that Foreman and Ali had signed contracts, or blank pieces of paper that would eventually become contracts, Don King and Hank Schwartz had to come up with a quick $10 million and a venue for the fight. Two or three days after obtaining Foreman’s signatures, Schwartz flew to London to meet a prospective investor, while King appealed to Jerry Perenchio, the man who had arranged the first Ali-Frazier fight. They both struck out. They had only days to make the initial payment — $100,000 to each fighter — and only months to find the remaining $10 million.
Scrambling, Schwartz identified a British investor willing to give him $200,000. That bought him a little time. King and Schwartz also received $500,000 from an organized crime figure from King’s hometown of Cleveland, according to an FBI memo. But they still needed more. Then one day, Schwartz received a phone call from an American working as a financial advisor in Germany and Belgium. One of the American’s clients was Joseph Mobutu, the murderous despot who ruled Zaire and who possessed ill-gotten billions in Swiss banks after years of blurring the lines between Zaire’s treasury and his personal accounts. Mobutu was once referred to as “a walking bank vault in a leopard-skin hat,” a man who had stolen his country’s wealth and bankrupted its morality. Mobutu’s financial advisor said his client would cover all the expenses of the fight, with $10 million up front, if Schwartz would agree to stage the event in Zaire.
Antarctica? Siberia? A boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean? Was there any place on Earth less likely than Zaire to hold a major sporting event?
Zaire was one of the poorest, most corrupt, most politically unstable, most inaccessible, most incomprehensible places on earth; it was the inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a place where well into the twentieth century the vast majority of people still lived as hunters and gatherers in rural villages without electricity or running water and still communicated not by telephone or television or radio but by a network of jungle-covered rivers; a place where people who opposed or disappointed the nation’s leader were routinely executed.
About all this and more, Schwartz said, “I didn’t give a shit.”
Schwartz, a Jewish, Brooklyn-born World War II veteran, didn’t give a shit that he was dealing with a financial advisor representing a homicidal dictator. Schwartz and Don King didn’t care that Zaire’s largest sports stadium contained only 35,000 seats and had no parking lot. They didn’t care that the fight would have to go on at 4 a.m. in Kinshasa in order to reach viewers in the United States at 10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, or that the contest might be washed out if Zaire’s seasonal rains arrived a little earlier than usual. They didn’t care that almost every piece of electronic broadcasting equipment would have to be flown in from the United States or Europe. They didn’t care that Kinshasa, a city of 1.5 million, had only about five hundred decent hotel rooms. They didn’t care that reporters or fight fans traveling to Zaire for the fight would make the journey, as Norman Mailer wrote, only “after inoculations for cholera, smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis . . . not to speak of shots for yellow fever and pills for malaria.” They also didn’t care that a heavyweight championship fight in Zaire would strengthen Mobutu’s hold on power and cause more suffering for 22 million Zairians, who were already suffering plenty.
Muhammad Ali didn’t care, either. If Ali was concerned about the political conditions in Zaire or about the moral consequences of doing business in that country, he didn’t say. He was Ali; the normal standards of conduct did not apply. His race, his religion, his defiance of his own government, and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War had made him one of the world’s most visible symbols of rebellion. In that way, fighting in Africa made sense, and that was enough to trump all other concerns. Don King called it “a symbolic black happening,” and that vague glorification resonated with Ali. So did the $5 million, of course. But Ali the showman and public-relations wizard recognized immediately the powerful imagery of two American black men fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world in the heart of Africa, the continent from which their ancestors had been sold into slavery, a place where black Africans still struggled to shake free from colonialism. The winner of this fight would be the greatest black warrior in the world, the man who dared to face his demons, the man who conquered white supremacy, the true champion of disenfranchised, downtrodden dark-skinned people all the world over.
The deal was made. Ali would fight Foreman on September 25, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire.
Ali had cause to be at least dimly aware of Zaire’s recent history. In 1963, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X had infuriated Elijah Muhammad by criticizing Kennedy and suggesting the president had deserved to die. Malcolm’s comment about “chickens coming home to roost” received most of the attention at the time, but in the rest of his remarks, Malcolm listed the crimes for which Kennedy and his administration bore responsibility, and those crimes included the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first black prime minister of Zaire (then known as the Republic of the Congo).
Zaire’s troubles, of course, began long before Kennedy. For more than a century, the central African nation was at the heart of some of the darkest scandals, dirtiest swindles, and deadliest double-dealings the world had ever seen. The nation, roughly the size of Western Europe, had wondrous riches. It had gold. It had diamonds. It had cobalt and copper, tin and tantalum. In the nineteenth century, Belgium’s King Leopold II built his personal fortune and strengthened Belgium’s economy by exporting vast resources from the Congo. Leopold, without ever visiting the place, treated the Congo as if it were his personal colony. He used forced labor to remove the nation’s minerals, and when the labor couldn’t be forced, it was punished. Backs were carved open with whips, hands chopped off with machetes, bodies sliced through with bayonets and dumped in rivers. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad drew on figures from this era to create Mr. Kurtz, who placed on fence posts the severed heads of the Africans he’d disciplined while working to extract ivory, rubber, and more from the Congo. In 1908, the Congo became a formal colony of Belgium. It gained its independence in 1960, as the Republic of the Congo, and then became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1965, at the age of thirty-five, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu assumed the presidency, with backing from the United States. In 1971, he changed his country’s name to Zaire (pronounced to rhyme with High-ear) and then changed his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which meant “the all-powerful warrior who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” To show his humility, Mobutu banished all titles such as “Excellency” and “President.” It was in that same spirit of modesty and egalitarianism that Mobutu banned neckties in Zaire, a move that would score him points with more than a few sportswriters in 1974.
Mobutu understood the power of money. Money allowed him to buy fighter jets for his nation’s military, which gave him the power he needed to assure his position in office, which gave him the ability to make more money, which permitted him to send his children to school in Belgium and to own extravagant homes in Brussels and Paris. Money would compel the great Muhammad Ali to come to Zaire, and with Muhammad Ali would come cameras. Muhammad Ali was not going to solve all of Zaire’s problems. He was not going to catapult the country into the twentieth century and end hundreds of years of suffering. But his presence would boost the reputation of Mobutu, and it would show the world that at least some degree of order had been delivered to what had long been one of the most chaotic and dangerous nations on Earth.
39
Fighter’s Heaven
Ali vowed that his fight with George Foreman, win or lose, would be his last.
“One more and I’ll be finished
,” he said.
Unless he lost. In which case, he said, he might fight one more time. Or a few more times . . . until he could get another crack at Foreman.
But he wasn’t planning to lose. One more fight, a victory, and he would retire as champion.
In March 1974, Ali went on a tour of the Middle East, one organized by Herbert Muhammad to solicit funds from Arab leaders to prop up the Nation of Islam. Ali returned from the Middle East in time to travel to Caracas, Venezuela, where he watched George Foreman knock out Ken Norton in less than two rounds. With that, Foreman had won his last three championship fights in a total of eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds. He had taken two good fighters, Frazier and Norton, and made them look like kittens. It wasn’t that Foreman outboxed his opponents. He merely flattened them the way a wrecking ball flattened an old house, with massive blows that made resistance futile. After decimating Norton, Foreman huffed and stomped around the ring. Looking up from ringside, Ali went to work taunting the champ and promoting their fight in Zaire. “If you behave like that,” Ali shouted, “my African friends will put you in the pot.”
When that quote appeared in the New York Times, it prompted a phone call from an aide to Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu’s aide said his boss wished to remind Ali that Zaire was sponsoring the Ali-Foreman fight to present itself to the world as a modern and sophisticated nation. It would help, he said, if Ali would not talk about boiling George Foreman or anyone else in pots. Mobuto didn’t resort to such crude methods of punishment.
Ali’s managers promised it wouldn’t happen again.
In July, Foreman held a press conference to announce that he would train in Pleasanton, California, for his fight against Ali. The taciturn champion announced that this press conference would be his last until the time of the fight. He had work to do, and he didn’t need reporters getting in the way. Foreman was a man of few syllables. When asked to predict how he would fare against the “aging Ali,” as one of the wire services called the challenger, Foreman refused to take the bait. He had won all forty of his professional fights, including thirty-seven by knockout. He saw no need for bluster. “I’ll be trying to get him in every round,” he said.
Asked about his strategy, Foreman said, “I’ll just try to beat him.”
Told that Ali planned to retire after the fight, Foreman said, “I think he should. He’s been hit a lot.”
Ali began training in July, same as Foreman, but with greater fanfare. He organized a picnic and invited reporters to his camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, and told them they were welcome to come around as often as they liked. He was always happy to talk. In explaining why he was so confident of victory, Ali performed an imitation of Foreman, lumbering across the ring and punching in slow motion before falling on his back when struck. Referring to Zaire, Ali said, “There’s gonna be a rumble in the jungle.”
As the Rumble in the Jungle approached, the business-minded men around Ali discovered riches to be mined in Africa. John Ali, the national secretary of the Nation of Islam, traveled to Gabon and promised President Omar Bongo that, for a price, Ali would stop in Gabon and conduct a boxing exhibition on his way to Zaire. Something went wrong, though, and John Ali wound up in a Gabonese prison. Muhammad Ali and Herbert Muhammad called in favors to win his release.
Don King had a more sophisticated money-making plan. He and Hank Schwartz formed a company called Festival in Zaire, Inc., to function as a travel agency that would bring fans from America and Europe to Africa for the fight, providing up to seven thousand spectators with plane tickets, deluxe hotel accommodations, and tickets for the big event. For King, logistical problems would be solved at a later date. Or not. What mattered was that he had a hot item on his hands — one of the biggest international sporting events the world had ever seen — and there was only one way for Americans and Europeans to see it in person: through Festivals in Zaire, Inc., with prices starting at $2,100 — the equivalent of about $10,000 today. The government of Zaire had taken control of every available hotel room and dormitory in Kinshasa and assigned them to Don King and Hank Schwartz. If all the hotel rooms and dormitories sold out, some guests would be housed in ships docked hundreds of miles away, and then flown or driven to Kinshasa in time for the fight. That was the plan, at least for the time being.
In justifying the high price and the unusual lodging options, Schwartz told the New York Times that “this event is like no other, and rules don’t apply.”
He was certainly right about that. But some rules did apply, including this one: it’s not easy to sell thousands of American sports fans on a trip that costs thousands of dollars, requires inoculation for multiple diseases, necessitates about fifty hours and ten thousand miles of travel, and ends, possibly, with lodging on a ship off the coast of Africa hundreds of miles from the sporting event said fans were paying to see. It was a lot to ask, especially for a fight that could end in a minute or less if George Foreman’s recent performances offered any precedent.
To begin his marketing campaign, King hired four beautiful young black women to serve as his ambassadors. The women would wear bikinis and boxing gloves, and they would appear at promotional events. They would pose for pamphlets and brochures. If potential customers wanted more information on the travel packages, one or two of the girls might be dispatched to present a slideshow with pictures of Kinshasa’s modern buildings and finest stores and restaurants. To find the women, King advertised on a soul-music station in Los Angeles, inviting women to attend open auditions at the Century Plaza Hotel. More than 250 applicants showed up, most of them clad in bikinis. “How did we pick the women?” asked Bill Caplan, who was Foreman’s public-relations manager and served as one of the judges. He paused as if he weren’t sure the question really required an answer. “Looks! They didn’t have to tell us they wanted world peace and the end of hunger in America. All that mattered was looks!”
While King and Schwartz worked to sell the fight to Americans, Mobutu prepared Zaire for what was expected to be the biggest spectacle in the nation’s history. Workers began rebuilding Kinshasa’s soccer stadium, quadrupling its capacity to 120,000, and adding a half-mile-wide parking lot. Mobuto ordered a fleet of buses so that thousands of Zairians could travel from around the country to see Ali v. Foreman. The government announced that the fight would come at the end of a three-day festival featuring black American entertainers such as James Brown and B. B. King.
Ali paid no attention to business matters, as usual. He never expressed interest in seeing the books or understanding the finances involved in this or any of his fights. He trusted those things to Herbert Muhammad. “Zaire’s foreign minister said Herbert reminded him of an African potentate,” recalled Rose Jennings, who had been hired by Herbert to serve as a special liaison between the American press and Mobutu’s government. Jennings said she was stunned by Ali’s negligence. “Some of the things I saw would turn your stomach,” she said, “but Ali was oblivious to it all.”
Ali did his part to sell tourists on his African adventure. He talked to reporters every day at Deer Lake, even allowing them to join him when he woke each morning to run three or four miles along Pleasant Run Road. He took to calling his camp “Fighter’s Heaven,” because he had everything he needed there, and perhaps because the place had the feel of an ashram, a holy place, with Ali as its leader, its prophet, its guru.
Ali’s sparring partners now included a promising young Pennsylvania fighter named Larry Holmes. Fans arrived every day at Deer Lake to do nothing more than watch the boxer jump rope or swat a punching bag. There were drugs and prostitutes available for those who chose to indulge. The place offered a nice view of the changes afoot in American culture in the 1970s, which the journalist Tom Wolfe labeled the “Me Decade.” As the historian Thomas Borstelmann wrote, “A new emphasis on self-improvement, self-expression, self-gratification, and self-indulgence moved to the center of American culture, to the detriment of more community-oriented values.” It was as if all the hopeful lon
ging of the 1960s counterculture had been washed away by cynicism, leaving a lot of easy sex and drugs in its aftermath.
If more Americans were living in the moment and living for themselves, Ali fit in nicely. Self-expression, self-gratification, and self-indulgences had long been specialties of his. Even with boxing writers predicting almost unanimously that Ali would lose, perhaps badly, his public demeanor never changed, his confidence never dimmed.
He explained why in an interview with Dave Kindred, a reporter from Louisville. “Round One — bing! — I’m out on him — boom, boom! — I shake him up — I beat him to the draw — He was a kid when I beat Sonny Liston ten years ago — They’re sayin’, ‘How much time will Ali last with George Foreman?’ And I say, ‘How long will he last’ — See, they say I can’t hit — And when have I ever been stopped — When have I ever given a record I go quick? — That ain’t right, that don’t even sound right. This is a kid. No skill, no speed — That’s belittlin’ to me, my greatness — He’s not fightin’ Joe Frazier, he’s fightin’ Muhammad Ali — I’m actually the greatest fighter of all time.”
During the same interview, Kindred asked if Ali had any regrets. If he had his life to live over again, would he do it the same way?
Ali was not usually introspective, but he paused momentarily to think about the question before answering: “I wouldn’t have said that thing about the Viet Cong. I would have handled the draft different. There wasn’t any reason to make so many people mad.” He went on to say he was proud of his decision not to enlist. His only regret was “the Viet Cong thing.”
