While negotiations with Foreman had come to a standstill, other plans were afoot, including Ali considering Jerry Quarry, who was loudly proclaiming that black fighters were "boycotting" him. But even though promoter Bob Arum made an offer for a third Ali-Quarry fight, Herbert Muhammad turned him down. Then others made a run at a potential Foreman-Ali fight, including the promoter of the first Ali-Frazier fight, Jerry Perenchio.
But, in the end, it was Video Techniques' vice president, Don King, who pulled their chestnuts out of the fire and the fight together by getting Foreman to agree to a contract. Putting what he called "my well-known talking machinery to work," King chased down Foreman, finally cornering him in a parking lot, and challenged him to sign a contract by telling him that "until you beat Ali, the world will never recognize you as the champion. As long as he's fighting and you don't show the world who's the best, they'll look at Ali as the master." That sealed the deal and Foreman signed.
Still, there was a problem with money. Or, more correctly, no money. To underwrite a bout of this magnitude, Video Techniques had to find someone to put up somewhere in the neighborhood of $11.5 million dollars, $5 million for each fighter and another $1.5 million for up-front money. Video Techniques was already out the $150,000 it had paid in good-faith money and the meter was running on their options. Trying everyone on their Rolodex, from A to Z, all they got were turndowns and "we'll get back to yous" when the A's to Z's in question heard the amount of money needed to float the fight. Finally, after exhausting almost every avenue, street, and alley, Hemdale Leisure Corporation came to the rescue, putting up irrevocable letters of credit. Then, with Herbert Muhammad granting another thirty days to Video Techniques to "put the deal together," Hemdale and King sweet-talked President Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire to underwrite all costs in the name of international public relations.
The high stakes game of finance was over, and the fight was on. Finally.
Negotiations are usually conducted with tact and subtlety. But not where Ali was concerned. Sometime during the negotiations for the fight, Ali and Foreman had a telephone conversation to discuss the deal that was on the table. In his characteristic manner, Ali opened the conversation with a challenge: "George, you think you got the nerve to get in the ring with me?" George growled back, "Anytime, anywhere, for the money." "Money?" said Ali. "They're talking about $10 million dollars. Let's make history." Then, with more taunt than tact, he threw in a towel-snapping, "Let's get it on ... that is, if you're not scared!" To which George, in his best imitation of Sonny Liston, snarled back, "Scared of you? I only pray that I don't kill you." Ali came away from the conversation convinced that George "sounded shaky."
And although he would continue to believe that George was, in his words, "shaky," and that it was eating Foreman up to be World Champion and still have people calling Ali "The People's Champion," Ali knew Foreman was a formidable opponent, one who had practiced outpatient surgery on the two men who had beaten him, Frazier and Norton, reducing each into smaller, neater pieces with his sledgehammer punches without breaking a sweat.
Moreover, in one of those long-ago-but-it-seems-like-only-yesterday flashbacks, Foreman reminded Ali of Sonny Liston, which was only fair since Liston was Foreman's idol and model—Foreman having roomed and sparred with Liston as a member of his camp. He even had to read to him, Liston being semiliterate at best. Now Muhammad would have to face this younger clone of Liston, ten years after fighting the original—with Ali at thirty-two, the same age Liston was when they had met in Miami Beach so many rounds ago.
Much of the media, including several who had been his avid supporters and fans during his exile and post-exile days, like Howard Cosell, were fearful of Ali's well-being. One, Scottish sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney, wrote that the only way to beat Foreman "involves shelling him for three days and then sending in the artillery." And the Chicago Tribune headlined its fight story: "Ali Needs a Miracle to Survive." To all such comments Ali merely said, "Black men scare white men more than black men scare black men."
And yet the comments fed the perception that Foreman was unbeatable, even "invincible." Off his record he looked damn near "invincible," with thirty-seven knockouts in forty wins. Going back to his very first fight, a three-round KO of Don Waldheim—after which Foreman said, "I can knock anybody out. Lord, I'm tough"—this Bunyonesque figure had chopped down nearly everyone who dared stand in front of him. Twenty of whom, in wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am fashion, he had KO'd in the first two rounds, including Frazier and Norton. Indeed, he looked invincible. But I knew there was always somebody who could beat somebody and to me, when it came to Foreman, that somebody was Ali.
Ali continued to be his usual brash self, at least on the surface—calling Foreman "The Mummy" and imitating his slow tree-chopping punches while shuffling forward and throwing in more than his share of verbal digs, like "I got all the rednecks and Uncle Toms pullin' for me to lose." But you damn well knew he was taking this fight seriously.
George Kalinsky, the official Garden photographer, clued me in as to just how seriously years later. According to George, about a month or two before the fight Ali, who was then in New York, called John F. X. Condon, publicist for the Garden, and asked if he could come over to talk. The Garden being "dark" that day, John invited Ali to come over and invited George to sit in. Suspecting that something was bothering Ali, Condon asked him what was the matter, and Ali admitted he was concerned about Foreman, saying he was "too big" and "too strong." Remembering a photo he had taken of Ali sparring at the 5th Street Gym where he was leaning back over the ropes, far away from his sparring partner, George said, "Why don't you try something like that? Sort of a dope on the ropes, letting Foreman swing away but, like in the picture, hit nothing but air." By the end of the meeting, George remembered, Condon had somehow changed "dope on the ropes" to "rope-a-dope."
Whether you believe the story in its entirety or not, it might give you a clue to what Ali's mind-set was like before a fight. It was something he gave voice to by saying, "I always go in there hopin' I can do it—not really doubtin', but I'm not sure. I wouldn't use the word doubt, but I'm not really that sure and this is a good sign. When you get too sure, when you're not nervous, most likely you're gonna get beat. The first Frazier fight I wasn't too nervous. I was confident, too confident. So when I'm a little nervous, when I get that doubtful feeling, then I'm a little frightened and nervous. And that's a good sign."
And so, with what he called "that doubtful feeling," Muhammad trained as he had never trained before, running up and down the mountain trails surrounding his Deer Lake camp, putting in extra time working the bags, skipping rope, sparring, and thinking of little else than Foreman, Foreman, and more Foreman, morning, noon, and night, 24/7.
For Ali's entire career I had selected sparring partners who could best prepare him for his upcoming opponents. They needed to be able to duplicate his opponent's movement and style and enable Ali to gauge his own offensive and defensive effectiveness. For instance, to prepare him for George Chuvalo, I got Cody Jones, a short slugger; for Floyd, Jimmy Ellis, a crafty boxer-puncher; for Karl Mildenberger, a left hander; for the second fight against Henry Cooper, a fighter with a hard left hook; and so forth and so on. Now, for Foreman, I had selected three: Roy Williams, a rugged banger with heavy hands who was an inch or so taller than Ali; Larry Holmes, another tall heavyweight who could also bang but had great boxing skills as well; and Bossman Jones, who had been Foreman's sparring partner.
When Bossman first came to Deer Lake, we all crowded around him to hear what he had to say about Foreman—his work habits, his strengths, his weaknesses, everything. Bossman filled us in. Foreman, he said, had been training harder for Ali than he had for any opponent, running up and down mountains, fighting four-minute rounds to increase his stamina, and practicing alternating his punching with boxing. Then Bossman said, "George is the first person I have been in the ring with I know can kill you." Bossman told us that Foreman had what he described as an
"anywhere" punch, a punch Foreman "ain't aiming anywhere," but anywhere it lands "it breaks something inside you ... a muscle, a bone, a finger, a shoulder, a rib." Furthermore, he told us, "It's a punch that starts out being a hook, but ends up a slider."
'Nuff said. As soon as Bossman told us what George was doing in training and how he was preparing, we went back to watch Foreman's previous fights, to dissect his past performances frame-by-frame, including those in the Olympics and against Frazier and Norton. I was convinced that the sum of all his parts was less than the whole. So, knowing he had not gone more than four rounds in over three years and had fought only five total rounds over the last twenty-two months, we paid particular attention to the three fights in which he had gone the distance for telltale signs about his stamina. And what did we see? In George's first fight with Gregorio Peralta, his trainer-manager Dick Sadler had told him that the ninth round was the "last" round. When George came back to his corner after the bell ending the ninth and held out his gloves to have them cut off, Sadler then told him that there was one more round to go. To hear George tell it later, he nearly fainted. We knew then that if we could take George past the third round, "his parachute wouldn't open," as Ali put it.
And so, after two full months of preparations, of watching and re-watching films, training hard, and thinking of nothing but Foreman, morning, noon, and night, we were as ready as we were ever going to be. Now it was time to go to Zaire to acclimate Ali to the local food, the temperature, and the people—to make him as comfortable in Zaire as he had been at Deer Lake.
Alighting from the plane in Zaire, Ali turned to Gene Kilroy and asked, "Who don't they like over here?" "Belgians" was Kilroy's answer. Putting his finger to his lips, Ali said, "Then tell 'em George is a Belgian."
Ali's campaign to make Zaire his home turf and make George the outsider had begun—which, as Ferdie Pacheco pointed out, was not too difficult, there being "a lot more people in Kinshasa with the name Muhammad or Ali than George or Foreman."
On the way into the capital city of Kinshasa from the airport all we could see were signs along the road reading, "The Foreman-Ali Fight Is Not a War Between Two Enemies, But a Sport Between Two Brothers," and "A Fight Between Two Blacks in a Black Nation Organized by Blacks and Seen by the Whole World—This Is the Victory of Mobutism," referring to the president of Zaire. Watching the signs go by, I thought to myself that before we left Zaire there might well be another sign erected reading, "This Is Ali Country," as Ali laid out his plans to make himself the country's hero and George the antihero.
Never fully understanding that Ali was, in effect, hijacking the fight, George, in his innocence and arrogance, played into Ali's hands. From the very first moment he arrived, leading a huge German police dog down the steps from the plane—the very same breed the Belgians had used to control the crowds during the occupation of their former colony and which the newly independent Congolese fell upon and ate after their departure—George hardly endeared himself to the local populace. While Ali was out on the street mingling with the locals, winning their attention and affection, there were so few sightings of George he might as well have been in the witness protection program. For the next few weeks George became a one-man alienation machine as Ali worked his charm.
I wasn't overly fond of his dog either. At one of our joint press conferences, the dog, named Diego, was spooked by something or someone and took off for parts unknown. Seeing his dog run off, George said, "They're going to eat the dog." He then barked to one of his trainers, Doc Broadus, "Go find the dog." Now he was hollering, "Diego ... Diego ..." I couldn't quite make out what George was hollering so I asked Kilroy what Foreman had said. "Dago," said Kilroy with a smile on his face. "He's calling you a Dago." Now I'm Italian and I'm used to being called a Dago or a Wop by my friends. It's part of my heritage. But you'd better be careful how you use those words, whether in a friendly way or with malicious intent. And thinking that George was trying to get at Ali through me, I interpreted his comment as being anything but friendly. So all I could think to say in response was, "Kiss my ass, you big son of a bitch." A little harsh, I admit, but I was upset. Both at George and his dog.
Almost from the moment we set up our headquarters some forty-five minutes outside Kinshasa Ali went to work converting the people of Zaire into Ali fans. He would mingle with the crowds of onlookers, run with them, and lead choruses of "Ali, bomaye," which loosely translated, I found out, is Swahili for "Ali, kill him!" Ali was like a church choirmaster leading his throng of worshippers as they continually shouted his name and chorused their chant of "Ali, bomaye!" On the other hand, George, when not training, stayed squirreled away in his suite at the Intercontinental Hotel surrounded by bodyguards and his faithful companion Diego. It was indeed Ali country, and he was playing the underdog card brilliantly.
But Ali didn't spend all his time courting the people. There was work to be done, hard work, in the gym and out there on the road, running. Believing, as he said, that "the fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, behind the lines, out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights," Ali ran to exhaustion, sometimes at 4:00 A.M. to approximate the time of the fight, knowing that his defense depended on his legs and that the only times he had lost were because his legs had given out.
The gym, where we worked out daily, was a large, two-mile outdoor facility shared by the two fighters, with Ali at one end and George at the other, separated by the press and TV mob. Ali would work out first, then Foreman. Our daily ritual was to first work the bags, then skip rope, and, finally, spar with our three sparring partners. But because we didn't want to show anybody anything, Ali did most of his work in the back room away from prying eyes, like those of George's trainers, Dick Sadler and Archie Moore, who were always in attendance. Moore took notes on Ali's every move and stowed them away in what he called his "cabinet," a large picnic basket that he carried with him.
Me, I didn't need no stinking picnic basket to spy on George. My reconnaissance was simple. All I had to do, after Ali had finished his workout and turned the gym over to George, was to go to the dressing room window, which overlooked the gym, pull back the drapes and, using a telescopic lens borrowed from Ali's official photographer, Howard Bingham, sneak a peek to see what I could see. And what I saw was George, back turned as if he knew someone was watching, banging away on the heavy bag with thunderous punches, leaving huge dents in the lower portion of the bag. After punching the bejabbers out of the bag, he sparred with his sparring partners—six of them compared to our three, most of whom had sparred with Ali at one time or another—fighting four-minute rounds instead of three with only a half-minute's rest in between. Obviously, as Bundini Brown said, "They ain't planning for him to get tired."
But, from what I'd heard, George was almost contemptuous of Ali. Convinced that Ali was scared, George hadn't watched any films of Ali in action and thought he didn't need much roadwork or sparring. After all, knocking out Ali would be a mere formality.
We hardly shared the same view. Conventional wisdom had it that George was a bullying, intimidating, terrorizing fighter who was, to use that word again, invincible. But as someone once said, conventional wisdom is always an underdog at the betting window. To us, George was beatable—especially by Ali who had all the tools to make George vincible: hand speed, footwork, and, most important, what we called "ring smarts." Even his hands felt fine. I was so sure Ali would win, I began telling anybody who would listen, "My guy could win in a phone booth."
With a little over a week to go Ali was at his peak, feeling the fatigue he'd feel in the fight by going nineteen rounds each day—three rounds on the speed bag, four skipping rope, three on the heavy bag, and nine three-minute rounds of boxing with his three sparring partners. All was going according to plan. My guy was as ready as he would ever be.
But what we hadn't planned for happened eight days before the fight. As one newspaperman who had been present at one of George's sparring sessions told us, George was
sparring with a college kid named Bill McMurray, and as George was whaling away at him with McMurray covering up, McMurray had raised an elbow to protect himself and caught Foreman above the right eye, cutting him. The cut was a quarter of an inch deep and Foreman was bleeding all over the place. The fight was off
Everything, all those months of planning, all the hard work, everything, was now out the window. Chaos would have been a step up for what followed. George, distrusting the local doctors, had trainer Dick Sadler temporarily tend to the cut, closing it with a "butterfly" bandage before planning to take off for Paris to get what he considered proper medical treatment. Writers, convinced the bout was not just postponed but canceled, began making plans to take the next flight out. 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.
Amidst all the hullabaloo there was one logical voice to be heard, that of Muhammad Ali. Make that semi-logical. After considering the situation, and convinced that if George left the country he would never come back, Ali sent a message, via the press, to President Mobuto, saying: "I appeal to the President not to let anybody connected with the fight out of the country." Shifting into high gear he went on: "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. Check all the luggage big enough for a big man to crawl into. 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." Then he added a word from the sponsor: "Because he knows I can't lose!"
I don't know if it was Ali's warning or not, but almost immediately after Ali had pointed out that George might not come back once he had left Zaire, George and his entourage suddenly decided against going to Paris, or wherever it was he was going, and agreed to stay.
My View from the Corner Page 22
