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When Muhammad Ali first bounded into his surgery in Overtown, Miami, Dr Ferdie Pacheco reckoned the mouthy 19-year-old prospect was the finest physical specimen he’d ever seen, and he subsequently felt privileged to work his corner as he went on to conquer the world.
“What was it like to be Ali’s fight doctor?” offered Pacheco. “It was like being Queen Victoria’s gynaecologist. The title didn’t mean much, but the view was spectacular.”
More than a decade into the relationship, the physician’s job description had evolved to include troubling concepts such as worrying about his patient’s long-term welfare. As Ali prepared for the Rumble in the Jungle, Pacheco was so genuinely concerned about the damage George Foreman’s concussive power (37 of his 40 wins had come by KO) might wreak upon the fighter’s 32-year-old head that he had a medical plane on standby. The plan was to rush his patient to Lisbon for emergency brain surgery if required. It wasn’t.
“You have heard of me since you were young,” said Ali to his opponent when they met in the centre of the ring in Stade du 20 Mai in Kinshasa, in the then Zaire, on October 30th, 1974. “You’ve been following me since you were a little boy. Now, you must meet me, your master!”
Foreman blinked and the overarching narrative for that magical morning (the bell tolled at 4am local time) half a century ago was set. As they retreated to their corners to hear the first bell, a billion people around the globe were watching, and an estimated 1,000 prisoners, some criminals, others political opponents of the president, Mobutu Sese Soku, were supposedly imprisoned in holding cells beneath the football field.
A giant portrait of the man the CIA dubbed “the black Hamlet” hung from the rafters at a venue his henchmen often used for executions. For fear the 60,000 citizens in attendance might seize this opportunity for vengeance, he didn’t attend the fight, preferring to enjoy a private watch party at the palace with Idi Amin, Uganda’s brutal dictator and an avid boxer.
Almost a decade after seizing power, Mobutu put up the purses by plundering $10 million from the coffers of a country where 40 per cent of the population battled malnutrition. An epic example of sportswashing‚ except that word didn’t exist then. A different time. Even if the original plan to call the bout “From the Slave Ship to the Championship” was shelved, the western view of Africa remained rooted in primitive Tarzan movie stereotypes; Ali threatened to have his brothers in Zaire capture the boxing commentator Howard Cosell, boil him and eat him.
The locals didn’t find that guff half as offensive as Foreman arriving in their still young country with a pet German Shepherd named Digo. The type of canine deployed by the Belgians during their lengthy colonisation and genocide was a reminder of their oppression. Upon touching down two days earlier, Ali had also warned that the reigning heavyweight champion was “a Belgium” (sic), a ludicrous declaration, yet enough to get the people of Kinshasa shouting “Ali, Bomaye!” (Ali, kill him!) in the Lingala dialect. The chant entered boxing lore.
Mobutu allowed his salubrious presidential compound on the banks of the Congo River at N’Sele, 40 miles from Kinshasa, to be turned into Ali’s training camp. Don King, busy helming the promotion that made his name and empowered him to embitter the sweet science for decades after, brought an 18-year-old Veronica Porche out there to visit one day. Smitten by the stunning co-ed from USC, Ali started an affair with her so blatant it was obvious to the ubiquitous press as well as to his long-suffering second wife, Belinda.
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A bizarre love triangle was just one more fecund seam to be mined by the squadron of great writers, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson et al, on hand. Their extended sojourn in Africa invested the whole affair with amplified significance and no little mythologising, and whisper it, it may also have elevated the fight a touch in the Ali canon. The plot was nearly too perfect. The planet’s most compelling athlete at play in his ancestral continent, an impossibly exotic location about which the West remained gullible enough to devour reams of copy sprinkled with voodoo dolls and witch doctors.
Then there was the spell Ali cast called “Rope A Dope”. Unknown to his trainer, he wholly improvised the tactic that became intertwined with his legend. “Move, Ali! Move!” roared Angelo Dundee when he saw his static charge disobeying the fight plan to dance away from the foreboding punching of Foreman. At ringside, the American writer George Plimpton observed Ali’s refusal to obey that simple instruction, and shouted, “Christ! It’s a fix!” How else to explain his willingness to lean on the ropes, for round after sapping round, shipping all those savage blows that had reduced mighty Joe Frazier and Ken Norton to rubble?
“I was beating him up pretty good, I thought,” said Foreman. “But in about the sixth round, he started screaming, ‘Is that all you got, George? Show me something!’ That was all I had with him forever.”
With 21 seconds remaining in the eighth, and both men looking utterly spent, Ali emerged from a weary clinch and suddenly unfurled three kinetic rights in a row. Then came a left hook followed by one more vicious right that sent Foreman pirouetting, falling to the canvas in slow motion.
“Oh Lawdy,” roared Bundini Brown from the corner. “He’s on queer street.”
In defeat, Foreman initially claimed his water was drugged, the ref counted him out too fast, and the ropes were problematic. Over time, he came to appreciate that he lost his title that day, yet earned his place in popular culture. People who have never watched boxing know the Rumble in the Jungle, a soulful R n B opera crossed with a blaxploitation flick, replete with accompanying concert featuring James Brown, BB King, and The Spinners. Foreman was simply cast as the unwitting villain in this drama, the usurper who had to be dethroned by the hero before the curtain could come down.
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An hour after the fight, the heavens opened, and a biblical rain fell. When Ali and his entourage drove back to N’Sele, the people came out and stood by the sides of the dirt roads to cheer the new old champ, their champ, as he rolled past. The redoubtable American columnist Jerry Izenberg followed the convoy to the training camp and later found Ali, alone, standing on the banks of the Congo River, his arms stretched wide in victory, shouting at the water roaring past.
“When all the outlandish trappings of an extraordinary event have begun to fade and gather dust in the memory,” wrote the peerless Hugh McIlvanney, “when we have grown vague about the wheeling and dealing involved, about how ethnic pride and financial avarice became ardent bedmates, when we scarcely smile at the remembered sight of Bundini Brown planting a kiss and a ‘Float like a butterfly’ biro on President Mobutu or the more appealing but equally unlikely spectacle of an attractive young black woman breast-feeding her baby in the third row ringside – when that distant day comes, what will remain utterly undiminished is the excitement of Muhammad Ali’s performance.”
Bomaye.
A revised, updated and expanded edition of Dave Hannigan’s The Big Fight – When Ali Conquered Ireland will be published by Merrion Press in 2025
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