It has been 50 years since the “Rumble in the Jungle,” and we’re still talking about it. There have been books written about it (Norman Mailer’s “The Fight”), films made about it (“When We Were Kings”) and countless recounting of the events leading up to and including the night of October 30, 1974, when Muhammad Ali really shook up the world by knocking out the seemingly invincible George Foreman in the eighth round.
And for good reason.
Sure, it was the most-watched event of all time up to that day, and 60,000 fans filled Stade Tata Raphael in Kinshasa, Zaire. But for me, it was Ali doing the seemingly impossible and cementing his greatness that will always make this one of boxing’s most memorable nights. Because, simply put, it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Leading up to the fight, Ali was going to lose. That was a given if you talked to fans and most pundits. The question was, how bad was he going to lose, and was he going to get hurt?
Why? Ali was a former heavyweight champion and one of the best of his era. But at 32 years old, and just a year and a half removed from only his second loss as a pro, to Ken Norton, he was largely seen as a fighter on the decline. After the loss to Norton, Ali avenged the defeat (albeit controversially) with a split decision in their rematch, then decisioned Rudi Lubbers and scored a less than scintillating decision over Joe Frazier in their January 1974 sequel.
Now he was going to face the 25-year-old Foreman, 40-0 with 37 knockouts, whose previous three fights were as follows:
Joe Frazier, TKO2
Jose Roman, KO1
Ken Norton, TKO2
Ali went life-and-death with Frazier and Norton, and Foreman barely broke a sweat. This was going to be ugly, and “Big George” expected as much.
“That’s the sad thing about it,” Foreman told me in a 2012 interview for Boxing News. “I had cleaned Ken Norton out, wiped out George Chuvalo, who had gone 12 rounds with [Ali], and I knocked them out. Muhammad Ali was no concern. I figured I’d knock him out in maybe two, three rounds at the most. And what made me so good against Joe Frazier was that I was afraid of him. And what made me so terrible was that I had literally no respect for Muhammad Ali. None.”
The fight world respected Ali, but most didn’t think he could win. Foreman was too young, too strong and too mean for the former champ. Knowing what we know about Ali now, things might have been different when it came to predictions. But after Foreman wrecked Norton and Frazier, he was the baddest man on the planet, no ifs ands or buts about it.
Legendary photographer Neil Leifer was there in Zaire, and while his heart was with Ali, his brain said Foreman.
“I’m a huge Ali fan and I was certainly rooting for Ali,” Leifer told me in a 2022 interview for The Ring. “But I picked Foreman by knockout in the fourth round. I photographed Foreman in the Olympics, I was at the [Ken] Norton fight when he just creamed Norton, I was in Kingston when he beat Frazier, and I just thought, with Ali, enough time had passed. I thought Foreman was younger, and I picked him in the fourth round because I thought Foreman was one of those fighters that, when he gets his punch in, he’s gonna knock you down; you get up and he knocks you down again. Foreman didn’t have a lot more going for him, even against Frazier – other than the fact that Joe was a fighter who sat right in front of you. If you or I got in the ring with Joe Frazier, we’d have no trouble hitting him. The problem is taking what he was dishing out. And the thing that George Foreman had better than anyone that was fighting at the time was, he could punch – and when he hit you, that was the end of the fight.”
Even Ali’s sizable entourage was hoping for the best but expecting the worst. As Mailer wrote in “The Fight”:
“It was a grim dressing room. Perhaps it looked like a comfort station in a Moscow subway. Big, with round pillars tiled in white, even the wallpaper was white. So it also looked like an operating room. In this morgue all groans were damped. White tile was everywhere. What a place to get ready! The men gathered had no more cheer than the decor.”
It was up to Ali to get his team on his side.
Mailer wrote:
“‘What’s going on here,’ said Ali as he entered. ‘Why is everybody so scared? What’s the matter with you.’ …Yet for all this fine effort, the mood of the room hardly improved. It was like a corner in a hospital where relatives wait for word of the operation.”
Ali was the only one who needed to be confident, though, and he was. So was Foreman. Too confident.
“I got in that ring and I didn’t even think about this guy,” said Foreman. “It was the best I ever felt. I remember going to the dressing room thinking, ‘Man, I like boxing. If I can feel like this before a match, I’d fight every day.’ No butterflies, no fear at all, and it makes you just go out and forget this and forget that. You don’t even think about moving your head or jumping backwards or anything; you just think about doing it. And I lost that quality, which was my best quality: fear.”
Eight rounds later, Foreman was counted out, and Ali was champion again. It was a glorious night for “The Greatest,” and one that “Big George” didn’t get over for a long time.
“I had this complex after losing to Muhammad, and I truly didn’t understand why I lost that match,” Foreman said. “And what bothered me more than anything was that it wasn’t supposed to happen. And to be honest with you, I was surprised I never got a rematch.”
The Texan said he did later talk to Ali about a rematch, but Ali’s condition for giving him a shot was that Foreman take back his manager-trainer Dick Sadler. Foreman refused, and there would be no rematch. It wasn’t until 1978 that Foreman got some peace and closure from the fight that took his title and undefeated record. By then, he had lost to Jimmy Young and walked away from the sport that he would ultimately return to in 1987.
“Allan Malamud from Los Angeles, a sports reporter, came down to my ranch,” said Foreman. “He was on his way to report on Muhammad Ali fighting Leon Spinks in the dome in New Orleans. And he stopped by, and I was working in my garden, of all places, and he said ‘George, what really happened in Africa? I want to know the truth.’ And I looked him in the face and said, ‘You know, I lost; that’s what happened.’ He said ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, I got knocked out and lost the title. I even have pictures to prove it.’ And we burst out laughing. And that was the only time I got a little freedom from that. It ate at me from ’74 to ’78, and then that was the last. I was done with it.”
Ali and Foreman would ultimately become friends, content in the reality that for as long as we’re talking about boxing, we’ll talk about the Rumble in the Jungle. And here we are, 50 years later and still talking about it.
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