A brush with jail and precious time with Muhammad Ali in Zaire

Sportswriter Jerry Izenberg covered a golden age of heavyweight boxing and 50 years ago today, he spent nearly two weeks in Zaire, Africa, where he was ringside to witness the historic Rumble in the Jungle.

Now 94 years of age, Izenberg recalls the event, the fight, and a magical moment he will always treasure.

You’ve gotta remember, this is my 74th year in the business, so I’ve seen a couple of things. The thing about that fight that time in Zaire, Africa, made it last in everybody’s mind was number one the underdog status of Ali, he was a 10/1 underdog. The second thing was the exotic area it was in, you got to the fight and you could hear the beat of African drums under the moonlight. The third thing was the unexpected way that he won.

About 10 days before Ali left for Africa, Jerry Lisker was the sports editor at the Washington Post, and he and I used to travel together. I said, ‘I’m going up to Deer Lake, I want to see Ali before he leaves.’ So we went together. We’re standing in the doorway of the gym and he’s gotta have eyes in the back of his head, because Ali never turns his head, he cannot possibly know we’re standing there, and he’s banging the heavybag and yellin’ ‘I’ll knock that sucker out. I’ll knock that sucker cold.’

He doesn’t do this when he’s alone. He’s performing, so he’s got to know we’re there. And he turns his head and says, ‘Oh, hi fellas.’

But I knew something Jerry didn’t know, and it had been about a year and a half since Ali hit the heavybag, that’s why he wasn’t knocking people out at that stage of his career, because he had arthritis in both hands. Well, I had lunch with Gene Kilroy, the head of the camp, and he said, ‘I couldn’t stand watching him anymore and we talked to the very responsible surgeon and he said to Ali, ‘Listen, you’ve been getting shots in your hands and you’ve been getting by, but I’ll tell you this, if you’ve got any punches left, throw them at him. I want you to soak your hands in paraffin five times a day. It will not cure you, but it will make the fight so much easier for you in terms of pain and you’ll be able to throw those punches.’ Well, that’s what happened. And I was leaving Deer Lake with Lisker and I said, ‘What do you think?’ Jerry said, ‘I think his time is past, I think it’s a great effort, but I don’t think he can win.’ ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Jerry, you’re not gonna believe this, but I’m gonna pick Ali, and I’m gonna pick him by knockout.’

A long time ago – I’d known Muhammad a long time, our friendship lasted almost 50 years – he said to me once, ‘If I tell you a mosquito can pull a plough, don’t argue with me, hitch him up.’ And I said to Jerry, ‘I’m hitching my selection to him.’ And I predicted by knockout and I think we were the only two guys to pick him to win by knockout, and we were right.

[In Zaire] nobody could enjoy it. This is a fascist country and I’ll tell you one thing that told me where we were. Ali said to me, ‘We’re going to meet Mobutu,’ who was the president by rule of machine gun, and he said, ‘Do you wanna come?’ I said, ‘Of course I wanna come.’ I go there, and the palace was at the top of the hill. At the bottom of the hill, I see these half naked kids, all naked in some cases, with swollen stomachs, a sign of terrible hunger. We walked up the hill, there’s a solid gold leopard cage. The leopard was the symbol of Zaire at that time, and out comes Mobutu with his bodyguards and guns and there was Ali and they say the eyes are the window to the soul – I don’t know if he [Mobutu] had a soul. Because after it was all over, we turned around and went back down the hill and saw those same kids with the bloated bellies and I said, ‘This is really Zaire.’

We had censorship, too. They’d look at our copy. I got in an argument with a censor. A guy comes to me when we get to the military place, and he said, ‘I will be your interpreter and guide here.’ Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I thought to myself, if you sprayed lemon juice on this guy’s forehead, the word C-O-P is gonna come up. The next morning, he said we must go through the censor before we file and I said, ‘Did we get in a war last night? What happened?’ I go to the censor, he smiles at me, takes a blue pencil and he cuts out the first paragraph. I said, ‘Wait a minute, what are you doin’? You didn’t even read it.’ He said, ‘No, you said Zaire has dusty roads. No dusty roads, country roads. And I say, ‘Alright.’ And he smiles at me, so I think it’s a game. So I say to him, ‘Pretty damn dusty country roads.’ And he looks at me and says ‘Pretty… Pretty country roads.’ And he’s still smiling, and he says, ‘If you do not stop, and if you interrupt me again, you will go to prison.’

Well, I was born in Newark. I know how to handle myself on the streets and I couldn’t handle myself against a whole army so we made a peace agreement after that. 

The thing about George Foreman, George is a good friend of mine, we speak maybe every three weeks and we were close, but the thing about it was I’ve often told him, ‘George, when you won the championship the first time, you didn’t know how to fight’ and I believed that. And Foreman said to me, ‘You’re right.’ He learned how to fight from a gym teacher in a job corps and you’re not ready for a heavyweight championship fight like that, and if you remember in his first defense in Japan, he actually kicked a guy who was on the canvas. So, it was his inexperience. Ali beat him, clean, knocked him out. But, Africa beat him just as badly because Ali used Africa. Coming off the plane, arriving in Zaire and Gene Kilroy turns to Ali and there’s over a thousand people there to greet him, screaming and hollering, and Ali says, ‘Who do these people not like?’ And Kilroy says, ‘I can’t say white people, because I’m white, Angelo Dundee’s white, so I tell them what I think.’

‘The Belgians occupied this country, the Belgians set dogs [German Shepherds] on these people, they hate the Belgians. Ali raises his arms, cuts them off and the crowd stops dead silent, like he’s the pope or something, and Ali says, ‘I will tell you this, George Foreman came with a dog and it was a German Shepherd and George Foreman is a Belgian.’

And they started screaming, ‘Ali bom-aye’ and when they told him what it meant, ‘Ali kill him,’ Ali followed George around town, everywhere there was a crowd and he’d lead them in cheers, Ali Bom-aye, and this really resonated with Foreman, he was really alone.

The day before the fight, Jerry Lisker had a telephone, I did not, because he was then the editor of some London paper and because of the time element the deadline was closer for him than it was for me. I couldn’t have made the first edition. He had to dictate the fight into the phone. 

In the fight, Ali gets hit in the first round and he gets stunned a little bit. He goes to the ropes, there is no rope-a-dope and he’s got his gloves before his face and he’s trying to figure out this guy. While he’s doing that, George Foreman, who still doesn’t know how to fight – really – his arms weighed about 100lbs each, and he’s trying to get through those gloves, which are covering Ali’s face, and he can’t do it. Instead of hitting the arms, Foreman’s arms got tired and he kept going back to the same technique. After the second or third round, Angelo says, ‘Get off the ropes, stay off the ropes,’ and Ali looks at him and says, ‘Shut up,’ because by then he had a plan. And Ali hadn’t thrown many punches and in the seventh round he hits Foreman with a right hand and puts it in his memory bank; Ali wasn’t the best heavyweight who ever lived but he had the smartest IQ I ever saw, so now he knew what he could do.

The following round, Ali hits him with a right hand and George falls down in sections and he stumbles and he’s down on the ground. I don’t remember if I jumped up or not. I try not to remember because if I jumped up it was very unprofessional. I was amazed. Partly because anyone I tip to win by knockout never does. But he did.

Was it the best fight of Ali’s career? No, no, no, no. The most important fight was that fight. The setting, the unusualness of the area, the way he came from leftfield to knock him out, that’s what made it an interesting fight. But if I saw this fight for the first five or six rounds in New York City, I might have walked out. Nothing was happening, really. The impact of the fight was what was important. The greatest fight Ali ever had bar none, and the greatest heavyweight fight I ever saw in my life, and probably the greatest fight, Ali-Frazier III.

But in Zaire, there are two moments that I clearly saw who and what Ali was. It poured rain after the fight. Ali wasn’t going to stay around and talk to us. He was on the same military complex that we were on so Dave Anderson and I are taking the bus back and I said, ‘I don’t think I did a good enough job’ and Dave was very sympathetic, and said, ‘Well, we didn’t have much time to write…’ I said, ‘I gotta see him tonight. I’ve gotta do another piece.’ 

So Dave says, ‘I’ll go with you, but where are we going to find him on a huge military compound’ and I said, ‘I swear, I know where he is. He’ll be down by the river because he had said something to me about the river being spiritual to him.’ We went down to the river and on a little hill, his back is to us, he’s facing the river and looking across and he’s yelling, and we know he’s yelling because his shoulders are moving but he doesn’t know we’re there. Ali was not performing because he only performs for an audience, he was saying whatever it was we didn’t know, but it was coming from his heart. Suddenly, he stops yelling and raises his arms above his head in the Rocky pose. I don’t know what he was thinking then, I’ll never know and I know him as well as anybody, but he turned around and saw us and said, ‘Don’t ask what that meant to me tonight. I couldn’t explain it to you, and you wouldn’t understand it if I could.’

In that moment, when his arms reached for the sky, and he was dead silent, I said to myself, in this moment, he is really the king of the world. 

Jerry Izenberg is a Newark Star-Ledger great and his book, There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing, is available online.