Rumble in the Jungle: The fight that defined a decade, 50 years on

In many ways, Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle didn’t start on this day 50 years ago at 4:30 a.m. local time (10:30 p.m. ET).

Nor did it start seven weeks prior when the fighters arrived in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where the bout would take place, or when promoter Don King struck a multi-million dollar deal with the country’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko, to hold Africa’s first ever heavyweight title fight.

In actual fact, the narrative that would come to define the fight began 10 years prior.

“You can’t just look at the Rumble in the Jungle as a fistfight, and ignore everything that went with it,” remembered Thomas Hauser, Ali’s biographer and friend, in an interview with CNN Sport.

“1974 in Zaire was really the symbolic validation of what the 1960s stood for.”

Ten years before Ali shocked the world by knocking out Foreman to claim the heavyweight championship of the world, he had done the exact same – albeit it under the name Cassius Clay – to Sonny Liston, three months after John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and three weeks after The Beatles first stepped off the plane in New York.

“Those three months are really when the 60s, as we think of them, began,” said Hauser, who was himself inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2020.

The following month, just as Cassius Clay was becoming a household name, he changed it to Muhammad Ali, in line with his membership of the Nation of Islam. Three years later, Ali refused to be drafted into the US Armed Forces.

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” he asked at the time.

Ali was arrested and stripped of his heavyweight title, his passport and his right to box. It would be another three years before he was permitted a license to fight, and another seven before the Rumble in Jungle offered him a chance to reclaim his title.

“There was a period within a little more than two months in 1974, 10 years (after 1964),” remembered Hauser. “First, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, over the Watergate scandal. And after that, Muhammad Ali went to Zaire and reclaimed the heavyweight throne.”

With the war in Vietnam coming to an end, one of its greatest proponents had stepped down, and one of its most famous critics had fought his way back to the top of the pile.

“Those two events seem to vindicate everything that was fought for in the 1960s, and the 1960s represented,” said Hauser.

But there was another narrative, which had also begun a decade before, which also helps to define how we remember Ali-Foreman. Having seized power in a coup of 1965, President Mobutu, along with the event’s organizers, saw the bout as an opportunity to promote Africa, and Zaire specifically.

The fight was pitched as a return for Ali and Foreman to their African roots and was even due to be tagged “From the Slave Ship to the Championship!” before Mobutu realized and had all the posters burned, according to History.com.

Upon his arrival, Ali was led through the airport by a man in traditional dress, and Foreman wore traditional West African clothing in the run-up to the fight. A three-day music festival – featuring artists like James Brown, BB King and Bill Withers – was due to accompany the bout, but ended up taking place six weeks before, as the fight was delayed when Foreman sustained a cut on his head.

For Mobutu, it was – perhaps even more importantly – an opportunity to promote himself.

“A fight between two Blacks, in a Black nation, organized by Blacks and seen by the whole world; that is a victory for Mobutism,” signs around Kinshasa declared. On the night, a large portrait of the president hung above the two fighters, in the very stadium in which Mobutu had detained political prisoners.

Even if Ali had no particular allegiance to Mobutu or Zaire, he was pleased to be able to bring the bout to Africa.

“Symbolically, it was very exciting for Ali to return to the motherland, so to speak, and fight in the land of his ancestors,” explained Hauser.

“I wanted to establish a relationship between American Blacks and Africans,” Ali would go on to write. “The fight was about racial problems, Vietnam. All of that.

“The Rumble in the Jungle was a fight that made the whole country more conscious.”

Despite, according to Hauser, Ali privately expressing that he had grown tired of Africa, the local audience took to “The Greatest.” The chant “Ali, bomaye” (“Ali, kill him”) became ubiquitous around the fight.

Attempts to attract attention to Zaire and Africa worked – the fight was watched by as many as one billion people worldwide, and Ali’s victory was seen as a victory for the continent.

It helped that the fight itself was an all-timer. Foreman came into it having won all 40 of his previous bouts, 37 by knockout. He was 25 years old, in his prime, and regarded by many to have the heaviest punch in the history of the heavyweight division.

“To me, it was like a charity fight,” Foreman later told the BBC. “I’d heard Ali was desperately broke, so I thought I’d do him a favor. I got $5 million and I was willing to let him have $5 million.”

Ali, meanwhile, was considered washed up. At 32 years old, he had lost a significant chunk of his career to the ban and had been beaten by Joe Frazier and Ken Norton since his return, two fighters that Foreman had recently knocked out.

Foreman was a three-to-one favorite with the bookmakers and there were genuine fears, not least from Ali’s business manager Gene Kilroy, that the challenger could be seriously hurt or even die in the ring.

“Big George” came out swinging to start, Ali surviving the first round. Then, 30 seconds into round two, the man who was famed for the “Ali shuffle” debuted a bizarre new tactic.

With Foreman again on the offensive, Ali retreated to the ropes and leaned back, blocking some punches, absorbing those he could not deflect, and still managing to throw some of his own back in his opponent’s direction.

As the rounds went on, Foreman began to tire. Come the end of the eighth round, Ali spotted his opportunity, springing back with a vicious left-right combination, knocking Foreman down, and prompting delirium within the Stade du 20 Mai. Within seconds the ring was awash with trainers, officials and fans, shortly followed by Zairean police and paratroopers.

Boxing is still a supremely popular sport. When Floyd Mayweather beat Manny Pacquiao in May 2015, the fight grossed a reported $425,000,000 from 4,400,000 pay-per-view (PPV) purchases.

But, according to Hauser, nothing today can match the shockwaves which the Rumble in the Jungle sent around the world.

“You just had Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk fight for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world, in Saudi Arabia, which is certainly an exotic location. One could even analogize the dictatorial regime of President Mobutu in Zaire with conditions in Saudi Arabia today,” said Hauser.

“If you walk out onto the street after we’ve finished talking and ask 20 people: ‘Who’s the heavyweight champion of the world?’ How many of them do you think are going to say Oleksandr Usyk?

“Now, if you had gone down the street after Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman and asked, ‘Who’s the heavyweight champion of the world?’ out of 20 people, how many people would have said Muhammad Ali?” Hauser continued. “I’m gonna say 19.”

It’s why, half a century later, we still remember the fight. Just as the history of the Rumble in the Jungle began a decade before the fight itself, what Ali did in the early hours of the morning in a soccer stadium in Zaire is still being discussed and dissected and eulogized in 2024.

“He was as close to pure fire in the 1960s and early 70s as a person can get,” said Hauser. “So if you ask, ‘Could that fight happen today?’ No – because Muhammad Ali couldn’t happen today.”