“ATTENTION! Stop talkin’ now!”
These were the opening words of Muhammad Ali’s impromptu post-fight press conference, soon after producing the second “I shook up the world” moment of his long career.
His first such moment had come a decade previously with his victory over Sonny Liston in Miami to become the youngest heavyweight world champion at that time. This second one had come after his stunning victory over an in-prime, fearsomely fearsome George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on October 30 1974.
Ali was in a state of high dudgeon on this monsoon-swept night in his dressing room in central Africa 50 years ago, lambasting his critics and the doubters from deep in the bowels of the then Stade du 20 Mai (20 May Stadium) in the capital of the central African state.
It was the post-Patrice Lumumba era in this long-tortured part of the world, a time when Lumumba’s CIA-backed executioner, the tyrant Mobutu Sese Seko, was able to secure the services of Ali and Foreman with the objective of attempting to legitimise his barbaric rule.
Ali was a great man, but this greatness lay within the confines of still being a man, never more than. By the time he climbed through the ropes to face Foreman on that unforgettable night in Kinshasa for an unprecedented five million dollars, the simple truth is that he was broke and desperate for money.
He had an extensive entourage, personal obligations, and a cult (Nation of Islam) to maintain with financial largesse. The glory days of the fleet-footed lightning-fast ring specimen were, by now, over. In its place was a shop-worn fighter whose need for validation was such that he was willing to go through hell in order to continue to attain it.
This is exactly what he did against the human wrecking machine that was George Foreman on that balmy late October night back. Boxing writers and commentators have outdone themselves since in ascribing a romantic slant to Ali’s extraordinary feat in winning this fight against every metric imaginable. The hard truth is that this fight, more than any other he’d had hitherto, sped Ali into the arms of the Parkinson’s that would colonise then claim his life in 2017.
What is life without risking all to touch greatness? This is a question that has preoccupied thinkers and philosophers since time immemorial. It is the reason why us lesser mortals have always sought to live life vicariously through the exploits of those who do.
Muhammad Ali was, throughout his flawed and imperfect life, the embodiment of this role in human affairs. His was a life lived in the service of the unfulfilled dreams of others. It was both a curse and a blessing combined.
The fight itself belongs in the category of an epic battle of wills. Foreman was the in-prime world champion who emitted an aura of primal violence. He’d only recently dispatched two of Ali’s previous opponents, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, with impeccable ruthlessness, both of whom had themselves defeated Ali.
Just imagine the mountain of self-doubt, based on this, that Ali had to climb in order to convince himself that Foreman was a fire he could walk through. In his mind, and in the mind of millions around the world, he was more than human. It was precisely this sense of otherness that was the key to his victory via an eighth round stoppage that remains among the most important moments in the entire history of sports.
Ali endured the kind of punishment against those ropes in that ring on this night that you might associate with a victim of the Spanish Inquisition. The ferocity of Foreman’s punches were such that when watching the fight back today, you can only and still shudder at the ability of a human being to endure them.
Ali by 1974 was not a man — he was an icon. More than an icon, he was a symbol of defiance in the face of the overwhelming odds. His had been a Camusian struggle against the injustice of a system forged in the crucible of a Vietnam war that was and remains the acme of Western imperialist barbarism.
And yet now here he was, in Zaire in 1974, legitimising the barbarism of an African despot in the name of personal enrichment and legacy. “Unhappy is the land in need of heroes,” Bertolt Brecht once proclaimed, and where Muhammad Ali is concerned, this staunch German communist was never more correct.
Ali was a flawed hero, but still a hero. He put everything, up to and including his life, on the line in Zaire against Foreman in 1974. He almost alone believed he could win, and he was proved right. The cost was immense, but in the process he achieved the closest thing to immortality a mortal being could and can ever hope to achieve.
“Down goes Foreman! Down goes Foreman!” the American commentator proclaimed, after Ali bounced back off those ropes with the most telling combination in all of boxing. It was a moment to savour. Still is. But it was one that came at a high price. Muhammad Ali was never the same after this pyrrhic victory writ large.
He was a complex man, the product of a complicated world, and that is how he should always be remembered.
