The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When We Were Kings: Review and Commentary: Difference between revisions

Rolling Stone reported that only , attended the first two nights of the festival, which may explain the dearth of crowd shots accompanying the per- formances. The , seat stadium filled on the final night only because President Mobutu “convinced” concert promoters to give away the remain- ing tickets (Gehr). Included on the Blu-ray version are brief interviews with Gast and co-producer David Sonenberg. For those devotees of Norman Mailer not interested in accumulating another piece of plastic in their home, both films are available via streaming on Amazon Prime, minus the extra content.

According to the Yale Film Archive, Gast was originally hired by promoter Don King to make a concert film of the Zaire  music festival, which was scheduled to be held along with the boxing match. His crew shot the festi- val, but then came Foreman’s cut and the crew was not allowed to leave the country. Perhaps sensing a great opportunity, Gast had them document the weeks leading up to the fight and we are all the richer for it today (Yale).

Foreman, although not well-educated, is a very intelligent man and he understood the situation in which he was placed. “This was clearly Muham- mad Ali country . . . If I knocked him out, the most I’d get would be grudg- ing respect for vanquishing a legend. And if I lost, there’d be a big crowd at the station, jeering me back to Palookaville” (Goldstein ).

Indeed, as far the fans in Zaire were concerned, the fix was in against Fore- man from the outset—partially due to Muhammad Ali and partially due to Foreman’s and his managers’ lack of worldliness. Ali had arrived in Zaire first, where there was little infrastructure and few people had access to tele- vision or print media. It seems incredible today, but up until fight time, be- cause of rumors Ali started, quite a number of Zairians believed that George Foreman was white. For his own part, Foreman deplaned in Zaire with his pet German shepherd, Diego. The dog was introduced at a press conference and filmed with his front paws on the table next to Foreman. George and his unsophisticated handlers had no idea that just a generation earlier, when Zaire was the Belgian Congo, German shepherds had been used by Belgian police to intimidate and attack Zairians (Gast).

“This was gonna be the easiest fight of my life,” a mature Foreman quipped in a tone of good-natured irony in the  documentary Facing Ali. “I was just gonna walk in and knock him out in one, two, or three rounds. It was the most confident I’d ever been in a boxing match” (McKo- rmack).

sources was far from dry. For one thing, he could take a punch. Following his fight with Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden on March , , referee Arthur Mercante commented on the fourteenth-round knockdown: “Frazier hit him as hard as a man can be hit . . . Ali was exhausted. He went down, and anyone else would have stayed on the canvas, but he was up in three seconds . . . I motioned Frazier to a neutral corner and when I turned around to face Ali, he was on his feet” (Hauser ). Besides his physical resilience, Ali could think under pressure and was a master of improvisation, both in and out of the ring.

In re-watching Foreman dismantle Norton and Frazier, I see exactly why Foreman felt the way he did. I’ve watched hundreds, perhaps over a thou- sand fights over the years and have never seen anyone punch harder than Foreman. In winning the championship against Joe Frazier in Kingston, Ja- maica, on January ,  (after Frazier had defeated Ali) one of George’s uppercuts in the second round lifted Smokin’ Joe entirely off the canvas. In- credibly, Frazier got up, only to be knocked down again, for the sixth and final time, before the fight was stopped (Cosell). Coincidentally, the match was refereed by Arthur Mercante, who afterward may have revised his opin- ion about the hardest a man can be hit.

During the run-up to the fight in Zaire, while Foreman healed, brooded, and trained without gusto, Ali threw his one-man public relations machine into high gear. During a reception given in his honor at the presidential palace, Ali said, “Mr. President, I’ve been a citizen of the United States for  years and was never invited to the White House. It sure gives me pleasure to be invited to the Black House” (Goldstein ). Meanwhile, he privately con- fessed to Howard Bingham, his personal photographer, “I’d give anything to be training in the United States. They got ice cream there, and pretty girls and miniskirts” (Hauser ).