The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When We Were Kings: Review and Commentary
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 13 Number 1 • 2019 | » |
Featuring Muhammad Ali, George Foreman
With Norman Mailer, George Plimpton
The Criterion Collection, 2019, $35.00
| “ | In the ring, genius is transcendent moxie—the audacity to know that what usually does not work, or is too dangerous to attempt, can, in a special case, prove the winning move. Maybe that is why attempts are made from time to time to compare boxing with chess—the best move can lie very close to the worst move. At Ali’s level, you had to be ready to die, then, for your best ideas.[1] | ” |
In the fall of 1974, eight days before George Foreman was expected to annihilate Muhammad Ali in “The Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, Foreman suffered a cut over the eye while sparring. His trainer, Dick Sadler, closed the cut, which would require eleven stitches, with a butterfly bandage.[2]
The so-called Butterfly Effect might have just as well taken its name from boxing, rather than chaos theory, and, in popular culture, Ray Bradbury’s 1952 science fiction story, “A Sound of Thunder.” The basic concept is that small causes may have momentous effects. In Bradbury’s tale, a time traveler goes back to the age of dinosaurs, accidentally steps on a butterfly, and returns to find his world irreparably changed—and not for the better.[3] In the boxing example, one of the results was the documentary When We Were Kings, which would not have been produced but for Foreman’s cut and the rescheduling of the heavyweight Championship of the World for five weeks later.
. . .
References
- ↑ Sipiora 2013, pp. 500–501.
- ↑ Dundee & Sugar 2008, p. 177.
- ↑ Bradbury 2005, p. 236.
Works Cited
- Bradbury, Ray (2005). A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories. William Morrow.
- Dundee, Angelo; Sugar, Bert R. (2008). My View From The Corner: A Life In Boxing. New York: McGraw Hill.
- Sipiora, Phillip (2013). Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays. New York: Random House.
