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

In round two, Ali begins the rope-a-dope, so it’s time to shine some light on the myth of Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, loosening the ropes prior to the fight. Mailer has, to some degree, helped to perpetuate this myth. Ac- cording to Dundee’s autobiography, My View From The Corner (a great read for all boxing fans), upon inspecting the ring the afternoon before the fight, Angelo and assistant Bobby Goodman discovered it had been set up by peo- ple who had never seen a boxing ring (Dundee ). Having set up a ring myself several times before matches I promoted, I can attest to the fact that it requires experience to do so properly.

The ring in the th of May Stadium had a pronounced list, one corner support having sunk into the turf. The ropes were sagging due to improper installation along with the tropical heat and humidity. Angelo and Goodman worked for several hours to jack up the sunken corner and install blocks under it. As for the ropes, they had to scrounge up a razor blade and use it to cut over a foot of slack from each rope before reinstalling and tightening them. According to Dundee, if they hadn’t attended to the ring, by fight time the ropes would have been sagging onto the canvas. (Dundee ). His ac- count is verified by Goodman in a separate interview (Hauser ).

“I saw him dancing for five or six rounds,” Dundee recalled, “Then I imag- ined him picking up the pace when George got tired and knocking him out in the late rounds, but everything was planned around not getting hit . . . when he went to the ropes I felt sick . . . that shows what I know” (Goldstein ).

Joyce Carol Oates points out in her small classic, On Boxing, that “boxers, like chess players, must think on their feet—must be able to improvise in mid-fight, so-to-speak” (Oates ). Ali personified this and explains what happened in his own words:

I didn’t really plan what happened that night. But when a fighter gets in the ring, he has to adjust according to the condi- tions he faces. Against George, the ring was slow. Dancing all night, my legs would have gotten tired. And George was follow- ing me too close, cutting off the ring. In the first round, I used more energy staying away from him than he used chasing me. I was tireder than I should have been with fourteen rounds to go. I knew I couldn’t keep dancing, because by the middle of the fight I’d be really tired and George would get me. So between rounds I decided to do what I did in training when I got tired . . . It was something Archie Moore used to do. He’d let younger men take their shots and blocked everything in scientific fashion . . . when they got tired, Archie would attack . . . So starting in the second round, I gave George what he thought he wanted. (Hauser ).

Bullshit, George. Joyce Carol Oates, a far more practical observer of the sweet science, quotes a smart fighter in her book, who explains: “Boxing is a game of control, and, as in chess, this control can radiate in circles from the center, or in circles toward the center . . . the entire action of a fight goes in a circle; it can be little circles in the middle of the ring or big circles along the ropes, but always in a circle. The man who wins is the man who controls the action of the circle” (Oates ).

Foreman, initially, made all kinds of excuses for losing. Years later, in ret- rospect, he was incredibly insightful and gracious. “Muhammad amazed me”, he recalled. “He out-thought me; he out-fought me. That night, he was just the better fighter . . . I went out and hit Muhammad Ali with the hard- est body shot I ever delivered . . . anybody else in the world would have crum- bled...Icouldseeithurt...hehadthatlookinhiseyes,likehewassaying I’m not gonna let you hurt me. And to be honest, that’s the main thing I re- member about the fight. Everything else happened too fast. I got burned out . . . I was the aggressor . . . but I knew in some way I was losing” (Hauser ).

Following the fight, on a whim, writer Pete Bonventre commandeered a car and driver and rode through the monsoon to Ali’s compound, the twenty-mile trip taking two hours. The compound was deserted, with the press all having filed their stories and the entourage gone to party. “Three hours after the greatest victory of his life, Muhammad Ali was sitting on the stoop, showing a magic trick to a group of black children. . . . And it was hard to tell who was having a better time, Ali or the children.” Ten years after upsetting Sonny Liston and seven years after he’d been stripped of the title, Muhammad Ali was once again the heavyweight champion (Hauser ).

Foreman stayed away from boxing for ten years. He watched no television and didn’t follow the sport, concentrating on his preaching. Then, at age , weighing over  pounds, he began a comeback. His goal was to raise money to build a youth center for his church and—to everyone’s amuse- ment—regain the heavyweight championship of the world (Dundee ).

The New George looked nothing like the original. He’d always been big, but now he was huge. And he’d learned to relax in the ring, no longer tensely stalking opponents and wasting energy as he had in those few short rounds in Zaire. The New George waited patiently, sometimes absorbing terrible blows, for his chance to land a short, sneaky right, and when he did, the ef- fect was devastating. Somehow, he’d retained—even refined—his jab into something akin to a pile driver. His style was anything but pretty, but he had enough weapons to remain dangerous (Dundee ).

heavyweight title, they’re whether I visit McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, or Jack in the Box” (Dundee ).

He took fights in places like Anchorage and other locations not on the boxing map. “I had seen others, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, fail in their comeback attempts because they were looking for overnight success. I knew it would take a long period of time to do it right, so I started from the bottom and worked my way up and it took three years” (Dundee ). He fought twenty-one fights against increasingly challenging opponents, in- cluding Gerry Cooney, Tommy Morrison, and Evander Holyfield.

On November , , age  years,  days, the New George got his chance. Following the ninth round in a fight against champion Michael Moorer, George had lost every previous round on all scorecards. His corner man told him, “You gotta put this guy down. You’re behind, baby.” Foreman’s corner man was none other than Angelo Dundee, Ali’s former handler (“Foreman,” You Tube). George bristled at Angelo’s comment, but boy did he ever go out and follow directions. Like Ali in Zaire, he controlled the ac- tion of the circle. Moving to his left, he saw the opening and landed that sneaky right directly on Moorer’s chin. Traveling no more than twelve inches, the punch was reminiscent of the one Joe Louis floored Max Schmeling with in the first round of their rematch in . Moorer was starched, as they say in boxing, landing on the seat of his pants, knocked out cold. Twenty years after losing the title to Ali, Foreman took it back from a man  years his junior. He had come full circle—along with his red boxing trunks, the same ones he wore in Zaire–with alterations for waist size. Muhammad Ali, whose disabilities had by this time become very evident, wrote to George. He said, “Congratulations, Champ, you had the courage and the guts to go out and do it” (Dundee ).

Following a close loss in his final fight at age  to respected heavyweight Shannon Briggs, Foreman returned to his dressing room dejected. There he was met by his lawyer with a check for a million dollars from the Salton company, whose electric grill George had reluctantly agreed to endorse. It was just the beginning (Rovell).

more for television appearances, Foreman’s profit from the grill approaches $ million—more, by far, than he earned or ever dreamt of in his boxing career. He continues to sidelight as a boxing commentator for HBO and pay- per-view broadcasts (Rovell).

Asked in recent years to reflect on the Rumble in the Jungle, the New George delivers his own version of the Butterfly Effect. “I’m just happy that I didn’t win it . . . because everything would be different . . . it made me fall into the hands of God . . . it was that fragile . . . one little thing could have messed the whole thing up. The world would have been different for us” (Brunt ) . . . ”I’m just proud to be part of the Ali legend. If people men- tion my name with his from time to time, that’s enough for me. That, and I hope Muhammad Ali likes me, because I like him. I like him a lot” (Hauser ).