BEFORE: Spike Lee carries over again from "Hoop Dreams" and I'm still at the intersection of documentaries, sports and Black history. I will get back to tennis in a bit, but I've got to get there through boxing and baseball, if that makes sense. This film focuses on the heavyweight title match held in the country of Zaire, referred to as the "Rumble in the Jungle". I've about it so many times over the years, but still I can't really tell you any details, so once again, I'm playing catch up tonight, time to learn some sports history.
THE PLOT: Boxing documentary on the 1974 world heavyweight championship bout between defending champion George Foreman and the underdog challenger, Muhammad Ali.
AFTER: My usual complaint about boxing movies, at least fictional ones, is that I don't end up learning very much about the sport - the different punches, the strategies, the techniques - most fiction films are good for a couple of intense training montages, then they throw the characters into the ring and let them have at it. That's all well and good, but I'm not really LEARNING anything that way. This doc swings far back the other way, we almost learn TOO MUCH about boxing strategy - but that's OK, you can never learn too much, it's almost always never enough.
Tonight I learned WHY the boxing match took place in Zaire, Africa - so that's a good start. Don King was just starting out as a boxing promoter and he financed the $10 million purse by holding the fight there. After all, what's $10 million out of the budget of a COUNTRY? Countries approve millions in pro-tourism funds all the time, and getting the heavyweight championship to be held somewhere other than Las Vegas or Atlantic City, that's a win-win, right? Zaire promotes itself as a travel destination for, umm, boxing fans (?) and the fighters get paid, and the money goes to the boxers and promoters, the way it's supposed to work, and not to some Vegas middle men. Or, a country's dictator launders about $10 million in dirty money by filtering it through a boxing match, who can say?
(What I love most about the "Rumble in the Jungle" is how that nickname not only inspired the "Thrilla in Manila" the following year, it also got parodied in the movie "The Slammin' Salmon", where the boxer-turned-restaurant owner is famous for fighting in both the "Dispute in Beirut" and the "Fracas in Caracas".).
Plus, it looks like a good time was had by all - there was a concert held with James Brown, The Spinners, the Crusaders, and African singing sensation Miriam Makeba - this was apparently the Zaire 74 Music Festival, which ran about the same time. Here's the next thing I learned, that Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Don King and their entourages all flew over to Zaire, and then Foreman got a bad cut over his eye during training, so the fight was pushed back about six weeks, and everybody just sort of hung around. Well, that means more time to enjoy the culture, the Zaire 74 Music Festival, and hey, let's make a doumentary with a lot of B-roll, since we've got a whole lot of nothing else to do. By the end of the six weeks, Ali had become a fixture around Kinshasa, interacting with the people, and he couldn't walk down the street without a crowd of followers. Foreman, no doubt, was sequestered at the hotel, enjoying the air conditioning while devising a better way to grill hamburgers and sandwiches. (I've owned a few grills in my time, and I just want to say, it's IMPOSSIBLE to both "seal in the juices" and "knock out the fat" at the same time. Those are simply opposing things, a device can usually do one but not the other. Also, "the juices" IS FAT, so let's get that straight.)
The world therefore anticipated the Rumble for six weeks, and that's what the first hour of this film is about - that wait. YOU, TOO will experience what it must have been like for boxing fans to wait. That. Long. So yeah, the film drags for a while, you can only watch so much footage of Ali training and then walking around town saying clever things. The Music Festival ran from September 22 to 24 in 1974, and James Brown was nice enough to hang around for a couple interviews, but then the fight didn't take place until HALLOWEEN. 80,000 people stuck around, though, or perhaps came back to watch the fight, and another 50 million tuned in for the closed circuit or pay-per-view airing. Needless to say, there was no internet back then, no ESPN app on your phone, so you had two choices, fly to Zaire (now called Democratic Republic of the Congo) or pony up the money for the PPV.
The other important thing to note here is this was Ali's "comeback" fight, much like Elvis' 1968 TV concert special. Ali was stripped of his title in 1967 and suspended from boxing for three years for his refusal to be drafted and maybe fight in Vietnam. Here's where "The Greatest" should have taken a page from "The King's" book, they drafted Elvis largely as a publicity stunt, he was never going to pick up a gun and shoot enemies, the top brass would see to that - but it sent a message to the U.S. public that nobody was above the law. Similarly, if Ali had accepted military service, they would have found a nice cushy, out of the way spot for him, hence sending a message that nobody was above the law. Ali getting killed in Vietnam would have had more of a negative impact on enrollment, see? So they wouldn't have let that happen, I'm sure the U.S. military wanted to draft him just to make a point - but it's just a theory, really.
In 1970, Ali regained his boxing license and worked his way up to an attempt to regain the heavyweight championship from Joe Frazier, only Frazier won by unanimous decision, so Ali had to find another path. Then Foreman came from winning gold at the 1968 Olympics on a path to ultimately beat Frazier, still at the young age of 25 in 1974, compared to Ali's age of 32, it seemed the smart money was on the younger, scrappier Foreman, and even Howard Cosell figured that Ali would likely retire if he lost the Rumble.
Ali had the speed and the technical skills, but Foreman had the power. Ali disoriented him early by leading with his right hand - a surprising tactic because his right hand took longer to arrive (so the analysts said) so Foreman would theoretically have more time to react to a right cross, but that didn't seem to matter. Also, none of Foreman's sparring partners would probably lead with a right, so he hadn't trained that way, therefore it was unexpected. But Ali's rights barely made an impact, and then Foreman started landing punches of his own.
Time for the old rope-a-dope. Ali let Foreman push him up against the ropes, and punch Ali on the arms and body, making Foreman waste a lot of energy on punches that didn't do much damage. Ali was therefore able to get in more punches to Foreman's face, while taunting him that he wasn't throwing enough punches, and this made Foreman angry. By the fourth or fifth round, George Foreman was looking tired. By the eighth round, Foreman had no defense and was tired from throwing so many punches. Ali then got in some right hooks, a five-point combination, then a left hook and a hard right brought George to the canvas.
Ali proved he could not only take punches, but adopt a new fighting style that involved staying in one place, instead of the usual "float like a butterfly" tactic of moving around a lot. Most of Foreman's punches were to Ali's body, except for a few blows to the head that seemed to have no effect (umm, until years later, of course.). George Foreman was essentially done, he tried for years to arrange another title bout against Ali, but retired in 1977 after a loss to Jimmy Young. Ali kept SAYING he would allow a rematch against Foreman, but saying that and doing that turned out to be two different things.
The documentary version of the 1974 fight didn't come out until 1996 (what the hell took so long? The film version of "Woodstock" was released only one year after the concert...) but when "When We Were Kings" finally did get released, it won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature - and the filmmakers really should thank Siskel and Ebert for changing the way that documentaries were nominated - in other words, this came out two years after the "Hoop Dreams" scandal.
Also starring Norman Mailer (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), George Plimpton, Thomas Hauser, with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), George Foreman, Don King (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), James Brown (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), B.B. King (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Mobuto Sese Seko, Malick Bowens, Lloyd Price, Miriam Makeba, Drew Bundini Brown, Odessa Clay, Howard Cosell, Joe Frazier, Stewart Levine, Sonny Liston, Alan Pariser, Dick Sadler, Zach Clayton, Angelo Dundee, Archie Moore, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes
RATING: 6 out of 10 back-handed jabs (the conversational kind)
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