Ali's 'Rumble in the Jungle' turns 35 today

"Beyond the stucco villa, the Congo River flowed swiftly," Dave Anderson wrote in The New York Times. "On the lawn several dozen Africans, men in their slacks and bright shirts and women in their long dresses had come for a glimpse of the famous man now that he was the world heavyweight champion again."

Anderson's words are of no recent vintage, but they remain as vivid and as lucid as the day he crafted them 35 years ago.

His words are remembered today because this is the anniversary of the title fight Anderson wrote about. Now as then, you can hardly forget it, not if you consider yourself a Muhammad Ali fan.

Even if you didn't watch the bout live or weren't born until after that autumn day in 1974, you have seen film of it or have read about Ali's "Rumble in the Jungle."

No fight defined the Ali character more poignantly than his bout with George Foreman, the reigning champ then.

Ali, of course, had had memorable fights before he stepped into the swelter in Kinshasa, Zaire, to meet Foreman. Epic bouts with Joe Frazier and Sonny Liston come to mind, and Ali's "Bum of the Month" club had pitted "the people's champ" against any fighter who merited a title shot.

Politics cost Ali. It punished him for refusing to enter the military.

"I was determined to be one nigger that the white man didn't get," Ali once said.

In a sense, the white man did get him; he stripped Ali of the title. Foreman had gone on to win the belt, dismantling the heavyweight rankings in the process with the kind of power not seen since Rocky Marciano lorded over boxing's glamour division.

Ali-Foreman was the fight that fans had longed for -- one that didn't seem possible, however, in the clashing world of boxing promoters.

Both Foreman and Ali wanted to be paid a king's ransom, and they would get it from Don King. He made the two fighters follow him to Zaire to collect it.

King didn't have the money to promote the bout himself, but he convinced the country's strongman Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the richest men in the world, to guarantee purses of $5 million apiece.

Neither Ali nor Foreman could reject those dollars.

But their fight proved less about the cash and more about the egos.

Ali, 32, never thought he was anything less than a world champion, his losses to Frazier and Ken Norton notwithstanding. He took on Foreman to prove it.

Foreman, 25, didn't need to prove much. He came into this fight in Mai 20 Stadium unbeaten with 37 knockouts in 40 bouts. Foreman had already dismantled Frazier, a fight as one-sided as any championship bout in history.

If people thought Mike Tyson was a fearsome force during his reign of terror, they don't know what "fearsome" means. Tyson was never the hulking menace Foreman proved to be.

Fear was never one of Ali's traveling companions, though. Ali showed no fear of Foreman, never believing the brutish slugger could handle his hand and foot speed. He would dazzle Foreman with both - or so the Ali faithful thought.

They could not have been more wrong.

Because on the early morning of Oct. 30, it wasn't Ali's hand speed or foot speed that did in Foreman. It was Ali's smarts.

The fight proved a test of brawn over brain, and brain got the better of it. Had the plodding Foreman wanted to devise a surefire plan for losing, he succeeded. He ignored the heat and humidity in the jungle rumble, and he came out of his corner in the first round trying for a knockout.

Round after round, Foreman threw wild punches, pinning Ali against the ropes but unable to penetrate his guard. Foreman's aggression won him rounds, but it sapped his strength as well.

By the eighth round, his energy was spent. He had allowed Ali's rope-a-dope to define the night. And once his energy had disappeared into the night, the fight belonged to Ali.

He knocked Foreman down with a hard combination in the center of the ring. Groggy from Ali's blows, sapped by the oppressive heat, Foreman struggled to beat referee Zack Clayton's count; he failed.

Against all logics, against all the doubters and critics -- men and women who had considered Foreman unbeatable -- Ali won, regaining a title the U.S. government stole from him.

It was a night frozen in sports history -- as vivid today to a generation of fight fans as when Anderson and others wrote about it 35 years ago.

Wanted: A heavyweight fans care about

Boxing is a dead sport walking, some people contend. And they might be right if they’re judging the sport on the men who lord over the heavyweight division.

Quick, can you name any of the division’s No. 1 contenders?

Only the most diehard fan can, because the heavyweight division is a mishmash of nameless, faceless palookas that draw yawns from folks who still insist boxing matters.

Think this is an exaggeration? OK, did you know that the WBC champion defended his heavyweight belt Saturday night? Vitali Klitschko fought the tub of Jell-O known as Cris Arreola. No reason to offer details about a fight that nobody noticed. Klitschko fighting anybody wouldn’t fill a middle-school gym unless the promoter gave away most of the tickets.

Making a fight fan fork over cash to watch the bout on pay-per-view television is about as appealing as paying top dollar for box seats to an Indians-Orioles game. Or, more to the sport, paying for ringside seats to see Larry Holmes (old and beyond his fighting weight) and Muhammad Ali (old and in poor health) fight again.

Sentimental value, perhaps; as high art, well … retired fighters in their 60s ought to stay retired.

And plodding fighters like Klitschko need to get out of the sport, too. Then again, he can’t be blamed for what’s happened to the most prestigious division in boxing. Not since Lennox Lewis retired in 2003 has the heavyweight division had a fighter anybody cared about, and even Lewis wasn’t a headliner in the Mike Tyson mold.

This is the nadir of the division. It had a transitional period after Rocky Marciano retired unbeaten in the 1950s and again when Viet Nam-era politics put Ali’s career in limbo during the ’70s. But the sports revived itself; it found new personalities to carry the banner of yesteryear’s greats.

But where are those personalities today? They can’t be found in Klitschko and his brother Wladimir, who combine to hold three of the four heavyweight belts. Before the bout Saturday, the two brothers had beaten two unknowns -- Ruslan Chagaev and Juan Carlos Gomez -- this year.

Did anybody notice those fights? Did the bouts make the SportsCenter highlights? Did they give fight fans things to talk about?

This is not to denigrate the Klitschko brothers. They can’t be faulted for breaking into boxing during a period when the heavyweight championship isn’t the glamorous title it used to be. Nor can they be faulted for being Ukrainian and for not being able to build a following among American fans.

The division might benefit if the Klitschkos played the role of the evil Soviets, stealing a persona that helped pro wrestling thrive: good vs. bad. But the ill-well toward Ukrainians isn’t what it was during the Cold War and when the Soviet Union stood as a threat to Americans.

That threat no longer exists, of course. And a legitimate American threat in the heavyweight division doesn’t exist either. Absent one, the division can’t grab the attention it once held.

That has allowed the smaller weight divisions to take the spotlight. The Juan Miguel Marquez-Floyd Mayweather bout eight days ago packed the MGM Grand and drew one-million buys as a pay-per-view attraction.

Klitschko-Arreola filled nothing, and the bout probably didn't draw a million viewers on cable TV, which is a pity. Then again, maybe the lack of interest in this bout simply proved that a boxer's size never should have been important when judging talent inside the squared circle.

The little men have always put on a great show.

(Photo of Vitali Klitschko by sunshinetrue's photostream)

Ali walks on the ugly end of life

Muhammad Ali used to cut a handsome figure, standing tall and proud and often defiantly in the face of opposition that crushed lesser men’s spirit and will.

Ali was "pretty," his body strong and sinewy and sleek. His charisma melted hearts -- or hardened them. He was all that people who chronicled the sport wanted to see in a great fighter: He drew an emotional response.

Not everybody loved Ali; not everybody loved Mother Teresa either. But whatever hatred people harbored for Ali softened as the champ aged.

His aging hasn’t been graceful, though. “The Greatest” is wobbling toward the final rounds of life.

People saw that when the 67-year-old Ali, unsmiling, inscrutable, a busted old pug, made a trip to his ancestral homeland last week in Ennis, Ireland, where his great grandfather Abe Grady immigrated. Ali’s visit became a public affair, and his motorcades drew thousands of Irish as if he were still a reigning champion.

But Ali’s days of being a champion are far into his yesteryears. His legendary fights with Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sonny Liston and Uncle Sam are fading memories from the '60s and '70s. Today, Ali is infirm. Parkinson’s disease has taken its toll on his body. Now, his opponent isn’t a man on the other end of his boxing gloves but the disease he fights publicly.

The disease is winning.

How do you tell a man who won publicly to lose privately? Hasn’t he earned the right to decide how best to enjoy the days he has left? Yet does Ali really want his legion of fans to see him like this?

The cocksure Ali never learned to duck the spotlight. He soaked it up like a glutton. So there he was on those TV videos, moving slowly, unsteadily -- his eyes vacate like a zombie’s -- as he walked among his Irish ancestors. There was nothing handsome in that sight, only sadness.

A man who was once so beautiful that people couldn’t stop staring is so broken, so fragile and so devoid of the personality he once drew on to charm people that he's hard to look at. The sight of Ali like this is not one his fight fans want to remember.

In their mind’s eye, Muhammad Ali is still strong and sinewy and sleek; he’s forever pretty; he’s forever the champ; he’s forever “The Greatest.”

He’s forever winning fights, not losing them.

But does Ali, one of fight fans’ last link to the halcyon days of this dying sport, have to lose his last fight so publicly? And why?

In his glory days, Muhammad Ali was an enigma to some, although never to the boxing crowds abroad who understood greatness when they saw it. The greatness is what they hold on to still, even as they shudder over having to witness Ali, the world’s consummate goodwill ambassador and humanitarian, going him down for the final count.