50 years after the greatest boxing bout ever

You will likely return with a handful when you google ‘the greatest boxing bout ever’. Not for me. I regard the greatest boxing spectacle in my lifetime to be the fight between George Foreman, then the world heavyweight boxing champion, and his challenger, Muhammad Ali, a former champion returning to the arena to retake his […]

You will likely return with a handful when you google ‘the greatest boxing bout ever’. Not for me. I regard the greatest boxing spectacle in my lifetime to be the fight between George Foreman, then the world heavyweight boxing champion, and his challenger, Muhammad Ali, a former champion returning to the arena to retake his title. The fight took place in the early hours of Wednesday, October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), then known as Zaire. It is the fiftieth year of that epochal fight that was widely celebrated last week.

In that period in 1974, we had just resumed for another session in the Kongo Campus of ABU Zaria. I was in my sophomore year and the beginning of that session was quite hectic for me. My friend Zakari Isa Chawai was standing for the post of vice president of the student union and I was heading his campaign team. To complicate matters for me, a group of us was starting a new campus publication which I was to edit. My hands were full with this and that, but all I could think of, when the date of the Foreman versus Ali beckoned, was the fight. You could feel the excitement building in the air. It was the subject of discussion all over the small compact campus, in the lecture rooms, the hostel of residences, the two dining halls, and wherever.

It had to be so as Muhammad Ali’s fame in that period went beyond boxing. He was a hero of sorts to many across the globe and in particular to students. The campus at ABU Zaria of the mid-1970s, like its counterparts in Ibadan, Lagos, Ife, Benin and Nsukka, was a hotbed of radicalism and boxing legend Muhammad Ali was an icon of that viewpoint. Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky in the deep south of the USA. He was raised in a society which was deeply divided along racial lines. He suffered racial discrimination most of his youthful life but was able to spruce up himself, learn boxing and excel. He was 18 in 1960 when he secured a gold medal for his country in the Summer Olympics held in Rome.

He turned professional that same year. Over the next three years, he proceeded on a string of fights which he mostly won by Technical Knockouts (TKOs). He rounded up this fantastic career rise by challenging, in 1963, the reigning heavyweight champion of the time, Sony Liston. Cassius Clay was not expected to win. He was clearly an underdog but he not only won the fight he won it by TKO. Cassius Clay had arrived at the world scene by becoming the world heavyweight champion at the age of just 22.

• Gombe signs MoU with Chinese firm for 100MW solar energy plant
• Flood displaces thousands in Bayelsa communities

However, he found out that despite the laurels he was getting for the USA, and his public standing, he was racially discriminated against within his country wherever he went.

Inevitably, he became politically radicalised. He rejected his Christian antecedents and became a Muslim and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. He became patently anti-establishment and used every platform to rail against his country’s racist policies. At that time the USA was engaged in the very unpopular Vietnam War and when Ali was due for conscription into the US Army, he refused citing his religious belief, which were against a war not sanctioned by the Almighty.

He asked: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”

The US Government convicted Ali of a felony and he had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get that overturned. Along the way, he suffered over three years of inactivity in the boxing circuit and as a result, lost his heavyweight championship. When he was finally cleared and got back his boxing license in October 1970, he had to claw his way up again. It was only in 1974 that he had the chance to challenge the reigning champion, George Foreman.

Here again, Muhammad Ali was an underdog. Foreman had followed the same route as Ali. He won the gold medal in the 1968 Olympics about the same age as Ali when he won his own in 1960. He won the heavyweight championship by beating Joe Frazier, then champion in just two rounds by TKO. Foreman was 25, and at the top of his art in 1974, having successfully defended his title twice. Ali on the other hand was older at 32 and had been slowed by years of inactivity.

The media dubbed the fight as a ‘rumble in the jungle’. The Zaire authorities allowed the fight to take place at the odd hours of the morning in deference to the US television viewing time. The fight was watched by a full stadium of 60,000 and an estimated one billion on TV.

Live television was not in place in Nigeria and most of the Kongo campus that early morning was glued to the available nearest radio. I can still hear the echo of the shouts across my hostel of residence when Ali gave a TKO to Foreman in the eighth round.