If people want to fight each other then it's fine by me. They know the risks so let them get on with it. Interesting story here though.
"This year, as almost every year, there have been calls for a complete ban on boxing. Two fighters, Ardi Ndembo and Sherif Lawal, have died as a result of the sport since April, with more than twenty meeting the same end in the last decade alone. Steve Bunce, BBC’s ‘voice of boxing’, seemed in a recent interview to encapsulate the central dilemma: ‘I’ve been in waiting rooms, I’ve been there when doctors have told loved ones that their son, husband and father has died. Nobody in their right mind is going to defend that.’
But as Bunce pointed out, the sport – often a million miles from the grotesque mismatch we witnessed between Tyson and Jake Paul earlier this morning – can also redeem apparently hopeless lives; those straightforwardly against it may ‘have no understanding what it’s like to grow up, in the case of Jimmy Murray, in a tenement on the outskirts of Glasgow. Fighters want to fight and they want what boxing can give them.’
Meanwhile, we’ve lately been subjected to the obscene Olympic spectacle of what looked very much like men – strong ones at that – beating up women in the ring for sport. Many will feel that an outright ban on fights between equally matched same-sex opponents has been eclipsed for now as a topic – even if it’s unlikely to go away.
Many of these issues were brought into focus by the recent 50th anniversary of the ‘Rumble in Jungle’, the mythical fight between heavyweight champion George Foreman and challenger Muhammad Ali which took place in Kinshasa, Zaire in October 1974. To mark the event, When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s unmissable nineties documentary about the match, has just been reissued on Blu-ray.
As Gast’s film makes clear, few at the time thought the pairing of Ali and Foreman a safe or sensible move. Former champion Ali, 32 years old – a Muslim convert who’d received a three-year ban from boxing for refusing to fight in Vietnam, and was probably the most famous man in the world – seemed outclassed and even to be risking his life. He’d lost to Joe Frazier in 1971 and, in another match with Ken Norton, had his jaw broken. Yet Foreman – unbeaten in forty matches, seven years younger and with a terrifying punching power – had ruthlessly dispatched both Frazier and Norton in a couple of rounds.
Sports commentator Howard Cosell was far from alone in his fears about the coming fight: ‘The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali…. Maybe he can pull off a miracle. But against George Foreman? So young, so strong, so fearless.’
Ali was bullish in his response to the world: ‘I’m going to make you eat everything you say against me, all of my critics. I’ll prove to the world that I’m still the fastest, the prettiest, the… classiest, the most scientific, the greatest fighter of all time….’ With Cosell, a notorious toupée-wearer, Ali got personal: ‘Cosell, you’re a phoney and that thing on your head comes from the tail of a pony!’
It was Zaire’s President Mobutu who financed the match. A bloodthirsty Congolese tyrant who’d executed numerous opponents (even dismembering one of them alive), Mobutu stumped up a staggering $5 million (£4 million) apiece for the fighters, hoping it would bring glory and new investment to his failing state of a country.
The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ may have been a glorification of violence. But it was also a tale of bravery
The fight, staged by first-time promoter Don King – who’d just been released from jail for manslaughter – was billed not just as a sporting event but the return of two African American boxers to their cultural roots (with James Brown and BB King coming along for the ride as well). As King is overheard saying in Gast’s film: ‘We left Africa in shackles and fetters and chains, you know? And we’re coming back in an aura of splendour and scintillating glory.’ Certainly Ali, with his openness, showmanship and motormouthed wit quickly charmed the Zairian people, who followed him around in a great, adoring mob.
Meanwhile title-holder Foreman – a shy, brooding introvert – struck the wrong note in Zaire from the start. Having snubbed Mobutu’s offer of quarters at a presidential palace outside the capital, he holed up in a city-centre apartment, visibly pining for home. Kinshasa was a place Foreman seemed to loathe – with its poverty and crime almost the definition of a ‘third world’ city – and the feeling appeared to be mutual.
Ali, naturally, was the beneficiary. As he trained, he was increasingly surrounded by Zairians yelling the phrase: ‘Ali bo-ma-ye! Ali bo-ma-ye!’ On discovering, to his delight, that it was a universal exhortation to pulverise Foreman – ‘Ali, kill him! Ali, kill him!’ – he began, with a broad smile, to conduct their shouts and lead the chanting himself. Though writer Norman Mailer (who later wrote his book The Fight about the Ali-Foreman match) believed Ali was throughout secretly afraid throughout the pre-fight period – no one did bravado better: ‘If you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait till I whip Foreman’s behind!’ Or, in words that turned out to be prophetic: ‘I’m the matador and he’s the bull.’
The match – delayed by an excruciating month thanks to an injury Foreman suffered while sparring – finally took place on 30 October. Rumours swirled round before the day: Foreman believed someone was poisoning him, others said Ali had got one of the local witch doctors – feticheurs – to put a curse on his opponent. Immediately prior to the fight, emotions in the Ali camp seemed funereal, with a feeling, as writer George Plimpton put it, that their man was going ‘out to the gallows’. Only Ali himself seemed unfazed: ‘Scared? A little thing like this! Do I look scared?… I fear Allah and thunderstorms and bad plane rides. But this is like another day in the gym.’
From the opening bell – at 4 a.m. – the fight was ferocious. The boxers seemed to lock horns, flailing and swinging madly at one another. As one official commentator put it: ‘There is real violence in that ring. There’s hatred… This is like a street fight, not a boxing match.’ It seemed that Ali, like Frazier and Norton before him, might succumb to an early KO by Foreman, a fighter who liked to keep things swift and brutal. Mailer said that in a break between rounds:
Ali had a look on his face that I’ll never forget. It was the only time I ever saw fear in Ali’s eyes. It seemed as if Ali were staring deep within – ‘Alright, this is the moment… This is the hour. Do you have the guts?’
Finally, the fighter ‘nodded to himself’ in response, and – ‘as if he was looking into the eyes of his maker’ – turned to the adoring crowd and began to shout: “Ali bo-ma-ye! Ali bo-ma-ye!” 100,000 people yelled back at him and ‘this huge reverberation of the crowd,’ Mailer remembered, ‘came back into the ring. Ali picked it up.’ The fight went on.
Yet it still looked like the other boxer was winning. Ali was mostly on the ropes, taking huge punishment from Foreman, who was battering away savagely at his arms and torso (Ali, according to journalist Ken Jones, urinated blood for days after the fight from kidney damage). ‘Get off the ropes,’ his trainers yelled at him, but Ali refused: ‘Don’t talk. I know what I’m doing.’
As Foreman continued to hurl punches at him, round after round, Ali began to taunt him back: ‘C’mon, champ, you can do better than that… Show me something, George… Punch, sucker! That’s a sissy punch!’ By about round five, with Ali absorbing more and more crashing blows, Foreman, unused to a fight of this length, looked as though he was flagging. In round eight, his eyes battered and swollen, he seemed exhausted.
Ali began to taunt him back: ‘C’mon, champ, you can do better than that’
It was at this point that Ali roused himself: ‘Now it’s my turn,’ he muttered to his opponent. Driving the champion into the centre of the ring, he seemed to toy with him before, with seconds left till the end of the round, delivering a deadly right-left-right combination, at which the poleaxed Foreman – undefeated in 40 matches – simply spun and hurtled to the canvas. The referee counted to nine before the bell went, but it was all over. The challenger’s strategy of letting Foreman punch himself out – his ‘rope-a-dope’ manoeuvre – had worked. Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champion of the world once again.
As a jubilant crowd of Zairians swarmed into the ring, Ali spoke directly to the camera: ‘Everybody stop talking now! Attention! I told you, all of my critics, I told you all that I was the greatest of all time… Never again say that I’m going to be defeated… If you want to know any damn thing about boxing, don’t go to no boxing experts in the whole of the States… Come to Muhammad Ali – I am the man.’
The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ may have been a glorification of violence. But it was also a tale of bravery, wisdom, endurance, humility and faith – one which seemed to happen on an epic plane and which, fifty years later, still has the transcendent power to inspire. Is it worth a century’s fatalities, or the sight of Ali shaking with Parkinson’s – possibly exacerbated or even directly caused by boxing – in his later years?
There are no glib, easy answers, though perhaps Muhammad Ali’s own words are relevant to the debate. ‘Without fear, there is no bravery,’ the champion once remarked, adding, at another moment: ‘Boxing is a risk and life is a gamble. And I gotta take both.’"
www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-it-time-to-ban-boxing/
