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00:00do it this time.
00:02That ball was on the line.
00:04It's five bucks there.
00:06Michigan can't take a timeout.
00:13No good.
00:15Line right.
00:25Hi, everybody.
00:26I'm Brian Kenyon.
00:27Welcome to ESPN Classics.
00:28Top five reasons you can't blame.
00:30A series that takes a fresh look at sports personalities
00:33who are remembered largely for their mistakes,
00:35controversial moments, or questionable decisions.
00:38They called it the Rumble in the Jungle.
00:40Heavyweight champ George Foreman
00:42against Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire.
00:45October of 1974, 21 months earlier,
00:48Foreman, a 3-1 underdog,
00:50had won the title by knocking out Joe Frazier,
00:52who, of course, beat Ali in the fight of the century in 1971.
00:56By the time they landed in Zaire,
00:58Ali's dismantling of Sonny Liston, another intimidating slugger,
01:02seemed as old as a 10-year-old newspaper carrying a headline bearing the name of Cassius Clay.
01:06Before we count down the top five reasons you can't blame Foreman for losing,
01:10let's examine how Big George became a seemingly indestructible force
01:14and had taken over the heavyweight division.
01:23George Foreman was one guy who beat more guys before they got in the ring.
01:26These guys were in there having an instant diarrhea looking at this guy going,
01:29oh, man, you know, what did I get myself into now?
01:33George Foreman's only plan was to destroy his opponent.
01:38They got hit so hard by Foreman that the percussion of the punch,
01:43the bone blew up inside my eye and burst from the inside out.
01:47There were a few people that were auditioning for Rocky One.
01:49One was sparring with George Foreman.
01:50I said, what was it like?
01:51He goes, let me just put it this way.
01:53Imagine someone taking a railroad tie and smashing it into your forehead consistently.
02:00Here, George Foreman was knocking guys cold, man.
02:03I mean, knocking their stuff in the dirt.
02:07Bam!
02:08Wham!
02:09Next!
02:12Applauded by a nation for winning Olympic gold in 1968,
02:16Foreman's public affection rating was soon KO'd,
02:18like 34 of his first 37 opponents.
02:21Tough in the ring, outside it he had all the charisma of Attila the Hun.
02:26Foreman was a crude, mean, bone-crushing boogeyman.
02:31He was a nasty piece of business.
02:33You couldn't get close to him.
02:36Nobody really liked him.
02:37He was a thug.
02:38He gave off the persona of someone who was just hateful and mean and didn't care what you thought.
02:44What in the world did I care about anything?
02:47All I cared about is going out there and knocking that fella out,
02:49getting my money and going home.
02:52Although undefeated, Foreman was not expected to be a problem for Joe Frazier.
02:57They met in Kingston.
02:58He was 40-0, 37 knockouts.
03:02Heading into it.
03:05Facing our lead.
03:06In Jamaica, January 22nd, 1973, the 6'3 challenger towered over the 5'11 champ.
03:14Foreman floored Frazier three times in the first round.
03:18Down goes Frazier!
03:19Down goes Frazier!
03:21George Foreman punch.
03:25Oh, man.
03:26He punched like four or five giants.
03:30The heavyweight champion is taking the mandatory eight count, and Foreman is as poised as can be!
03:36Foreman had just absolutely spread Frazier across the ring like he was apple butter.
03:44Frazier is down again!
03:46He threw that uppercut, and Frazier's entire body went up in the air, and down he went, landing on one
03:54knee.
03:55Six knockdowns.
03:56And I stopped the fight.
03:58It is over!
03:59It is over!
04:00George Foreman is the heavyweight champion of the world!
04:06Foreman's annihilation of Frazier launched a new era of intimidation.
04:10After destroying the skillful Ken Norton in his second title defense, the champ agreed to fight Muhammad Ali.
04:17The place?
04:18Kinshasa Zaire.
04:19The date?
04:20September 24th, 1974.
04:23The consensus?
04:25All Foreman.
04:26I had knocked out Kenny Norton, who beat Muhammad Ali, and I devastated Joe Frazier.
04:32I figured, hey, I'm just going to waste Muhammad Ali in two or three rounds.
04:37I looked like he was a fading champion.
04:39My biggest worry is, where were we going to take him when he got hurt?
04:43Please let him live.
04:45Never mind winning the fight.
04:52Ali's expected slaughter was postponed.
04:54A cut above Foreman's right eye caused the fight to be pushed back to October 30th.
04:59In the run-up to his date with Destiny, the man who had twice beaten Liston, sought advice from one
05:04of the ring's most respected tacticians.
05:08Ali had a relationship with Cus D'Amato.
05:11And Cus told him, you're fighting a bully.
05:15As soon as the bell rings, you run out and hit him with a big punch.
05:23Let him know that you're not going to run.
05:26Ali looks like he's ready to go here.
05:29He's not staying away.
05:30He's going after the man.
05:31In the second round, Ali abruptly changed tactics and leaned against the ropes, while Foreman waded in like a bouncer
05:39in a back alley.
05:41Flying to Zaire with Ali, he said to me,
05:46If George Foreman doesn't get me in seven, his parachute won't open.
05:52Foreman tries to work the body.
05:54Neither one of those punches did any damage.
05:56None of those punches are doing any damage at all.
06:00George didn't set his man up.
06:02He was just so frantic.
06:03He just wanted to beat Ali into the ground.
06:06He wanted to show all the people that he was the menacing terror that he tried to show himself to
06:11be.
06:11So that Foreman just, one of them guys, he had a lot of confidence in his ability to break you
06:18down.
06:18No smarts, no nothing.
06:20And he ran out of gas.
06:24The rope-a-dope.
06:25I'm the dope.
06:26I allowed him to lay on the rope until I just wore myself out like a dope.
06:44That was the first time that he had a guy that he couldn't just brutalize.
06:49He gave up and vanquished himself.
06:52I came in one man and left out a shell of that man.
06:57Not only did he beat me and took the title, I was devastated.
07:00He was the baddest of the bullies.
07:02He was the meanest of the fighters.
07:05He was all of these things.
07:07And then in Zaire, suddenly he saw something he had never seen before.
07:11And it really came crashing down on him.
07:16Foreman's loss to Ali haunted him for many years.
07:19But redemption would be his in 1994, when at age 45, he knocked out Michael Moore
07:24and reclaimed the title and became the oldest heavyweight champion of all time.
07:28In a few minutes, we'll begin counting down the top five reasons you can't blame Foreman for losing to Ali.
07:33But first, here are a few that didn't make the short list.
07:35We call them the best of the rest.
07:39Sonny Liston.
07:40He was a negative role model for Foreman.
07:43Liston was a guy who had done time for armed robbery.
07:48A real professional thug.
07:51While working as Liston's sparring partner in 1969, Foreman internalized many dark facets of the former champion's less than Sonny
07:59nature.
08:01George wanted to be like Sonny Liston.
08:04I want to kill somebody.
08:05And that's what he wanted to do.
08:07So everything Sonny did, George literally, you know, imitated.
08:11I think it's befitting that I go out of boxing like I came in ten years from there, I beat
08:15Sonny Liston, destroying another Sonny Liston who idolized Sonny Liston.
08:20In this profession, there's always somebody who can kick the other guy's butt.
08:24And Muhammad was made to order to beat Liston.
08:27And Muhammad could beat George Foreman every day in a week.
08:33Our other best of the rest, loose ropes.
08:36Even before Ali and Foreman entered the ring in Zaire, the ring ropes were sagging.
08:42I saw Angelo Dundee testing the ropes.
08:47And we asked Angelo, what are you doing, Angelo?
08:50Nothing, nothing, you know, it's just this pre-fight stuff we do.
08:53I tightened those ropes at four o'clock in the afternoon.
08:56And the ropes were 24-foot ropes for a 20-foot ring.
09:00So I got a double-edged razor and cut the rope and tied them together.
09:05They were trying to tighten it so the boxes wouldn't fall out.
09:08I mean, they tightened.
09:11Had the ropes been any loose?
09:14Despite Dundee's efforts to...
09:16They would have fallen out of the ring.
09:19...tighten the ropes, they still sagged under Ali's weight.
09:22Whenever Ali started doing the rope-a-dope, we thought, oh my God.
09:27He loosened the ropes.
09:29So Ali could lean way back.
09:31Do we see it as Angelo Dundee, the trainer, telling the truth?
09:35He's basically out of the ring.
09:38It was just Ali leaning back as far as he could go
09:42to get away from Foreman's roundhouse punches.
09:48When our countdown continues, we'll explore how the location of the fight affected the outcome.
09:54Ali made himself a shit.
09:58Welcome back.
09:59Let's begin our countdown with reason number five.
10:03Zaire.
10:04With the sight marking a return to roots for the African-American combatants,
10:08it was Ali who spun the locale to his advantage.
10:12I fight in Africa because I'm fighting in my homeland.
10:16Ali made himself a citizen of Zaire emotionally.
10:20Your homeland's Louisville, Kentucky.
10:25...with the people, and he made George an interloper.
10:29From the moment Foreman stepped off the plane in Zaire for the rumble in the jungle,
10:34he inadvertently alienated many residents.
10:36A German shepherd was a symbol to Zaire, which had been the Belgian Congo,
10:42of the dog that had been used by the Belgian police to control them.
10:47And it frightened the bejabbers out of him.
10:50Following the champion's cold reception, Ali was cheered as though he were a member of African royalty.
10:58As we walked across the tarmac, there was one little group that was shouting,
11:04Ali, Bumbaye, Ali, Bumbaye.
11:06He walked up to one of the kids and he said, what does that mean?
11:10The kid said, that means Ali killed him.
11:13And he, just without missing a beat, turned in, Ali, Bumbaye, Ali, Bumbaye.
11:19Ali was a world figure.
11:21And in Africa, as Nelson Mandela once told me, he was a huge figure.
11:28As this black American who had stood up to the power of the government.
11:35People would come out of nowhere, hundreds of them,
11:41to see him work out.
11:43It was just incredible.
11:45He was a hero.
11:46They did a lap around the track and Ali,
11:50with the people coming out of the stands and leading them to this,
11:52Ali Bumbaye, Ali Bumbaye.
11:55And you could almost see Foreman shrink.
11:58George Foreman was up in his room,
12:01scared to come out to the streets with two police dogs,
12:03bringing in food from New York because he thought they were going to poison him.
12:07And Ali is getting the people to a chance.
12:10Ali Bumbaye.
12:11When he came into the ring,
12:12he really missed out on some good African food.
12:15Every punch that he hit George Foreman with,
12:18he hit him with 10 million Africans.
12:21This is an incredible scene.
12:23The place is going wild.
12:25Muhammad Ali has won.
12:27Had that fight been in Houston or Las Vegas or New York,
12:30a very different George Foreman mentally would have probably walked in the ring.
12:34The whole atmosphere there just freaked him out.
12:40One down, four to go.
12:42Here is reason number four.
12:45Black magic.
12:46In Zaire, where witch doctors are called fetishers and are more common than dentists,
12:51one put a spell on Foreman.
12:54It was such a big upset at the time, I guess, you know,
12:57you could have to say that it took a witch doctor or some kind of...
12:59It's ridiculous.
13:00The greatest heavyweight of all time doesn't need witch magic.
13:05Five-week postponement hurt Foreman's chances.
13:14We're counting down the top five reasons you can't blame George Foreman for losing to Muhammad Ali.
13:22Did the first two reasons grab you?
13:23If so, here's reason number three.
13:28The cut.
13:29Eight days before the original fight date of September 24th,
13:33Foreman's sparring partner Bill McMurray clipped the champ above his right eye with an elbow.
13:37Foreman needed 11 stitches, and the fight was postponed five weeks.
13:42We were supposed to be there for 10 days, and instead we were there for two months.
13:46I was there.
13:47There is nothing to do there.
13:50He had to be antsy.
13:51He had to be bored.
13:53None of this is good for a fighter.
13:56Foreman wanted to recover in Europe,
13:58but Ali, perhaps remembering how Sonny Liston was rendered docile
14:02when their second fight in 1965 was delayed six months,
14:06worked a little backdoor magic to keep Foreman in-country against his will.
14:11There was a guy named Madunga Bula.
14:14He was like the number two guy in Zaire.
14:16Ali went to Bula, and he said,
14:18Listen, this guy's afraid, and he doesn't like Africa, and he's going to run away.
14:22So he had to put a guard on George, and that weighed very heavily on George.
14:28Foreman wasn't the same Foreman that I had seen before the cut.
14:36While Foreman fiddled, Ali enjoyed the people's adulation and carefully honed himself physically and mentally.
14:44A postponement would hurt him more than it would myself.
14:46The man that really wins this fight is the one in the best condition,
14:50the one who's paced himself just right.
14:52One of his strengths was his flexibility.
14:54He could be very adaptable.
14:56Foreman, on the other hand, liked his regiment.
14:58So I think the delay really spoke to Ali's personality strengths
15:02and highlighted what wasn't one of Foreman's personality strengths.
15:07What the cut did was to reinforce Ali's feeling of blackness
15:14and feeling that he was at home, that he could not be beaten in Africa,
15:18and that he had Foreman's number.
15:22Psychologically, it had a very negative effect on him.
15:25I think had the fight have taken place when it was originally scheduled to happen,
15:31Foreman would have won that fight.
15:36Have we begun to change your mind yet?
15:38If not, take a look at reason number two.
15:42Foreman's corner.
15:43Veteran trainer Dick Sadler and former light heavyweight champion Archie Moore.
15:47I'm a dog wash.
15:49Sandy Sadler and Archie Moore are to blame for Foreman losing?
15:56Or were outfoxed by Team Ali.
15:59Case in point, they didn't know about the ropes.
16:02I do blame George Foreman's corner for the results of that fight.
16:08It is up to the champion's corner to determine the tension of the ropes.
16:14They should have known about the tension of those ropes.
16:18Worse, perhaps, was Foreman's corner had no answer for Ali's bizarre strategy.
16:24Everyone figured I'm going to knock him out.
16:26If it didn't happen the first round, it was going to happen the second.
16:28I was eventually going to get him.
16:29So there wasn't much advice for me.
16:32Get him, get him, get him.
16:33That's all.
16:34The corner could have done a lot more for Foreman.
16:36All Foreman had to do was make an adjustment and get a little bit closer, but he didn't.
16:40The corner is supposed to tell you to step over, create an opening, pull his arm down.
16:44You could spin him and hit him.
16:45There's no human on this planet that I respect more than the late Archie Moore.
16:49But in this instance, considering he was a great fighter at adapting, I don't know if
16:53he and the corner of George Foreman helped him in this regard.
16:59When we return, the number one reason you can't blame George Foreman for losing.
17:07He really was the greatest.
17:09For more than a decade, many criticized Ali for claiming he was the greatest.
17:14By defeating Foreman, he left no doubt that he was what he said he was, in body and in mind.
17:21I was with Muhammad a month and a half before the fight, and Muhammad came up to me and said
17:28to me, what do you think about me and George?
17:30I said to him, Muhammad, George throws punches out the window.
17:34And he said, I've been hearing that I have something in store for him.
17:38I predicted after eight good rounds, he'll be, it'll be obvious that he's dead tired.
17:44He won't have no more after eight.
17:49After a highly active first round, in which Ali scored repeatedly by sticking and moving,
17:54he slowed his pace to a near standstill and began to engage the embattled foreman in extended
17:59conversation, all while conserving his energy.
18:03At first, it seemed to many ringsiders that he'd be pummeled to the canvas.
18:08We're screaming at him in the corner.
18:10Get off the ropes.
18:11He said, shut up.
18:12I know what I'm doing.
18:13This guy's not hurting.
18:15He won because he was agile, good reflexes, while he was backwards on the ropes.
18:20And he emptied George's tank.
18:22Only Muhammad figured that out.
18:24Maybe this could be the tactic of Ali to let the man punch himself out.
18:30Displaying an epic mix of guile and courage, Ali withstood foreman's best shots.
18:35The image of him against the ropes, dodging and feinting and slipping punches, remains the
18:40clearest visual language of the rumble in the jungle.
18:43Nobody else ever would have been willing to absorb the punishment and live in that eye of the storm, the
18:52way Ali did.
18:53Ali knew in his mind that he could survive that, and he had the heart and the stomach and the
19:01courage to apply it.
19:02George landed the same punches that he knocked out Joe Frazier with, that he knocked out Ken Norton with, and
19:11Ali didn't go down.
19:14I've never faced anyone with that kind of bravery before.
19:17It looked as though he started to say, I'm not going to take any more.
19:20He started to fold up and pull himself together, and he realized, you know what?
19:23I've taken his best.
19:25And he took heart.
19:27As the sting of foreman's shots began to diminish, Ali stepped up his banter, verbally challenging the champion's capacity to
19:35do him any harm.
19:36It was Ali transcending even himself.
19:39It was Ali's mind game that took over the whole fight.
19:45He was toying verbally and physically with foreman's mind.
19:52Look at Ali.
19:53He continues to talk.
19:55Definitely serious.
19:56Tremendous combination by Muhammad Ali.
19:59About the sixth round, when I hit him hard in the side, I mean, I got a good shot.
20:05And he said, is that all you got, George?
20:08And I remember thinking, yep, that's about it.
20:11He understood at some level, foreman's got one gear.
20:14The rope-a-doke strategy seems to have been calculated on an understanding of foreman's personality.
20:20The brilliance of it was that he was right.
20:22I told you all that I was the greatest of all time.
20:26I'm never again that made me the underdog until I'm about 50 years old.
20:30I wanted to make him lose all his power.
20:32I kept telling him he had no punch.
20:34He couldn't hit.
20:35He's swinging like a sister.
20:36Staying on ropes is a beautiful thing with a heavyweight when you make him shoot his best shot and you
20:41know he's not hitting him.
20:42His ability to overcome again and again and to reinvent himself constantly.
20:47People felt like he was touched with some divine energy.
20:50He's not just a great athlete, but there was something from God.
20:54You forget the savagery of boxing when someone like Ali did it because he was an artist.
20:59It's an indefinable thing that separates a star from a superstar.
21:06It's that genius.
21:08Ali was a genius.
21:15Well, there you have it.
21:16The top five reasons you can't blame George Foreman for losing to Muhammad Ali.
21:20That Foreman would be the legitimate heavyweight champion 20 years later only adds luster to a career of a fighter
21:27who was at least one of, if not the greatest of all time.
21:31I'm Brian Kenney.
21:32Thanks for watching.
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