When I think of the Rumble in the Jungle, I see the face of Miriam Makeba and hear “Amampondo.” African children chant in unison, clap their hands, and stamp their feet. Meanwhile, Muhammad Ali walks beside Don King, journalists all around them, notepads at the ready. “When I get to Africa,” Ali says, “we’re gonna get it on because we don’t get along! I’m going to eat him up! Too much speed for him! Too fast! I’m going to retire the heavyweight champion of the world! September the 25th the world will be stunned! If you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait till I kick Foreman’s behind!” Finally, to finish, a single blast of a saxophone cues a cut to black and these words in white:
Not a memory of mine but a montage, the film in question is of course “When We Were Kings.” Released back in 1996, this Oscar-winning documentary arrived 22 years after the Rumble in the Jungle ended with George Foreman on the floor and was directed by Leon Gast and produced by Taylor Hackford and David Sonenberg. It was responsible for providing me with false memories of an event which took place during a decade I was not around to experience. It is also the best documentary about boxing ever made and ranks alongside “Hoop Dreams” in terms of its power and cultural significance.
Personally speaking, it is thanks to “When We Were Kings” that I have any knowledge of the Rumble in the Jungle at all. Beyond the fight itself, “When We Were Kings” gave me and doubtless many others the context and history lesson we would otherwise lack, presenting not only fight footage and insight from its chief principals but chronicling both the music concert which preceded it and the drama of the Foreman cut which pushed the fight from Sept. 25 to Oct. 30. All of this can be found within the documentary’s 88-minute runtime and all of it helped me better understand something I have no right or reason to really understand.
The Rumble in the Jungle, you see, was neither a fight nor an occasion for me. Born long after it in the second half of the ’80s, I was not around at the time it happened and, even if I had been, still I would not have understood either the enormity of its scope or what it meant to an entire race of people. It was instead something I would watch through a screen, at a distance, whether present at the time or not, and the task of writing about it 50 years on would seem impossible were it not for a film like “When We Were Kings.”
First viewed at the age of 15, this film would become something I watched repeatedly over the years, until I knew by heart every line spouted by Ali and could anticipate every beat struck by James Brown’s band. I even came to love the gentle guitar-picking and pained wailing of B.B. King and the rapping of “Bundini” Brown, both of whom were names new to me prior to watching the film. Together, perfectly synched, these artists laid down the rhythm of the film. Its flow. Its poetry. Its bassline. To watch “When We Were Kings” at that age was to fall under its Makeba-like spell and never want it to end. It was, like Ali, an extraordinary blend of style and substance and worked as both something to be studied and as pleasant, soothing background noise. I watched it enraptured mostly, yet would occasionally fall asleep to it, too, often waking to the sound of James Brown telling everybody they’re going to have a funky good time.
Much of the appeal of “When We Were Kings,” aside from the obvious, could be found in its stories. Always compelling, they selected the right talking heads for it and the strength of the stories divulged would only grow in time, creating much of the folklore that surrounds Ali vs. Foreman today. Indeed, when I watched the film again ahead of the fight’s 50th anniversary on Wednesday, what struck me most was the power and quality of its storytellers. You had the great Ali, of course, arguably the sporting world’s finest, but then you had so many other voices, too, all of whom had not only first-hand experience of the event but a level of intelligence that added layer upon layer to a film already chock-full of depth and pathos.
In addition to Spike Lee, you had Norman Mailer, you had George Plimpton, and you had Thomas Hauser, Ali’s biographer. Each of these men were largely unfamiliar to me at the time, having only encountered Ali’s biography at 15, but eventually I would watch “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” and I would read “The Executioner’s Song” and “Paper Lion,” and would soon come to understand what it meant to have men like these invested in an event like the Rumble in The Jungle.
Great minds, one and all, each of them delivered poignant accounts in “When We Were Kings” that have stayed with me to this day, some two decades after first watching the film. I still remember Mailer, for example, both as gifted and egotistical as any writer born, telling the story of him going to the bathroom during a party thrown by Esquire and an aging Ali using the opportunity to say to Mailer’s much-younger wife, “You still with that old man?” I also remember Plimpton recounting how he one day listened to Ali, a dyslexic, deliver a lecture at Harvard in front of 2,000 graduates. “At the end of it,” Plimpton recalled, “Someone said, ‘Give us a poem!’” The poem Ali then decided to recite that day was a simple one, yet perhaps his most powerful:
Me,
We.
As Plimpton rightly said, “It stands for more than just the poem itself. What a fighter he was. And what a man.”
Not just seduced by Ali, these observers, despite their own significant achievements, were profoundly moved by him as well. They clearly valued and appreciated their time in his presence and would then, rather than forget it, pay him the ultimate compliment by preserving his brilliance in their words, delivered either on camera or written on a page.
As a result, our memories of the Rumble in the Jungle are often the memories of other people, the kind skilled enough to give you theirs with such vivacity and detail that it is easy to forget yours have been purloined. Yet make no mistake, for many they have been. When it comes to this fight specifically, I myself am a thief, grateful just to have once watched a documentary as good as “When We Were Kings” and felt, for 88 minutes, as though I happened to be in Zaire in 1974. Without such insight, it would, for me, be a fight like any other from that period in boxing. It would be a fight I would watch on DVD growing up and understand only the impact of the punches thrown in the ring. I would have no understanding of anything beyond that, nor any grasp of what any of it really meant. At least now, thanks to “When We Were Kings,” I can forever do my best to join in and pretend.
As for its legacy, it was hard when rewatching it not to wonder how the big heavyweight fights of the modern era will be viewed and documented in years to come. These, we are told, rank alongside the likes of Ali vs. Foreman in Zaire, yet one watch of “When We Were Kings” will have you realize, or simply remember, just how susceptible we are to the hyperbole of fight promoters. No fight, in truth, has come remotely close to Ali vs. Foreman in the 50 years that have passed and, what is more, no fight without Ali has attracted the same kind of worldwide attention or delivered the same range of stories told by genius storytellers.
In fact, one of the biggest differences between the great fights of that era and the great fights of this era is that no longer are there the storytellers around to elevate a fight beyond just a great fight between two great fighters. You understand this more than ever when watching the talking heads speak so eloquently and with such sagacity in “When We Were Kings.” You then try to imagine the equivalent today — discussing a fight like Oleksandr Usyk vs. Tyson Fury, for example — and find yourself breaking out in a cold sweat. (That one’s for you, James Brown.)
After all, we have only company men and content creators these days, not thinkers, not storytellers. If they have not been paid by the promotion to attend the event, they are overjoyed just to be there, and this desperation to attend kills any hope we ever had of critical thinking, or even objective reporting. Most who attend the big events nowadays do so in service of the promoter, not to do the fighters justice with their own talents, and that is what makes the prospect of a “When We Were Kings” in 2024 so unlikely.
Consider for one second the talking heads. Imagine the kinds of things they will remember and the kinds of things they will on camera choose to reveal. The odd anecdote, yes, but insight and an education? Hardly. Today, you see, there is no Cosell, let alone an Ali. There is also no Mailer or Plimpton or King, whether Don or B.B. Moreover, there is no mystery or magic to it all. We have seen everything yet, as a collective, know next to nothing. We have, thanks to social media, heard all we could ever want to hear from Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk, or any other heavyweight for that matter, and are left now with nothing new to discover or learn about these men, or so it seems.
Even Ali, the world’s most famous athlete, somehow always carried intrigue and an air of mystery. That was possibly because he had so many layers and was just so damn charismatic. Or maybe it was because he was often surrounded by storytellers, intelligent men and women equipped to peel back these layers and reveal more angles to Ali than just the blindingly obvious. A single watch of “When We Were Kings” and you will start to see and appreciate this. You will see both what it meant to be around Ali at that time and what it meant to Ali to have these people — this caliber of people — around him, telling his story on his behalf.
Me,
We.
