This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Four a.m. in the steam room of an African night. The heat hangs low and sultry, plucking sweat through a man’s pores and making it bloom on his skin. Four a.m. and there are 80,000 people here, terraced in the darkness, intent on the square of light dead centre in the stadium.

Even by the surreal standards of boxing’s travelling circus, this is the last outpost — a country whose people are dirt poor but whose president encourages everyone to steal. And why not? No one steals as much as he does: Mobutu Sese Seko with his leopardskin toque and pink marble palace, Mobutu Sese Seko who charters Concorde for shopping trips to Paris and is pictured descending god-like through clouds every evening at the start of the news.

A century ago this city was Léopoldville rather than Kinshasa, and this country the Belgian Congo rather than Zaire. The hundreds of Western reporters here are a raft of Marlows seeking Kurtz, but they do not see, or wish to see, what Joseph Conrad really meant: that the heart of darkness is as much inside as out. When you thrill to the savage beauty of the fight, when you tingle at the sight of a punch which would snap the neck of an untrained man, the first place you’ll find Kurtz is in the mirror.

Everyone knows the protagonists. Muhammad Ali, poetry-quoting and butterfly-floating, is past his best at 32 but still the darling of this crowd, as he is with every crowd. “Ali! Boma yé!” they chant: “Ali! Kill him!”

“Him”, of course, being George Foreman: seven years younger, the champion, all silence and stillness to Ali’s noise and motion. Away from the ring, Foreman’s voice is so soft that you have to lean in close to hear him, and he won’t shake hands: instead, says Norman Mailer, “he keeps them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case”.

Weaponry is exactly what those hands are. “One round with George is like ten with another fighter,” says his sparring partner Henry Clark. Foreman has fought 40 times as a professional and never even been knocked down, let alone out.

Round one. Ali starts hard and fast, throwing lead rights to unsettle Foreman and get him off balance. Ali dancing, bouncing, beckoning Foreman on, matador against bull. Foreman closing, cutting off the ring, trying to shut down Ali’s options. A vicious left to Ali’s heart. Foreman wants to punch Ali out of the ring, out of existence.

Now Ali changes tactics, because in this murderous heat even he can’t dance all night. He still shimmies and darts, but he also takes up position on the ropes and lets Foreman come at him. Usually this would be suicide, but here the ropes, already slack through heat and humidity, haven’t been tightened properly.

Rope-a-dope, they’ll call it later and Foreman will wryly accept the truth of both parts

Foreman comes forward round after round, but it’s the ropes rather than Ali that absorb much of his kinetic energy, and in the lulls between barrages Ali pulls him in and taunts. “That all you got, George? They told me you could punch, George.”

Round four. Foreman hasn’t been this far in years, hasn’t needed to go this far. Keep punching, keep punching, and he’ll go down: but he’s not going down, is he? Foreman hits harder and faster like a road gang jackhammering tarmac, trying not just to knock Ali out but to uproot him. Still Ali hangs on, and still he taunts. “You disappoint me, George. They told me you could punch as hard as Joe Louis, George.”

Now the tide starts to turn, and the noise comes like a waterfall as the crowd senses it. Ali’s like a lion in the long grass, just waiting for his moment. Rope-a-dope, they’ll call it later, and Foreman will wryly accept the truth of both parts: “He stayed on the ropes, and I was the dope.”

Round eight. Ali picks Foreman off with spearing left jabs and short punches down the middle. Twelve seconds left, Foreman yearns for the sanctuary of the bell. Ali with a left hook to bring Foreman’s head up into position and then a straight right to the face.

Foreman staggers and looks at his conqueror: a single beat, no more, of surprise, admiration, resignation, respect. Then he bends double and spreads his arms out like a parachutist as he falls. Through the static on the radio, Harry Carpenter provides commentary as immortal as the fight itself. “Ali’s doing his shuffle and I don’t think Foreman’s going to get up … he’s trying to beat the count … and he’s out! Oh my God, he’s won the title back at 32!”

The storm comes an hour later, a Biblical downpour which floods the stadium. Then it passes, and when the reporters next find Ali, he’s standing on the banks of a Congo running wild and swollen: staring out at the water, and for once silent.

The reporters watch and let him drink it in. Eventually he turns, sees them, and says, “You fellas will never know how much this means to me.” To him and to everyone who loves sport, for as Mailer says it was “a triumph for everything which did not fit into the computer: for audacity, inventiveness, even art”.