Legends reflect on Rumble in the Jungle

Muhammad Ali has passed away at the age of 74. Ali died on Friday at a Phoenix hospital, where he had spent the past few days being treated for respiratory complications.

Legends reflected on the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ – one of Ali’s most famous fights, where he reclaimed the heavyweight title from George Foreman, with former champion Larry Holmes amazed by Ali’s ability to galvanise the crowd.

Larry Holmes- Former heavyweight champion

“Rumble in the Jungle was ‘Ali bomaye’. He was learning their language and he was making people happy by saying ‘Ali bomaye’.

“I still to this day don’t know what that means, but that’s what they were hollering. He walked down the street; he couldn’t walk down the street in Africa. He’d pick up 100 people right behind him hollering ‘Ali bomaye’. Ali was that much of a draw.”

Thomas Hauser- Biographer

“It was a great fight, Joe Frazier won. There are dissenters that feel differently about it. But, to my mind, and I’m an Ali fan, I was rooting for Ali then, I’m rooting for Ali now. Joe Frazier won that fight.

“Ali had a future ahead of him, people understood that. But it was one loss against a great fighter; people felt that he could come back. When people began to feel that his career was over was when he lost that first fight to Ken Norton. No he had lost to Frazier and Norton and it seemed as though his best days had passed.

“So what did he do? He fought a rematch against Norton and beat him. He fought a rematch against Joe Frazier at the Garden, and beat him. He journeyed to Zaire to fight George Foreman, who was just as invincible and undefeatable as Sonny Liston had been.

“The Rumble in the Jungle, Ali defeating George Foreman in Zaire, is generally considered to be the iconic Ali fight, and that’s because Ali won. If Ali had beaten Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden that would have been the iconic Ali fight.

“Muhammad told me once, was that the fight when he was at his best as a fighter was against Cleveland Williams. The fight that was the best for fight fans was the third Ali-Frazier fight in Manila. But the fight that meant the most to him was beating George Foreman in Zaire to reclaim the heavyweight championship of the world. There are certain fights that stand out as the iconic Ali fights. You’d have to start with the first Sonny Liston fight.

“Then there’s Ali-Frazier I, Zaire and finally Ali-Frazier III in Manila. Those are the four fights that stand out above all the others. If you look at them you’d have to say that if you’re going to pick one as the iconic Ali fight, you’d say Zaire and you’d say that for a couple of reasons. Number one: Mohammad won.

“Number two: this was the fight that put Ali firmly front and centre on the world stage. That was when he became something bigger than he had ever been before. He was now like Elvis. He was now like The Beatles.

“This was a story of a handsome prince who had been unfairly denied his crown, had journeyed to the heart of Africa, had come back and reclaimed it. And at that point, he hadn’t been before. At that point, Muhammad Ali became the most famous, recognisable face on the face of the earth.”

Robert Lipsyte- Journalist and Author

“The first fight against Joe Frazier was the blood ritual in which he came back. But the big fight was the fight against George in Africa, the so called ‘Rumble in the Jungle’. The Ali shuffle, the rope-a-dope, in which he was brilliant, took punishment, and beat a much younger, much larger man. That was the iconic fight. Probably would have been a good time for him to stop.”