6. Impossible Feats

Some years ago, Leon Gast produced a movie called ‘When We Were Kings’. The movie tells, in a documentary fashion that is, neverthelss, full of emotional drama – the story of the title fight for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship held in Zaire in 1974. The fight is between Muhammed Ali, in his thirties and past his prime, and George Foreman – young, fearless and devastatingly powerful. Foreman was the reigning champion of the world and had demolished with ease all the best fighters in the game – some of whom Ali had recently fought and struggled to beat. All the fight commentators had Foreman picked to win the fight. What made them so pessimistic for Ali’s chances was the sheer power of Foreman’s swings, demonstrated graphically in the film by the melon-sized indentations left in the heavy punchbag after Foreman’s workouts.

Ali, in typical style, was talking himself up, but no one believed he was a match for Foreman. He had neither the power nor the skill to outbox the younger man. Ali’s trademark ability to ‘dance’ around the ring may have secured him victories earlier in his career, but Foreman had already proved he could ‘cut off the ring’ – in other words, corner the ‘dancing’ fighter – against other opponents. In the energy-sapping heat of Zaire, dancing would see Ali tire even quicker than his younger opponent. Nobody believed, not even Ali’s own camp if Gast’s film is accurate, that Ali’s ‘dancing’ skills would save him from a terrible beating at the hands of Foreman.

But Ali didn’t dance; he stood toe-to-toe with Foreman in the first round and threw long rights over the top of Foreman’s jab. It is, as commentator Norman Mailer said, a great insult to throw this kind of punch at a professional boxer. Since the right hand is normally cocked behind the leading jabbing hand, it has to travel a lot further to land on the opponent. Professional boxers don’t use long rights without jabbing first – it’s too easy for anyone, save the rank amateur, to see them coming. Forsaking the jab, Ali threw twelve long rights in the first round of the bout for Heavyweight Champion of the World. Foreman, who had probably never encountered this technique in a professional fight, was clearly surprised though hardly outmanoeuvred; instead, no doubt feeling that Ali was treating him with great disrespect, he went wild with rage.

It was, to say the least, a risky tactic on Ali’s part. Knowing the power of Foreman’s punches, one would think enraging him would be the worst possible thing to do. But rage, Ali knew, is like a storm – it blows itself out. All Ali had to do was weather the storm.

After the first round, Ali stopped using the long right, but he kept up the disrespect. Verbally haranguing Foreman when the fighters got in close, claiming Foreman’s punches were soft, that he had no power, that he would have to concede to the better man, Ali drove Foreman’s rage to the full extent of the man’s physical limit. Eventually, Foreman’s rage and the hot African night took its toll. By the 8th round, Foreman was exhausted. Ali threw a blistering combination that felled the World Champion flat to the canvas. Muhammed Ali, at the age of thirty two, was Champion of the World again.

It is a David and Goliath story; an heroic story of the underdog whose determination to make the world conform to his own will defeats the world’s implacable resistance to change. Foreman was bigger, stronger, harder, younger; these were facts that no one, including Ali, disputed. But Ali ignored the facts. He made an image in his mind and brought it into reality in spite of the facts.

How did he do it? We all try to imagine things otherwise than they are from time to time, but hardly do we have the success that Ali had in reshaping the world to fit with our desires.

Of course, on one level, it is easy to analyse what Ali did. He went to great lengths to prepare his body for the brutal beating he knew Foreman would dish out; by using the long right, or ‘the right-hand lead’ as it is known amongst boxers, he found a clever way to shock Foreman out of his pre-match gameplan, strategy and mental poise. By continually chipping away at Foreman with jibes, he kept the man’s mental focus off-balance. Keeping Foreman angrily swinging huge broadsides while Ali lay on the ropes covering up made the African heat work for the older and against the younger man.

But Ali still had to endure Foreman’s prodigious power; he still had to weather eight rounds of brutal punching. Indeed, that which made Foreman’s victory seem certain – his immense power – was the very thing Ali chose to face head on and defeat. It was only by facing Foreman’s power and surviving it – not trying to avoid it or ameliorate it – that Ali could dent Foreman’s own psychological determination to win the fight.

Had Ali tried to avoid or match Foreman’s punching power, he would certainly have lost. Foreman would have held steady to his belief that his punching would catch Ali off-guard at some point. Only by demonstrating that Foreman had no power could Ali undermine Foreman’s confidence. The more Ali jibed that Foreman’s punches ‘weren’t even breaking popcorn’, the more Foreman had to retreat into his rage and swing heavier and heavier punches to prove himself.

But prove himself to whom? Foreman was not trying to prove himself to Ali, or to the fight audience, or the millions of people watching live on TV. Foreman was trying to prove himself to himself. This was the genius of Ali’s strategy: he took away Foreman’s power by making the stronger man doubt himself.

Where do you get the courage to do what Ali did? Where do you find the mental strength to face the very thing you fear the most? According to some reports, Foreman’s trainers were praying that he would not kill Ali in the ring, so mismatched did they – and many others – believe the contest was. What, then, made Ali risk his life to face the very thing that he should avoid most? Where did he find the willpower, the guts, the courage, to stand up to the man whom everyone else said could not possibly be beaten?

In Gast’s movie, Ali tells us himself where his courage to face Foreman came from; in short, from his belief in Allah. But we don’t have to believe in the existence of God to acknowledge that Ali’s courage, and therefore his victory, was directly attributable to his belief in God. This belief gave Ali something George Foreman didn’t have – the belief in something other than himself. Foreman’s belief in himself revolved around his belief in his power; but Ali took away that belief and in doing so he took away that power. Could Foreman have taken away Ali’s power in a similar way? It is hard to see how, for Ali’s belief was not in himself, but in something that Foreman couldn’t touch, no mattter what he said or did in the ring.