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October 10, 2024 47 mins

Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s heavyweight title fight is considered one of the greatest sporting events of all time. What’s less well known is that five weeks earlier in the very same stadium, James Brown headlined an epic, three-day long, pre-fight music festival. Rumble braids together both boxing and music history for a compelling account of Muhammad Ali’s growth into both The People’s Champ and the GOAT. For his first title fight, he takes on the “bad man” Sonny Liston.

REFERENCE BOOKS:

Ali: The Greatest, My Own Story by Muhammad Ali

Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Rumble In the Jungle by Lewis Erenberg

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
October thirtieth, nineteen seventy four. Kinshasa zaiir.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Here comes the Ali people out of the dressing room.
This is an awesome bar of George Foreman against the
varleyd boxing skills of Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Thirty two year old Muhammad Ali strides through the crowd
and finds his place at the center of the ring
for his title fight against the reigning heavyweight champion of
the World, George Foreman. Their heavyweight title bout is considered
by many to be the greatest sporting event of all time.

(00:45):
But what's less well known is that five weeks earlier,
in that very same stadium, James Brown headlined an epic
three day long pre fight music festival. This unique event
brought blackham American musicians like BB King and Bill Withers
to share the same stage with Afro Caribbean acts such

(01:06):
as Celia Cruz and African megastars like Miriam Mikiba and
Hugh Masekela.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
All the biggest Black artist on the planet due a
concert for this fight.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
It was a musical homecoming for these musicians of the diaspora.
But all this black excellence in one stadium in Zaire
during a hot autumn in nineteen seventy four. How did
this come to be well? The two events were both
orchestrated and stage managed by, believe it or not, an

(01:39):
African dictator, Mabutu Seysei Siku.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
Mubuchu is a darling of the West tied to nationalism
as a way to consolidate his power.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
His full name was Kuku and Bindu Waza Benga. Translated
into English, it means the all powerful war who, because
of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from
conquest to conquest, leaving fire.

Speaker 5 (02:07):
In his wake.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Once the Belgian Congo, Mabutu had rechristened his homeland as Zayir,
That was the man who was running things well, him
and the famously colorful boxing promoter Don King. The fight
and the music festival were originally scheduled for the same
weekend to be televised across the globe. A music festival

(02:31):
to warm up the crowds and to reinforce the ascendants
of black culture on the world stage to mark the
reconnection of Black America and the Motherland, then to be
followed by the heavyweight title fight to crown a new
world champion for a dictator like Mabutu. It was a

(02:52):
rather masterful bit of international theater. The music festival was
called Zaire seventy four, a testimony to the growing power
and glory of Mabutu and his recently liberated African nation,
and the championship fight became known as the Rumble in
the Jungle. But as so often happens, Fate stepped in

(03:15):
to interrupt the carefully coordinated plans of mice and men
and Central African dictators. Fate also had plans for the
man called the People's champ.

Speaker 6 (03:26):
We were scared to death for Ali. The people who
knew about boxing and cared about Ali were really scared
for George Foreman could literally kill him.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
This is the story of what all went down in
Zaire in nineteen seventy four, how we get there, and
for so many reasons. This ultimately is a story of
excellence in the Key of Blackness.

Speaker 5 (03:49):
Jane Brown said, Said Lois said, I'm Black and I'm Brown.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Among the numerous legends told lost moments will also be
revealed in this podcast.

Speaker 5 (04:00):
I'm Niko Ali Walsh.

Speaker 7 (04:02):
I'm a professional boxer and the Muhammad Ali is my grandfather.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Intertwined with the cultural milestones will come portraits of greatness
and accounts of rare humanity.

Speaker 5 (04:13):
All the Africans who have been spread around the world,
we know where you are, we haven't lost track of you,
and we all hid together on this earth.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
All told, this is a tale of many battles, many fights,
the wars that rage through both African and American cultures
in this time, and how these conflicts tested people's values
and convictions brought into sharpest relief in the story of
one Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
He was a craftsman with the skill of boxing, and
brilliant a brilliant mind.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
He is our hero and will carry us through all
the soulful high points, violent lows, cultural chaos, and societal
craziness to come.

Speaker 8 (04:56):
The military, they mutinied.

Speaker 9 (04:58):
He will not sir in any capacity in a war
against fellow brown people.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
His life was steadily becoming more and more endangered.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
If fighting was the spirit of the times, you could
say the soul of seventy four was a rumble. Welcome
to Rumble, the story of Ali Foreman and the Soul

(05:34):
music of nineteen seventy four. I'm your host Zarren Burnett,
the third from iHeart Podcast School of humans. This is rumble.
I can't remember a time when I did not know
about the rumble in the jungle. My pops was a

(05:58):
huge fan of boxing. He told me this story of
the Ali form and fight like it was Arthurian legend.
The way he told it elevated their heavyweight bout to
the level of the champions of old. My pops also
gave me his name.

Speaker 5 (06:11):
My name is Zaren W. Burnette Junior. I am a writer, observer,
and chronicler of American history. I particularly focus on African
American history because I'm an African American, but I focus
on American history because I'm an American, and of course
I'm the father of my son, Zaren Burnett the Third.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Now, back when I was a boy, when my pops
told me the story of the young brash Cassius Clay
taking on the former mob enforcer and leg breaker Sonny Liston,
it was like hearing about David and Goliath. And my
pops would also light up whenever he told a story
about Smokin' Joe Frasier, that was his other favorite boxer.
But as a kid, I was thrilled by the stories

(06:55):
about Ali.

Speaker 5 (06:56):
When Ali came out, it was kind of an exciting
moment because he fought like a middleweight. He fought like
sugar Ay Robinson. He was real fast, he threw a
lot of punches and get out the wait.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
By the time I came into the world, Ali was
considered the goat, the actual greatest of all time, so
naturally I was eager to hear his story. Ali was
like no one else, both inside and outside the ring.

Speaker 5 (07:21):
He was a provocateur on purpose.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
The perfect champ of his moment. In every way possible.
Ali was this new sort of fighter.

Speaker 5 (07:30):
We were all young, so it was fun the white
young person coming there and kick all the old guy's asses.
And he was doing all his poetry and he was
telling all his hit It was like wrestling. He made
it like wrestling.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
In nineteen sixty four. Ali made boxing seem less like
the mean, old brutal sport of face smashing violence. He
wasn't part of its dark and smoky, old fashioned past,
the one that wreaked a cigar smoke and spilled liquor.
Ali's fights felt like the future arriving. His fights were different.
His style in the ring was different.

Speaker 5 (08:03):
He wasn't a puncher, you know, he didn't hurt people anything.
He would beat you about, throwing eighteen punches so fast
that he would just be overwhelmed.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
It always sounded fun, especially how Ali felt like change personified.

Speaker 5 (08:16):
This is the early sixties, so this is also the
beginning of the Black power movement. Black young people are
feeling in all kinds of ways. So this is a
black young person who we can get behind.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
These days. When you ask people about Muhammad Ali, especially
those who actually knew him, you still hear it in
their voices how Ali was special.

Speaker 10 (08:35):
Ali was smart, he was bright, and he was handsome.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
Ali was extraordinary in every way. I mean extraordinary boxer,
extraordinarily beautiful person, extraordinarily loquacious, and the master storyteller.

Speaker 6 (08:51):
I loved Ali, not just as a fighter, but everything
that he stood for.

Speaker 11 (08:55):
Ali is still refreshing because he's real. It's just no
bullshit about the guy.

Speaker 7 (08:59):
Ali is so handsome you want him to win.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
Over the course of his career, Muhammad Ali stayed a
media presence, and as such, he gave many interviews. It
seems like the people's champ was always talking, always trying
to explain himself, and all those interviews revealed that Ali
was a man of complex motivations, as Ali tried to
tell the world, he was both the butterfly and the bee.

Speaker 4 (09:28):
People in America just find it hard to take a
fighters seriously. They don't know that I'm using boxing for
the sake of getting over certain points you couldn't get
over without it. Being a fighter enables me to attain
certain ends. I'm not doing this for the glory of fighting,
but to change a lot of things.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
That's a quote of Muhammad Ali from the book The
Fight by Norman Mahler. It's about the rumble in the jungle.
Mahler was a prolific fan of boxing, and, like many
of us, a huge fan of Muhammad Ali. In particular.
In the first chapter of the Mahler attempted to convey
what it was like to be in the presence of
the people's champ.

Speaker 10 (10:05):
There's always a shock in seeing him again, not lives
in television, but standing before you, looking his best. Then
the world's greatest athlete is in danger of being our
most beautiful man, and the vocabulary of the camp is
doomed to appear. Women draw an audible breath, men look down.
They are reminded again of their lack of worth. If

(10:25):
Ali never opened his mouth to quiver the jellies of
public opinion, he would still inspire love and hate, for
he is the prince of Heaven, so says the silence
around his body when he is luminous.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
In order to truly understand what was at stake for
Muhammad Ali in nineteen seventy four when he stepped into
that ring against Foreman in Zayir, we must first understand
that Ali at the time was.

Speaker 9 (10:52):
The hero of the moment, the great freedom fighter, the
person who would challenge American policy, who would represent freedom
for African Americans.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
No matter where you looked in nineteen seventy four, the
sense of a fight about to burst out anywhere everywhere
was rolling through the culture like thunder. It was a
time of upheaval. To anyone paying attention, it was abundantly
clear the world was changing fast. Some folks were busy

(11:25):
fighting against that change. Others were out protesting and organizing
to fight to advance it. The rest were caught in
the middle. The war in Vietnam had reached the peak
of its unpopularity. After a decade of body bags sent
home to the United States with little to show for
their sacrifices. There were groups like the Weather Underground and

(11:47):
their terror campaign of homemade bombs. OPEC announced an oil embargoed,
effectively crippling the oil driven economies of the West. News
cameras recorded the effect for everyday Americans. High and priceikes
at the grocery store, memorable blocks, long lines formed at
gas stations. This is when the Detroit carmakers began to

(12:09):
lose ground to the compact cars built in Japan. The
steel plants were closing, Big factories were shuttered. Layoffs in
industries across the board were daily headlines. Many cities were crumbling.
The site of them could inspire dystopian fiction. Things did
not appear promising for the American experiment. Even the President,

(12:30):
Richard Nixon, spent his days battling for his political life.

Speaker 7 (12:35):
It was almost two years ago. In June nineteen seventy two,
the five men into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington.
It turned out that they were connected with my reelection committee.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Now he still didn't believe it in the spring of
seventy four, but Watergate that was a fight Nixon was
bound to lose. Meanwhile, there was the People's chamt Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 6 (13:00):
Standing for principles and willing to give up everything for
his principles.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
And there was the heavyweight champion of the world, George Foreman.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Very serious and quiet, incredibly confident. He was gonna talk
with his gloves, not with his mouth.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
The two men were bound to fight. Everyone knew it.
It was just a matter of time.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
What was going on in the world at the time
made this fight as important that anything else is going
on on the planet. So even if you don't fuck
with this, if this is not your first language, you
need to be here.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
This show is about so much more than Muhammad Ali,
the man, the fighter, the cultural icon. Yet he is
the focus, and so it is with him, the people's
champ where our episodic journey begins.

Speaker 5 (13:52):
They float like a butterflies thing, like a bit. You
gotta be a damn food to get in the ring
with me.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Junior in Louisville, Kentucky,
on January seventeenth, nineteen forty two.

Speaker 9 (14:13):
He grew up in a border state. The worst of
segregation passed him by. Although Louisville was segregated in neighborhoods,
most schools, parks, public spaces. But African Americans had the
vote and some labor power and were able to mitigate

(14:34):
the worst of the segregation of that era. Still, he
could look forward to less than full rights as a
human being.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
That's Lewis Ehrenberg, author of Rumble in the Jungle, one
of the definitive books on the Ali Foreman fight and
Ali's place in boxing history. He is a fount of
all things Ali, As Ehrenberg explains, by the time Ali
was a young boy, he already fully understood the force
racism played in reducing the potential of his parents' lives

(15:06):
under Jim Crow. For Ali, his father.

Speaker 9 (15:09):
In particular, was a very unhappy guy who he wanted
to be an artist. He ended up a sign painter.
It was difficult for him to earn a living.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Cassius Clay's parents warned to their son about the risks
he'd face in life, not just economic and professional, but
from believing himself to be free. After all, lynching's were
still a very real threat in the forties and fifties.

Speaker 9 (15:35):
His father regaled him with tales of how African Americans
were treated when they stepped outside the black community, including
the fire bombing of a home bought by a black
family in a white neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
Now you might be asking yourself, as I wondered. Raised
with ugly racist violence as a constant threat, why would
young Casius Clay want to pick up boxing gloves.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
At twelve years old? Someone stole my bicycle. I went
to a home show where the display cars and refrigerators
and household utensils and everything. And I went there and
I left my bicycle outside and came out. It was
drizzling rain that night, Saturday evening, about nine o'clock. My
bicycle was gone. I just got it for Christmas. I

(16:26):
asked somebody with the closest police officer, and they said
in the same building. I just came out.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Young Cassius Clay went back inside and he founded the
officer who would go on to become an integral person
in his formative years. The CoP's name.

Speaker 4 (16:39):
Joe Martin, was training amateur boxes in a room about
this size, and he asked me to take out an
application and learned how to fight so I could beat
the fellow up in a joking fashion who stole my bicycle?

Speaker 12 (16:53):
So I started boxing.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Ironically, a white cop teaching a young black boy to
fight was seen at the time to be a way
to keep him on the straight and narrow. His parents
were relieved because it kept young Cashius Clay from getting
caught up in any street crime or random trouble. Now
he had a focus. This marked the beginning of Cassius
Clay's road to future greatness, a road that was documented

(17:17):
by his most authoritative biographer.

Speaker 11 (17:20):
My name is Jonathan Iig, and I am a writer
and the author of the Muhammad Ali biography called ali Alife.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
Early on in the research and construction of the narrative,
I was struck with one question.

Speaker 11 (17:32):
What made this kid think he could be special? First
of all, he just seems to have this appetite for
attention from a very early age, before he can talk,
you know, he's just standing up in the crib and
in the stroller, just wants everybody to look at him
all the time. And then when he gets to school
he has dyslexia. He doesn't really know it, but he
discovers that he can't really get the attention for his schoolwork.

(17:54):
He's not as good as he should be in terms
of you know, reading, writing, and arithmetic. But he can
make people laugh and he can make people pay attention
with his wordplay, and he seems to really need that,
so I think that's a key too. When he discovers boxing,
he doesn't really show what he interested in other sports
because it's not enough of a spotlight for him. I

(18:15):
guess boxing it's if you're the one winning, you're the
one getting all the attention.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
And he was good, like so good that when the
fledgling fighter wanted to get on a local Louisville TV
show called Tomorrow's Champions Piece of k done, he moved
on to new goals, bigger goals. Casius Clay became an
amateur boxer on the rise. He won the Golden Gloves,
he won the National AAU, and eventually he qualified for

(18:42):
the nineteen sixty Olympics. He would travel to Rome to
represent the United States on the world stage, and he
won the goal. He was only eighteen years old when
he returned home to the American South. It took him
only a few days to realize winning gold for the

(19:02):
US of A did next to nothing to change how
he was treated in Louisville, Kentucky.

Speaker 4 (19:08):
It made me popular for a few days, but I
wanted to do something good with it. So I went downtown.
At the time, black people was marching to eat in
the white restaurants. They wanted rights to go where they
wanted to. And I said, so I'll take this medal

(19:29):
and I'll go downtown and I'll sit down at the restaurant.
I got him on the spot now, and then I'll
order something to eat. So I go downtown and I
have the medalon, and the lady was looking and I said,
I'd like a cheeseburger. She said, we don't serve negroes.
I said, and I don't eat them either. Just give

(19:49):
me the cheeseburger.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
That's one version of the story Ali would later tell.
There were a couple others, like how Ali.

Speaker 9 (19:57):
Went into a bar and the owner chased him out
even though Cassius Clay was wearing the metal. He also
said that he was chased out of the bar by bikers,
white bikers.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Then there was the story about the Ohio River. This
river held specific meaning. It had always been the line
that demarketed freedom when black people were enslaved in America.
Those close knew, if you can cross the Ohio, you free.

Speaker 9 (20:26):
Now a whole legend has grown up around this. He
was so bitter, he threw his medal away. It's just
not clear what happened to the metal. He may have
just misplaced it, but he definitely stopped wearing it.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
The way he tells it, Young Cashius Clay, well, he
took his gold medal and tossed it right into that
river and proclaimed himself free. And the river was his witness.
In his hometown of Louisville, segregation didn't stop local white
businessmen from making money off a piece of Young Cashu's clay.

(21:01):
If anything, That's what the South was best at, finding
ways to profit off a black body while limiting what
that same person could do with their body. It didn't
take long for Louisville moneymen to see dollar signs in
the form of Cash's clay.

Speaker 9 (21:17):
Once he won the gold medal as a light heavyweight
at the nineteen sixty Olympics, he attracted the attention of
various white businessmen in Louisville. The owners of distilleries, newspapers,
et cetera, who put up money for his training, put
money in for bank account that would accrue earnings over time,

(21:38):
and in fact, Clay had a boost that few not
only African American athletes, but any American athlete had. He
was like the first corporate athlete.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
What those white businessmen did not expect is that Ali
was going to do Ali as a kid, Cash's love
to watch the pro wrestler Gorgeous George perform on local
Louisville TV. He studied how Gorgeous George hyped up an
upcoming match, boasting about what all he planned to do
next time he was in the ring. His hyperbolic bravado

(22:14):
stayed with Cassius Clay. He later said, you know.

Speaker 4 (22:18):
He makes a lot of money with that kind of talk.
I'm gonna be like him and liven up the fight game.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Notable fight writer, best selling sports biographer, and ESPN commentator
Mark Krigel believes that Gorgeous George's influence was absolutely key
to who Ali would become as a boxer and as
his own hype man.

Speaker 12 (22:37):
If you look at the wrestling construct, it's not an
accident that Muhammad Ali said that he learned from Gorgeous George.
I mean, Gorgeous George himself is like a very American archetype,
and Ali used that stuff. Glitz, the razzle, the braggadocio,
whatever you want to call it. He used that to

(22:59):
connect with the audience. And the audience can hate you,
they can love you, but they can't feel neutral, and
that was part of Ali's genius.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
Ali seized on the symbolic power inherent in the narratives
of pro wrestling.

Speaker 12 (23:14):
You can't understand boxing. I don't think you can understand
American culture without understanding wrestling, and wrestling as a construct
requires a couple of things.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
You need a babyface and a heel. The babyface is
the protagonist, the hero.

Speaker 12 (23:33):
The protagonist needs to have that great, resourceful sense of narcissism.
It would help them measurably if he has a sense
of humor, which Ali had in abundance.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
And the heel is, of course the antagonist the villain.
But you need other dynamics and a role playing for
the wrestling construct to be compelling.

Speaker 12 (23:52):
The protagonist, the leading man, whether he's the heel of
the babyface, usually has a valet. For a great part
of Ali's career, that was co Cell.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
As in the legendary sports commentator Howard Cosell and Cossell.
He was the star of.

Speaker 12 (24:11):
All those wide world of sports broadcasts that went into
everyone's living room. There was co Cell this like kind
of goofy Jewish guy from Brooklyn. What's he doing there?
But he's got some sort of rapport with Ali and
it was comic, but it was also meaningful and no
one had seen that before.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
Now, along with the valet, a wrestling hero also needs
a hype man.

Speaker 12 (24:33):
What he didn't have until Zayir was the ring master,
the barnum, another narcissist at the center of the ring,
screaming and yelling, you know, selling tickets. Come see this,
Come one, come all. It's a freak show. It's crazy.
It's a race war. It's not a race war. It's brutality.
You'll never see this again. Whatever, It is a shameless

(24:54):
presence in the center of the ring, and that, of
course is Don King.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
The impress Sorio of the fight game. Don King had
the same love and talent for spectacle, much like Ali.
He also could elevate boxing with his flare for storytelling.
But Don King also represents the more sinister side of boxing,
the mob connections and fixed fights that dark past we

(25:21):
mentioned earlier. It was still the norm when Ali was
coming up, but again, Ali was different at.

Speaker 12 (25:28):
The end of the day. One of the things that
got him over certainly with the American public and probably
around the world, was a sense of humor.

Speaker 5 (25:38):
But that's not all.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Ali also had one other key aspect to his character.

Speaker 12 (25:43):
The second thing, and maybe the most important thing, was
his undeniable courage, and that is the revelation of Zayir.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
The Rumble in the Jungle takes place in nineteen seventy four,
but you cannot really understand what all goes down in
that boxingering in Zaire without first understanding what Muhammad Ali
stood to win, or rather to regain in that title fight.
Thus we must go back to nineteen sixty four, when
a young Cassius Clay first stood in the ring fighting

(26:14):
for his chance to claim the title of heavyweight Champion
of the World. Cassius Clay was up against a serious,
real life villain. As Lewis Ehrenberg recalled the champ at
the time.

Speaker 9 (26:27):
Sonny Liston was a bad man. I mean that is
bad in the folkloric sense. He was so good he
was bad.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Sonny Liston went to prison for armed robbery, sent to
a hell hole that Time magazine once described as quote
the bloodiest forty seven acres in America. Yet Liston thrived
in that gladiator pit. In fact, his future in the
fight game first opened up to him while he was
locked up. The way my pops told.

Speaker 5 (26:57):
It to me, he was boxeding and wound guys who
fixed who arranged spouts, bringing in other fighters to fight.
The prisoners saw Liston fight, said that's the man we
need to They went back talk to the boys, got
in parolled parole from the federal prison and the condition
was to them that you fight for us now.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
The they is the mob, and that also meant Sunny
Liston had already made job.

Speaker 9 (27:22):
And still after coming out of prison, he attracted mob
figures who wanted to help his boxing career and make
money off in at the same time, and Listen began
to rise in the ranks.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Sonny Liston worked collections for the mafia as they waited
for his fight career to take off.

Speaker 9 (27:42):
He was a enforcer for the Saint Louis mob, a
leg breaker and a fearsome guy.

Speaker 5 (27:49):
You know when they say a leg breaker, Listen actually
would break the leg with his fists. He would he
would stretch your leg across two chairs and punch the
shinbone and break it. He was known for kicking cop
of acid. He beat a cop inality one time, took
his gun and walked away, just left and land there.
So then and then didn't he run handing on a
yellow sweater. Papers is looking for a negro on a

(28:11):
yellow sweater. That's how he found it. He didn't take
it off.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
You see why my pops couldn't help but love him.
Sonny Liston's hands were so large fifteen inches he needed
custom made boxing gloves. When he sparred, he fought two
and three men at a time. Sonny Liston broke bones
in the ring. He had no pity or human feeling
about anyone who stepped in the ring with him. Sunny

(28:37):
Listen was absolutely merciless. Also, Liston famously hated the press.
While young Cassius Clay took his inspiration from pro wrestling,
Liston said of himself.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
A prize fight is like a cowboy movie that has
to be a.

Speaker 5 (28:53):
Good guy and the bad guy.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
Only in my cowboy movie, the bad guy always win.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
Good to his word, Liston did win. He became the
heavyweight champion of the World in nineteen sixty two, and
for those who don't know boxing's history, this early sixties
marked a new era for the sport, mostly due to
the entrance of one man, Muhammad al Lee, then known
as Cassius Clay.

Speaker 9 (29:20):
Nobody took Cassius Clay seriously, especially the way Sonny Liston was.
I mean, just the smile of Cassius Clay made him
a different sort of person. Liston was the scowl, Clay
was the smile.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
And Clay's fast mouth talk did very little to impress
anyone in the world of boxing.

Speaker 9 (29:40):
He attracted a lot of attention. Nobody, however, gave Clay
a chance against Liston.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Now from my pops, the list In Clay fight was
a moment when America revealed itself in terms of who
a person rooted for in the ring.

Speaker 5 (29:56):
Yeah, that was That was an interesting moment. First, a
lot of people wanted to shut Ali's mouth, Then an
equal to number of people wanted Ali to beat the criminal.
So at that moment, they both were favored by one
faction of America or another.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
For the boxing insiders, though they mostly believed that Cassius Clay.

Speaker 9 (30:15):
He seemed too lightweight to be a heavyweight champion, and
people just took him as a bragger. The sports writers
in the black and the White press just felt he
was a bit of a buffoon.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Cassius Clay did not act the way any professional fighter
was expected to act, especially a black boxer. Clay was brash, disrespectful,
he talked over white reporters. What really upset many folks
black and white was how Casius Clay was a new
sort of proud black man.

Speaker 5 (30:49):
He was a shit talker that was considered poor sportsmanship,
and it was like it was frowned on as calling
unnecessary attention to yourself, you know. So, so he came with,
oh I'm so pretty all that, guys. The people liked
it at first, then he just kept on doing and
then the people in the barbershops would turn on him.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Where black men gathered, the talk often turned to boxing,
and Cassius Clay and Sonny Listing Liston's fight skills were admired,
but the man was hard to love. While Cassius Clay
was new in the fight game and was fast, but
just as cocky and always telling the world how pretty
he was. For the workaday men of the era, regardless

(31:29):
of race, talk like that made him hard to love
for his own reasons. The champ Sonny Listen wouldn't ever
agree to fight the new Lippy contender, So in order
to get his chance at a title fight.

Speaker 9 (31:43):
Cassius Clay has to follow Listen around. Listen just doesn't
take him seriously, but Cassius Clay tracks him down, ridicules
him in public shows no respect.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Cassius Clay showed up whenever and wherever he could find
Sonny Listing. Then he'd mock Listen to his face as
Clay's young fans laughed at the spectacle. Cashus Clay knew
one sure way he could get a fight was to
piss off Sonny Listen. No one else thought that was
a good idea. It worked, though, Sonny Liston agreed to

(32:16):
a title fight in Miami in the spring of sixty four.
This first title fight tells us a great deal about
where all Lee is going to go, both inside and
outside the ring. Not only that, it also almost mirrors
the events of the Rumble in the Jungle, and all
Lee said as much to the legendary sports broadcaster Howard

(32:38):
Cosell in an interview in the days just before he
stepped into the ring for the Rumble in the Jungle.

Speaker 4 (32:45):
This present fight with George Foreman is only a reflection
on my past fight with Sonny Liston.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
There was one other key parallel for the two title fights.

Speaker 9 (32:53):
And they thought he was going to be killed in
the ring.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
In nineteen sixty four, Cassius Klay faces Sunny Liston in
a championship bout in Miami, Florida. In nineteen seventy four,
Muhammad Ali faces George Foreman in a championship bout in
Kinshasa's Zaiir to Muhammad Ali the boxer in both fights,
it was one story, one long fight to regain his crown,

(33:25):
But he was two very different men in nineteen sixty
four and nineteen seventy four. He changed in those ten years,
just as the whole world would change dramatically in many
ways thanks to Ali. In Norman Mahler's book The Fight,
the author focused on the value of emotion to young
Casshiu's clay.

Speaker 10 (33:45):
Part of Ali's strength in the ring was fidelity to
his mood. If when speaking to the press, a harsh
and hysterical tone intoed his voice as easily as other
men would light a cigarette. He was never frantic in
the ring, at least not since the fight with Liston
in Mya in nineteen sixty four.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
There were many men who were integral to Casius Clay's rise,
like his trainer Angelo Dundee, who will meet later. But
few were more colorful or more ever present than his cornerman,
Drew Bundini Brown. He was like a second heart.

Speaker 5 (34:24):
True.

Speaker 9 (34:24):
Bundini Brown was a guy who came out of the
boxing world. I mean he hung around boxing, He hung
around nightlife. He hooks up with Muhammad Ali early on
and it helps Aali challenge the accepted ways that a
black champion should behave.

Speaker 6 (34:45):
And I got to hang out with him a little bit.
He was a very fascinating guy.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
That's Gary Stromberg. He's a huge fan of the fight game.
And also I.

Speaker 6 (34:55):
Did the public relations for festival in Zaire.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
And he recalls well his time spent with and near
Bundini Brown. It was self evident Bundini loved Ali.

Speaker 6 (35:06):
I got to watch it and that was really impactful
to me to watch how much he loved him. He
loved him like a father, you know. I got to
go to training a couple of times and watching Bundini
watch Ali take punches, he suffered for it was like
a father watching his son. If Ali said something that
was hurtful or somebody was insulting Ali or in any

(35:30):
kind of situation that was impactful to Ali, Bundini would
get emotional about it, and if he would cry, I
thought he was a remarkable guy.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Bondini Brown was not only Ali's cornerman and his hype man.

Speaker 5 (35:43):
He was like your own personal cheerleader. And he was
a trainer. He worked with Angelo Dundee, but he was
like a psychological coach.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Bondini Brown was also the man who first got Ali
spouting poetry and dropping his famous bars, his taunting couple
about his opponents. As Jonathan Ig notes.

Speaker 11 (36:03):
Bundini was Ali's muse in a way, and his tormentor
and his best friend. And you know, Ali was a
great rhymer, but Bundini was better and really helped him
polish his act.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
The memorable taunts of Bundini gave more sting to all
these punches in the ring. It's like my pop used
to tell me.

Speaker 5 (36:22):
Bundini Brown he kept Ali focused on on hurting people.
Ali is mean, but I don't think I don't think
he has a natural desire to hurt people. And Bundini
Brown knew he could direct that meanness.

Speaker 9 (36:34):
He really went along with all these poetry recitations.

Speaker 5 (36:41):
Say like a butterflas thing like the you gotta be
a damn food to get in it ring with me. Rumble,
young man, rumble, and they would say it face, face
to face. It would be hollering. That shit. That was
that was fun, that was entertainment.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Keep in mind, this was all new. The idea of
an influencer was decades away. MTV didn't even exist. No
one talked about themselves the way Ali did in nineteen
sixty four. Love it or hate it, the people ate
it up. And so when young Cashus Clay prepares to
fight Sunny Listen, Bundini Brown knows his fighter needs the

(37:18):
sort of energy that only comes from good hype. At
the Fighter's Way In, separated by police and boxing promoters,
the two fighters, dressed in their satin boxing robes, square off.
Young Casius Clay shouts at listen over the heads of cops, Hey, Sonny.

Speaker 4 (37:36):
You ain't nothing, You ain't got a chance.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
I'm gonna dance. Then Cashus Clay tells the gathered press.

Speaker 4 (37:44):
I predict that somebody will die to not a rightside
from shop.

Speaker 9 (37:48):
Clay just uses the way in in a way that
no fighter had to just create havoc and get to listen. Psychologically,
he and Bundini are yelling and screaming at the way
in Rumble young Man, Rumble and roaring, and it just
people think that Clay has gone nuts.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Cashus Clay is so fired up most of the boxing
press believe the young fighters trying to mask his fears
of facing sunny Liston.

Speaker 9 (38:19):
But then when he gets back to the dressing room,
they take his temperatuist pulse rate and it goes down immediately,
so people have concluded but since then that this was calculated.
He wasn't afraid. He was running a game on listen,
essentially to undermine his confidence.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
You see, Cashus Clay starts to fight his opponents inside
their minds, long before they ever step inside the ring.
The night of their title fight finally arrives, the stars
gather in Miami. The world turns its attention to see
if there will be a new heavyweight champion crown and

(38:59):
to see if Clay is all talk or not there
with him. Cassius Clay has another boxing legend at his side,
his trainer, Angelo Dundee. He runs a historic boxing gym
down in Miami Beach Dundee takes an interest in the
young Olympic champ and helps turn Casius Clay into a

(39:20):
true contender. Now, before the ring bell dings for the
World Heavyweight Championship bout, Dundee knows his guy is ready,
and so on February twenty fifth, nineteen sixty four, Casius
Clay steps into the ring to face Sunny Listing.

Speaker 9 (39:39):
It opens with Clay just peppering Listing with jabs and
right crosses. I mean he's moving and grooving, and Listing
is you need to look older and older and clumsier,
which is very surprising because this is a very deadly fighter.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
Rounds one through four are close as far as the
judge's scoring, and the audience is a gay stunned by
how Cashius Clay is cool as a cucumber in a
bowl of hot sauce, to quote my man MCA. Now,
in these first four rounds, Ali keeps the upper hand
battling against this villain that just about any sane man
would fear, and then something unexpected happens.

Speaker 9 (40:22):
It's only in the fifth round that the bout is
in doubt because something gets in Cassius's eye and he
can't see very well.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
It's a caustic substance. It stings and it burns. Clay
can't see much of anything, so.

Speaker 9 (40:38):
He says to his trainer, Angelo Dundee, take off the gloves.
I can't see.

Speaker 5 (40:43):
Cut my gloves off.

Speaker 4 (40:45):
I want to prove to the world there's dirty work
of foot.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
But Dangelo Dundee tells his fighter mid round, whoa, whoa,
back up, baby, Come on now, this is for the title.

Speaker 5 (40:54):
What are you doing?

Speaker 8 (40:54):
Sit down?

Speaker 1 (40:56):
Meanwhile, Dundee still needs to figure out what is in
his boxer's eyes as Dundee tails it, so I get
him down, I get to sponge and I pour the
water into his eyes, trying to cleanse whatever's there. But
before I did that, I put my pinky in the
eye and I put it into my eye. It burned
like hell. There was something caustic in both eyes. Dundee

(41:17):
also knows if Cash's Clay doesn't come out of his corner,
the fight will be called.

Speaker 9 (41:23):
So Dundee says, you're going out there. You just keep moving.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Dundee shoves his fighter back out into the ring to
face list it half blinded.

Speaker 9 (41:32):
By the end of the round, it clears and in
the next round of sixth Clay is hitting him from
all angles and Listening cannot respond, and the fight is stopped.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
The ref announces the new heavyweight champion of the world.
Cash's Clay runs to the ropes and shouts at the
press and the news cameras.

Speaker 5 (41:57):
I shook up the wild. Ah, I shook up the world.
I'm taking the world.

Speaker 10 (42:03):
Ah.

Speaker 5 (42:03):
Pretty, I'm a bad man.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
He's just twenty two years old.

Speaker 9 (42:09):
Cassius Clay becomes the heavyweight champion of the world and
becomes a major cultural and political figure as a result.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Sonny Liston was a big reason boxing was synonymous with
the mob in the early sixties. He didn't even try
to hide it. Liston was also why folks shouted that
the fix was in when he faced a young Cassius
Clay a second time in nineteen sixty five in Lewiston, Maine.
That fight ended in the first round when Ali threw

(42:43):
what he called an anchor punch that caught Liston off guard.
Others referred to it as the phantom punch since no
one really saw it. What they did see was Listen
fall down on his back. When he struggled to get
back up, he rolled over and was counted out to
this day, Folks like my pop, they won't let it go.

Speaker 5 (43:02):
First of all, he didn't beat Saint Listen. That was
the first I've seen fixed flights in my life, and
that was a fixed fight. I don't give it dwn
what anybody says. Ali never knocked out one more person
with one punch in his whole career, and the one
he did was Sunny Listen. No, and the odds are
nine to one on this inside.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
That's a tempting payoff for a mobster looking to fix
a fight, which is why, as Mark Krigel points out.

Speaker 12 (43:27):
The fixed fights were not a rumor, was a way
of doing business. But it also becomes part of the
folklore of boxing. And I think that the role of
the mob was really not unlike Bud Schulberg's were on
the Waterfront, whatever that famous speech is, you know, that's
pretty much.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
How it worked. In the film On the Waterfront, Marlon
Brando plays Terry Molloy, a former boxer turned doc worker.
Rod Steiger plays his brother Charlie, a gangster who works
for the mob boss and fix his fights. In that
famous taxi cab scene, Terry tells his gangster Big brother
Charlie that he should have looked out for him, acting

(44:08):
his ass off. Brando says, you don't understand. I could
have had class, I could have been a contender. I
could have been somebody instead of a bum, which is
what I am. Let's face it, it was you, Charlie.
That scene was still resonating in the culture when Sonny
Liston looked like he took a dive, so it was

(44:30):
easy for boxing fans to shout the fight's fixed. And
due to this shadow cast over the two Listen fights,
it would take Casius Clay a long time to shake
the whispers that he was an illegitimate champ. In fact,
it wouldn't be until the Rumble in the Jungle in
Zyere that that kind of talk fully stopped. But for now,

(44:53):
legitimate or not, Ali was the heavyweight champion of the
world and the stage was set for new phase as
the people's champ and the boxer who did not want
to fight. On the next episode of Rumble.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
Suddenly he's like rubbing shoulders with Miles, and he's meeting
Monk and all these dudes.

Speaker 9 (45:18):
This guy is dangerous. He's speaking his mind.

Speaker 4 (45:21):
I know where I'm going and I know the truth,
and I don't have to be what you want me.

Speaker 5 (45:27):
To be as black power shit. You know, like this
is some more shit to fuck with people about.

Speaker 8 (45:36):
Rumble is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
Rumble is written and hosted by Zaren Burnett. The third
produced and directed by Julia Chriscau. Sound design and scoring
by Jesse Niswanger. Original music by Jordan Manley and TJ. Merritt.
Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. Series concept by Gary Stromberg.

(46:00):
Executive producers are Jason English, Sean t Toone, Gary Stromberg,
Virginia Prescott, L C. Crowley, and Brandon Barr. Production manager
Daisy Church, fact checker Savannah Hugley. Additional production by Claire Keating.
Legal services provided by Canoel han Lee PC. Casting director

(46:21):
Julia Chriscau. Episode one cast Abraham Amka as Mohammad Ali,
Jonah Weston as Norman Mailer, John Washington as Sonny Liston.
Casting support services provided by Breakdown Express. Special thanks to
Lewis Ehrenberg. Check out his book Rumble in the Jungle.
It's a great resource. Also thanks to Jonathan I for

(46:44):
his book Ali A Life, and finally, thanks to Zarenz
pops Zeke who grounds this material like no one else.
If you like the show, let us know, like subscribe,
leave five star reviews. It really helps. Also check out
our show note for a full list of reference materials.
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Host

Robert Greenfield

Robert Greenfield

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