From the Vault: Hugh Mcilvanney meets Muhammad Ali, hours after the Rumble in the Jungle

We should have known that Muhammad Ali would not settle for any ordinary old resurrection. His had to have an additional flourish. So, having rolled away the rock, he hit George Foreman on the head with it.

Foreman, roughly disabused of his conviction that all his rivals were entombed in physical inferiority, is by no means the only one left stunned by the blow and that gives Ali a particular satisfaction.

He said so more than once in that muted time early on Wednesday afternoon when the turmoil detonated by his achievement had subsided for a few hours. Lying back on the thick cushions of an armchair in his villa, with the windows curtained against an angry sun that was threatening to evaporate the Zaire River as it slid like a grassy ocean past his front door, he talked with the quiet contentment of a man whose thoughts were acting on him as comfortingly as the hands of a good masseur.

“I kicked a lot of asses – not only George’s,” he said. “All those writers who said I was washed up, all those people who thought I had nothin’ left to offer but my mouth, all them that been against me from the start and waitin’ for me to get the biggest beatin’ of all times. They thought big bad George Foreman, the baddest man alive, could do it for them but they know better now.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/mar/05/hugh-mcilvanney-muhammad-ali-rumble-in-the-jungle

 

I have one of his books.

 

That's okay. I really like Mcilveney but I'm more interested in the subject of this particular piece.

 

Yep. It has a photo from Ali-Frazier ll on the cover.

 

Some of Mark Kram's stuff was good. A J. Liebling. Thomas Hauser.

 

I liked Kram until he went on a huge anti-Ali campaign decades after he retired. Ali didn't always cover himself in glory but if hagiography is writing about your subject as if he or she is a saint Kram wrote about Ali as if he was a devil. If you have a chance google Poet and the Pedagogue. It's a piece by A.J. Liebling about the Clay-Banks fight.

 

You're welcome.