“I’m the freedom fighter,” he declares, representing “all the African people who are fighting for their freedom and independence.” as a pivot point in the racial, political, and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s.Īli, the black Muslim stripped of his title and license to fight after refusing to enter military service at the height of the Vietnam War, is seen as the embodiment of the anti-war movement and the struggle for black empowerment, a theme he’s happy to expand upon once on the ground in post-colonial Africa. local time to accommodate prime-time viewing in the U.S.

And what it misses in first-person testimony - Erenberg hasn’t interviewed any of the principals or their camps - isn’t easily made up, even with impeccable research.īut the professor’s central focus, all these years later, is on framing the fight - conceived by Don King, the bombastic promoter with the finger-in-the-electrical-socket hair financed by Zaire president Joseph Mobutu’s larcenous government and scheduled to start at 4 a.m.

His account of the fight itself - best remembered for Ali’s spontaneous rope-a-dope stratagem of leaning against the ring ropes, pawing meekly while the younger, stronger, seemingly invincible champion punched himself into exhaustion, and then ending the fight with a four-punch knockout in the dying seconds of the eighth round - takes up all of eight pages.Įrenberg devotes three times as much space to Zaire 74, the three-day music festival that preceded the fight, veering off into lengthy discourse on the politics and economics of the music industry.Įven as social commentary, The Rumble in the Jungle lacks some of the immediacy and intimacy of earlier treatments from writers who were there. Nor is he hoping to entertain those hardcore fight fans eager for blow-by-blow analysis or the vicarious sensation of blood, sweat, and spittle filling the air, the sniff of fear or desperation palpable from a ringside seat.īy any reasonable measure, Erenberg’s The Rumble in the Jungle isn’t a boxing story at all. Liebling counterintuitively called boxing, has attracted a long line of literary heavyweights, from Jack London to Norman Mailer, and an army of would-be contenders in between.īut Erenberg, a professor emeritus of history at Loyola University in Chicago, isn’t striving to go toe-to-toe with Hemingway or W.C.

Erenberg’s The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, an historian’s take on the 1974 heavyweight fight improbably staged in Kinshasa, Zaire (the onetime Belgian Congo), isn’t likely to change that. Google “Rumble in the Jungle,” and the first thing that pops up is a kindergartner favorite, a colorful rhyming book about elephants, giraffes, and chimpanzees.

The rumble in the jungle