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M uhammad Ali’s victory over George Foreman to regain the heavyweight championship in the October 1974 Rumble in the Jungle is one of those historical moments that has developed its own mythology . Norman Mailer devoted a book to what he called The Fight. In 1997, the documentary When We Were Kings won an Oscar for its coverage of the event. These accounts, and others like it, place Ali at the center, as the transcendent conquering hero who reclaimed his throne as king of the world, once and for all banishing the forces of evil that had exiled him in the first place. Most observers simply cannot resist the temptation to let Ali’s brilliant strategic victory over a seemingly impossible foe—in Africa, no less—pass without attaching to it some kind of biblical significance. Ali-Foreman is a natural for such passion plays. The bout was a watershed that marked Ali’s full-fledged arrival as a mainstream American hero. While there are always pockets of resistance to any public figure, no matter how revered, those who clung to the idea that Ali was a draft-dodger were pushed to the margins. Once a powerful enough force to drive Ali into exile, they now were on the wrong end of the conventional wisdom . Even to many who had once opposed him, the bout offered reason to celebrate. Athletically, it was a heroic performance. Politically and culturally, it dovetailed with the spirit of the times. For a country reeling from a series of crises—Watergate, race riots, the OPEC oil embargo—and having all but abandoned the Vietnam War, Ali was the perfect salve, someone whose redemption could resonate with the national consciousness and serve as a foil King of the World The Consequences of Monarchy King of the World 155 to the domestic and international events that were drowning American confidence . He protested the war well before most others had caught on. His honesty distinguished him from a presidential administration whose chief executive only months earlier desperately insisted that he was not a crook. He was black but appeared to transcend race without ever losing consciousness of its significance. He was Muslim but seemed neither foreign nor fanatical. The outpouring of affection toward Ali during this period underscored his effectiveness as a symbolic counterforce to disquieting domestic turmoil and worrisome shifts in the global order. Gerald Ford invited him to the White House. TWA made the bout its in-flight feature. Ali’s reputation was rehabilitated.19 Some of the most celebrated versions of the Ali-Foreman narrative, such as When We Were Kings, star Ali in the role of transcendent cultural Renaissance man, a Pied Piper with the magical ability to align and unify African, American, and African American worldviews and values to everyone’s betterment . While there is something to this perspective, it has obscured the fact that when it came to the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali was not really the force that made it happen, although it certainly could not have occurred without him. Zaire’s true king of the world was President Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1997. Mobutu was a dictator whose excesses were illustrated by his spending $10 million from the impoverished nation’s treasury to host a boxing match. He suppressed those who opposed this farfetched plan to spur investment in his kingdom. Mobutu’s prince of darkness, the man who served as the go-between linking him with the two fighters, was the American boxing promoter Don King, whose reputation would be made by this event and who developed a talent for fleecing African American boxers . It was they, along with the fighters and their managers, who stood to profit from the bout. Because it involved the politicized Ali and Foreman as his foil—a man who in response to the black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics took a flag-waving lap around the ring after clinching the gold medal—people failed to realize that those who injected symbolic meaning into Ali-Foreman were not the fighters, but rather Mobutu and Don King. While Americans, including Ali, latched on to the idea that the Rumble in the Jungle was something more than a boxing match, they were taking their cues from an unsavory duo. Although the bout increased American awareness of Africa, and the media attention produced positive images that countered Western ideas about African primitiveness...

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