Intelligence planning, disciplined execution, and an improbable knockout

When We Were Kings – 30 years on

This year marks three decades since the release of When We Were Kings, the Academy Award winning documentary account of the “Rumble in the Jungle” – the World Heavyweight title fight between challenger Muhammad Ali and defending title holder George Foreman in Zaire in 1974.

When We Were Kings is not just a gripping drama. It is also an excellent case study of uneven contests and asymmetrical conflicts – especially those in which an underdog prevails. The film recounts the drama of the fight as it unfolds from the lead-up all the way to the fight itself. We see how George Foreman, the stronger and more destructive of the two, prepared to use his overwhelming power to defeat his opponent. We watch Ali construct a layered psychological warfare campaign. He uses narrative control – through local media and public performance – to ridicule and isolate Foreman. He also seeds a false expectation of a head-on fight, while privately preparing for something entirely different: a strategy of defence, attrition, and energy transfer.

In the ring, this deception and misdirection holds. Ali continues to provoke, annoy, enrage and destabilise, drawing Foreman into a furious, unsustainable offensive rhythm. In response, Ali retreats into what looks like passivity, but the strategy that will become known as rope-a-dope is, in fact, a masterfully executed disciplined resource management. Foreman eventually wears himself out. By the time he realises what is happening, it is too late, and Ali proceeds to decisively ends the fight with one of the most iconic knockout blows in boxing history. As we watch the film we also experience the hesitation, the indeterminacy, and the true risk that are involved in deception, manipulation and underdog success.

If you ever need to persuade a sceptical coach, or military general for that matter, that active intelligence can overcome technical inferiority, a guided viewing of this film will do the trick. From shaping and influencing the opponent’s perception of reality, through predicting the opponent’s course of action, all to identifying the opportunities for a strategic surprise – the Rumble in the Jungle is a masterclass of underdog action. It is also a great place to start an analysis of the risks, such as predictability and cognitive closure, that are inherent in technical or power superiority. More on these in a coming post.

How this film came about is itself worth recounting. It, too, was at some stage a battle against the odds. Director Leon Gast would never have guessed when he embarked on the project twenty two years earlier what a tortuous path his film would take, nor could he have guessed what a masterpiece he will end up producing – ironically, very much because of this long delay.

The film was originally commissioned by the fight’s promoter, Don King, through a little known British consortium. Much more than a convicted felon and a manipulative, ruthless sports promoter, Don King was an audacious visionary. He had to be in order to make this fight happen, and raise the millions of dollars he had promised to participants.

Partly out of financial necessity, and partly out of PR genius, King sought to turn the fight between Ali and Foreman into a mass-media mega-event. It was to be a televised celebration of Africanness and African Americanness set in the same land where Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had been set – Mobutu Sesse Seko’s Zaire (now the DRC). The fight was to be accompanied by a star-studded three-night Woodstock-style music extravaganza, Zaire 74, featuring such living legends as James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, the Crusaders and Celia Cruz. Mobutu as host and major financier provided US$10m in prize money for both pugilists – $5m each – hoping to win both international respectability and legitimacy for his regime which deserved neither.

King intended the film to focus on the three-day musical festival that would coincide with the boxing event. Gast arrived in Kinshasa with a crew of forty and the team started filming. A lot. They filmed the preparation for the music festival. They filmed the preparations for the fight. They filmed the boxers training. They filmed the boxers, especially Ali, mixing with the locals. They filmed the political charade surrounding the event.

The fight shaped up as a titanic battle between two very different personalities – the flamboyant, extroverted, fast-talking Muhammad Ali, and the quiet, severe and intimidating George Foreman. This was a drama of Greek proportions.

And then the first major hitch happened. Foreman injured himself while sparring in training. This delayed the fight by six weeks. The musical extravaganza, though, could not be pushed back. The artists had their own schedules. The tickets for the festival had been priced out of reach of most Congolese, and too few foreigners were still in Zaire. Inevitably, the first-night attendance was embarrassingly low. Mobutu announced that attendance in the following nights would be free.

Box-office revenue, though, was supposed to fund Gast’s movie. When the time came to be paid, the funding consortium refused to pay the film crew. Don King claimed ownership of the footage and refused to release it. Gast, assisted by lawyer and producer David Sonenberg who had worked with Celia Cruz, sued through a UK court for the footage. The legal tussle, during which it turned out the funding consortium was a front for a company that was registered in the Cayman Islands and was linked to the Liberian finance minister, took the best part of two years. Eventually, Gast won and recovered 300,000 feet of film and 100,000 feet of audio. But this was only the beginning of the epic.

Gast was now stuck with massive amounts of celluloid which captured an event that was no longer in the headlines, and with no funding to proceed. The project essentially stalled for 15 years.

In 1989 Sonenberg joined as co-producer and contributed $400,000 to the project. The film started moving forward. The project’s focus was shifted from the concert to the fight. This attracted director Taylor Hackford, who joined the project and proceeded to record interviews with different cultural icons and others who had been present at the fight or could help make sense of the fight and the historical context. While the film lapses at times into eroticisation and essentialist exoticisation of its African subjects, its construction and explanation of the boxing drama is superb, making it possible for people unfamiliar with the sport to make sense of the protagonists and the drama.

An initial release to the Sundance Film Festival in January 1996 won great acclaim along with extra funding from PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. There followed the October release to the theatres, then the Academy Awards in March of 1997, and with it a well-justified recognition. The Marathon was complete. When We Were Kings was not widely accepted as the gold standard for sports documentaries.

Ironically, perhaps, this long delay was what made the film so great. It allowed the focus to shift to the fight, gave the film a historical depth, and allowed Gast and his crew to build on the public and sporting legacies of both Ali and Foreman, both of whom, but especially Ali, had since become cultural and sporting icons of the 20^th century.

The film production saga also shows that risk, uncertainty, creativity and tenacity are always inherent in struggling against the odds, a lesson Ali had demonstrated so vividly in 1974 in Zaire.

Gast, Foreman, Ali and Sonenberg