OLD MAN SHAKES FIST AT CLOUDS – Ali vs Foreman
I was in the car with my roommate, Michael, his friend Dwight, and a girlfriend I had at the time, Mary Sue. We were all stoked, jazzed, on our way to see the Ali-Foreman fight live on closed circuit in a theater downtown. I’d been following Ali for most of his professional career, and this fight was making people nervous. He was fighting George Foreman, the guy who hit Joe Frazier so hard it lifted him a few inches off the ground. And this was in the second round. When Frazier finally came back to earth, that was that – the end of the fight.
And now Foreman was getting in the ring with Ali. Some fighters said they were afraid to hit Foreman because it just made him mad. Ali was in the ring, talking to the crowd, talking to Foreman. Every time they got into a clinch, Ali whispered “Is that all you got, George?” Foreman did not come to play. It infuriated him. He was young, invincible, and he intended to burn Ali to the ground.
The crowd was crazy. Crazy Ali fans, crazy Foreman fans. 95% male, a few va-va-voom females as slick window dressing for the men, feathers in the men’s hats, silks, sequins, matching furs, whatever they had in the closet. There was a half-dozen security guards, and they stood and watched the fight along with everyone else.
Round after round, everyone screaming, rising to their feet after a good exchange, then sitting down again. By the sixth round, the man next to me, a Foreman fan, was screaming, almost a moan: “Oh George. No, man. No George. He’s getting himself gassed. O no.”
George wasn’t pacing himself. He wanted the belt, the championship, everything Ali had. He wanted Ali’s head on a stake. He wasn’t cruising for a fifteen-round decision.
Finally, about half-way through the fight, Ali opens up. He’s not gassed at all. He hits Foreman four or five times in two seconds, and watching it on video, it seems Foreman is collapsing slowly, a pile of bricks stacked too high. Ali has a chance to pop him again as Foreman goes down, but pulls back. Foreman hits the canvas.
I heard a sound then that I had never heard before and have never heard since. Thousands of men, howling and screaming, on their feet. People are crying and hugging and passing bottles of whiskey down the aisles, and it is a wild scene. The man next to me says they’re all going to the Kit-Kat Club, a place I’ve never even heard of. My roommate and Dwight and Mary Sue walk back to our car, and we want to feel the way we did then forever. Ali!
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