The Fight, a Fanta with Ali and Advice from Mailer

Within weeks of our arrival, Kinshasa was scheduled to play host to the fight that would become known as the Rumble in the Jungle. The heavyweight championship match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali was set for September 25 — at 4 a.m.Kinshasa time, with American television viewers in mind.

The city, I reported in a letter home, was “in a frenzy of activity in preparation. The post office is being painted, trash has been removed from its portico, lights installed along the streets and the stadium has been renovated. Workmen in new orange suits have taken up brooms in an attempt to slow the encroachment of sand onto the roads. Scores of new buses have been bought to transport fight-goers. Let’s hope they’ll be put into service afterward for the Zairois, who now crush into buses so tightly that an occasional arm or leg is seen out the windows. We often drive by one that has broken down, and stopped for who knows how long. Once, all the people inside it were singing. This too is Zaire.”

Celebrities began pouring into town. Some seemed to have a hard time grounding themselves “in this city that knows no maps, respects no schedules, babbles many languages, delights in surprises but is likelier to laugh than pay respect. Celebrity doesn’t seem to apply here.”

With fame failing to afford its usual distancing, we in the tiny expat American community benefited enormously.

“We could pack a picnic lunch and take It to the presidential domaine of N’sele and, from the front seat of a huge hall, watch Foreman train alongside the reporters and photographers covering him. We had fried chicken with longtime lightweight champion Archie Moore. We met Howard Cosell and Stokely Carmichael, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Hunter Thompson. On one glorious weekend afternoon, several of us TASOK teachers spent time drinking with Mohammad Ali around a table on the patio of a Kinshasa bar. We were drinking frosty bottles of the excellent lager SKOL; Ali was drinking Orange Fanta. He was delightful — charming and funny and cocky and handsome.”

When Foreman suffered a cut near his eye in training, the fight was postponed by five weeks. This delay raised fears that the rainy season would begin before the fight’s new date — a disastrous prospect, given the fight’s setting in an outdoor stadium. The pre-fight music festival went on as planned, and those who had come to perform — Miriam Makeba, B.B. King, James Brown and many others — left town soon after. But some of the writers and reporters hung around during the delay and, being in Kinshasa much longer than anticipated, grew bored. They were happy to have local company. Some of us TASOK teachers were pleased to provide it — usually during evenings at the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel. Reading back through my journal, those encounters seem surreal.

One evening, I asked Mailer to read some things I’d written and give me some advice. The next evening he delivered: “You write as if you’re afraid someone will interrupt you. You’re a scanning beam, protean, too young to be patient. You are too arch; you have to write totally WITHOUT personality first. When you can do that, THEN you inject personality.” I needed more focus, he said, and he gave me some “missions: Read Das Kapital, Part 1; take at least 3 months. Spend an hour a day on Latin for the rhythm of it.” (He, having run for mayor of New York City, told me I should become a politician, and that this would enrich my rhetoric.)

We argued about Hemingway, whose entire body of work he insisted I read. I’d read plenty of it, and Hemingway annoyed me. I’m sick of the Hemingway worship, I said. His women do little but sigh. Dashiell Hammett nailed it when he said Hemingway couldn’t portray women. “Dashiell Hammett was an ignorant bastard,” Mailer replied. As the evening wore on, and we drank and thumb wrestled (he dubbed himself the American champion), he talked about each of his marriages. Having so many wives was like living in as many different cultures. One of his wives, he said, was like me: Impatient and wanting to achieve.

On another evening, the AP’s legendary combat photographer Horst Faas told me about working with the columnist Joe Alsop, “one of the few opinion writers who actually got out into the field.” Once, as they flew over a ferocious battle somewhere in Southeast Asia, Faas looked over at Alsop and saw that he was reading a book — and yawning. “I’ve seen so many battles, you know,” said Alsop. “Battles bore me now.”

At last, the Fight arrived. Mike and I sat so close to the ring that the boxers’ sweat fell on our faces. The next day, I wrote of the “huge lights making my head ache and the fat swarm of bumbling photographers. The flags and national anthems and singsong chant of ‘Ali, bomayé!’ (Lingala for ‘Kill him, Ali!’) and the wet, squishing thump of a boxing glove — Ali’s glove, at the start, pushing off Foreman’s face a spray of water, catching the light, mushing up the face, making a dope of a brawny man. Then, leaning back against the ropes, there was no butterfly in this Ali, protecting his face against blow after blow, biding his time. And then: Pow! Pow! Pow! The heavyweight champion of the world staggered and fell clumsily to the mat. Ali had won! And, as if on script, great cracks of lightning split the sky and the rain fell, huge sheets of it, pounding the ground. The rainy season had begun.”

This fight has been called “arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century.” Estimates are that it was watched by a billion television viewers worldwide, the most-watched live TV broadcast up to that time. Yet, somehow, the city seemed to shrug it off quickly. I wrote that “Kinshasa has absorbed this huge happening, incorporating it into itself, making one more strange thread in the fabric that is Léopoldville-Kinshasa, a fabric so vari-colored that even this loud new hue has been effectively integrated.” As for us, we went back to our quiet evenings on TASOK’s campus, finding it hard to believe it had all really happened.

Happily, we had an enticing new prospect: We’d made some delightful friends — including friends who owned Land Rovers. Before long, we’d be venturing out of Kinshasa ourselves.