AN EPIC JOURNEY TO GLORY
bumaye!’ (‘Ali, kill him!’) That would make anybody feel uncomfortable, and George was no different.” And what of “moody, growling George”? “Oh, that was all an act,” said Caplan. “George got that brooding stuff from Sonny Liston. When [Foreman] won the gold medal at age 19 in Mexico City, he waved his little American flag in celebration, and then he was put into a training camp with
in the second round. Ali was taking terrible punishment but still leaning back on those ropes. At the end of the second round, I’ve got my ample belly up against the ring and I see George sucking in wind, breathing hard. I said to the photographer next to me, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to blow this fight.’ Eventually we did. George was completely exhausted and, in the eighth round, Ali hit him with a good right hand and it was over. He got up as the “Oh, that was all an act. George got that brooding stuff from Sonny Liston.” referee said 10, and he thought he beat the count. But he was exhausted.” Caplan found the same downcast Foreman he had experienced years earlier: “George was very depressed afterwards. And here’s what’s going to sound self-serving: I got up in the ring, walked to the corner, patted him on the back and said, ‘George, don’t worry about it. It’s not the end of the world. All the great fighters lose.’ And they do. Sugar Ray Robinson lost 19 fights in his career. Joe Louis lost fights. All the greats did. Rocky Marciano was the only exception. “Then we go to his dressing room, which was perhaps 20 by 30 feet, and so was Ali’s. By this time, the skies had opened up and the monsoons were there. The fight just beat the monsoons. Ringside was flooded out. The teletype machines were flooded out. There were people packed in his dressing room. Wall-to-wall media. It was like a steam bath. George was just lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and suddenly he sat up and said, ‘I have a statement to make.’ Everybody had their notebooks poised and their pens ready.
He said, ‘I found a true friend tonight in Bill Caplan.’ Now I almost passed out. I went weak at the knees. Why? Well, he wouldn’t talk to me for the whole time that we were there. He’d only try and beat me at ping-pong. Zaire made him kind of crazy.” Looking back, Caplan celebrates being involved in such an important era: “During the golden age of heavyweights, you had George, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Kenny Norton
Sonny Liston. Then he said, ‘That’s been very effective for him. Now I’m going to do that.’ It was just an act of intimidation. George was always a super-nice kid. “I was a betting man in those days and I bet money on George. I laid down 3-to-1 odds; and it would have been 10-to-1, except he was fighting Muhammad Ali. Because Muhammad Ali was so loved
and then about 10 or 12 or 15 really good heavyweights. There have never been so many good heavyweights in the history of the sport, which is why it’s called the golden age of heavyweights in boxing. They all did numbers on each other. It was like a round- robin. They were all beating each other. It was a good lesson in ‘styles make fights.’ George knocked out Joe
and hated, and because he was the most famous person on Earth, the odds were 3½-to-1. If it was anyone else, it would have been 10-to-1. George had destroyed everyone else. “The weigh-in day was again at the big soccer stadium where the fight was held. I said to George, ‘Let’s take a walk around the track.’ They had a running track, and George walked around that quarter of a mile track and waved at the crowd. He actually got a lot of cheers. It made him feel better. “Let me tell you what his disadvantage was, aside from the styles, which I’ve mentioned. George did not take stitches in that bad cut he suffered. He hated needles. So he made them do it with butterfly bandages. And because of that, in that six-week period, his sparring partners were not allowed to hit him above the chest. That was to his detriment.” So, to the fight, and Caplan’s feelings as the contest played out: “Now we’re in the fight and George whales on Ali in the first round. Ali is lying back on those very loose ropes, doing the rope-a-dope. George whales on him
Frazier twice. He knocked out Kenny Norton. Joe Frazier and Kenny Norton gave Ali all the heck he wanted and had beaten Ali. And yet Ali beat George in Zaire. They were all doing numbers on each other. Why? Because of the styles. Styles mean everything in boxing.” When Foreman went into exile and then returned 10 years later, it was Caplan who was there again for his guy: “I actually helped him get his license in California. And California is not an easy state to get a license in. I helped him. I was not worried about him. Ten years of not fighting was like taking a vintage automobile and putting it in the garage and you don’t drive it for 10 years. When you drive it out of there, it’s still a new car, a good car.” So many memories, so many good times. “I was fortunate to meet George when he was a green, green amateur,” said Caplan. “What a life he had. What a man. There will never be another like George. He really was special.” Gareth A Davies is the boxing correspondent for The London Daily Telegraph and TalkSPORT.
A prime Foreman weighs in for the Muhammad Ali fight in Zaire.
very unique relationship. I was happy to see it.” Now back to The Rumble in the Jungle. Caplan recalled the journey to Zaire with Foreman and entourage: “I’ve worked hundreds of fights in all these years since 1963, and it’s right at the top of the list as the greatest adventure. Even though my guy lost, it was still the best. He lost, I lost, but it was the greatest adventure of my career. I flew in with George. It was quite a long trip from California. We went to Montreal, then to Paris, stayed overnight in Paris, and then took a red-eye flight, Air Zaire, which was quite an experience. We occupied the whole first class of the jumbo jet, and it was a Zaire crew and they were very accommodating. They left the door open to the cockpit for the entire flight, which, if I remember correctly, from Paris to Kinshasa, was roughly eight hours. They invited us to come up into the pilot’s cabin whenever we wanted.
sparring partner. He was the California heavyweight champion. A pretty good fighter, too. “The fight was delayed for six weeks. George wanted to leave the country. He didn’t like it there. Mobutu (the dictator president of Zaire) wouldn’t allow him to leave, though. George just wanted to get out of there. Mobutu feared he would never come back, and he probably wouldn’t have. “Ali was the most famous person on Earth at that time. He could literally go into any country in the world, walk out onto the street and draw an immediate crowd. He was bigger than the president of the United States, the prime minister of England and the pope. None of them could do that without their entourage. Ali could walk anywhere and he’d have an immediate crowd. He did it in Zaire and had people following him by the hundreds. Everywhere they followed him, they were chanting, ‘Ali bumaye! Ali
“We landed at sunset, and they gave us a little tour of the city before we landed. I’m sure we were less than a thousand feet up, and this jumbo jet circled the city about four times so we could have a look at it all.” There were 20 of them on the flight. “Foreman had five sparring partners, he had his doctor, his trainers, Dick Sadler, Sandy Saddler, Archie Moore and others in the entourage. There were 6,000 people on the tarmac at sunrise waiting for us to arrive. Ali got an even bigger greeting, of course. He got in one day before we did. We were supposed to be there for 10 days, but George got cut five days before the fight when a sparring partner stuck his elbow up in his eyes. We were there for two months in total. Bill McMurray was the
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