On Monday night I went on strike, protesting harsh working conditions and demanding an increase in compensation. Truth is, my brain was so sluggish I could barely move the mouse, let alone come up with a coherent thought, and rather than write the night off as wasted, I turned it into a pointless protest, thereby easing my guilty conscience at work still pending. Its pointless because I am both employer and employee, going on strike involves arguing with myself for a minute, and then losing said argument. Suffice to say my boss has never given me a pay raise, cold hearted bitch, but that’s a story for another day. I turned off the laptop, made myself a cup of tea and plonked myself in front of the TV, ready to lose myself in 90 minutes of mindless fluff.
Now the movie of choice was a suitably fluffy rom-com; those ones where boy meets girl, girl likes boy, boy messes up and loses girl, then realises the mistake he’s made and runs after her with a tearful declaration of undying love, girl kisses boy, and then they walk off into the sunset, aaaawwww… Just what a jaded soul like mine needed on a Monday evening after a shitty day at work, and it was a good plan, until I looked inside the DVD case and found the wrong movie, not the fluffy nonsense I was hoping for, but a movie cum documentary. About boxing. Cue disappointment. Problem is, it had taken me about five minutes to decide on this one (wrong) movie, I wasn’t about to waste another five looking for another one, the quest for fluff was promptly abandoned. With a reluctant shrug I stuck in the movie and sat back, ready to doze off in under half an hour. I have never been so wrong…
Before we go any further, I must warn you that this one is for the hustlers amongst us, and its mostly about one fight, a real fight. If you're hoping for my usual man, or lack thereof, drama, come back Sunday. You’ve been warned.
The movie is ‘When We Were Kings’, the documentary about the legendary ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the heavyweight fight between George Foreman, then champion, and Mohammed Ali, at the time reportedly on the brink of retirement. The film follows the fighters and their trainers, promoter Don King, assorted musicians, journalists and dubious characters, in the weeks leading up to the fight, chronicling the time in then Zaire, now DRC. Ignoring the moral questions raised in the mind of any self respecting African, especially when watching footage of Mobutu, the documentary is a fascinating glimpse into a slice of history whose significance may have perhaps been overshadowed by the glamour of heavyweight boxing. I’ll spare you the synopsis, guessing that some of you older types have watched it, and those that haven’t deliberately chose not to, back in the day (like I did), and thus couldn’t care less. It’s more than a decade old and if anything I say is considered a spoiler, then…tough! That’s my unapologetic disclaimer, by the way.
Watching this film, the first thing that struck me was how different both Foreman and Ali looked back in their prime. The thing about boxers, especially as they get older, is that their faces don’t age too well, their eyes in particular are inevitably sleepy looking, the result, I assume, of taking too many blows to the head, making them look, well, a bit slow. Because of the publicity surrounding Ali throughout his career, most of us have seen images of him in his youth, and heard him speak, albeit in snippets (‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee…’), and we’ve also seen him as he is now, his motor functions reduced by Parkinson’s; but watching him in this film is an eye opener. Yes, he was a brash black man, ‘in need of a good whooping’ (his words), but he was also surprisingly articulate, and intelligent. And here’s the kicker, from what little you see, so was Foreman. The happy, always clowning around middle-aged man we saw in the 90’s, making a comeback, in crap sitcoms and selling kitchen equipment, is nothing like the young man you see in this film, that bugger was serious, and deep, and a little scary.
And Foreman was also, apparently, a very good boxer. Ali was, by all accounts, expected to lose that fight, and if it wasn’t for his unorthodox strategy he would have. What he did, and you have to forgive me for any inaccuracies because I’m not much of a fight fan, was let a bigger, stronger fighter hit him until he couldn’t hit any more. It sounds simple enough in theory, except for the hitting continuously bit. Ali was fast on his feet and liked to dance around, making him hard to hit, but Foreman knew this and knew to ‘cut off the ring’, basically keeping Ali confined. Ali couldn’t knock Foreman out; he tried in the first round and only succeeded in pissing the man off. The solution? He took to the ropes. Now this is one thing I initially couldn’t understand about boxing, I figure when a man is against the ropes he’ll probably get beaten half to hell, thus if I was a boxer, I’d stay well away from the ropes. After watching a couple of fights, I then realised that said man against the ropes wasn’t there by choice, clearly. So you can understand my confusion watching Ali pushed to the ropes and seemingly unconcerned. Kumbe the bugger had a plan. In the eighth round, with Foreman exhausted from the exertion of seemingly endless heavy punches, Ali throws a couple of quick counter punches and the next thing I know Foreman is down. I had to watch it a couple of times to understand what happened, but there it was in glorious Technicolor, Foreman was down for the count. Like I said, confused.
The technique is called rope-a-dope, allegedly coined by Ali after this fight. Some analysts credit him with developing this style himself, but as is likely with all things innovation, he probably perfected someone else’s idea, and that’s just fine, anyone with the balls to pull this stunt deserves all the accolades he gets, no? See the thing is, standing there taking body shots is not an easy thing (I assume, it’s not like I’m a boxer), especially from a strong bugger with heavy punches. You’ve read the stories of boxers pissing blood after fights because of repeated blows to the kidneys, I’m guessing said repeated blows can be quite painful, no? The assumption is that when against the ropes, you hold your hands up to protect your head, avoiding the knockout blow, but exposing your flanks, but if you take enough hits on the same spot, instinctively you will drop your guard to protect yourself, or simply in exhaustion, and that’s when you get socked in the head. Usually when a fighter retreats to the ropes, it’s a defensive manoeuvre of last resort and the knockout punch isn’t far behind. People watching the fight assumed the same of Ali , but they were forgetting that Ali always trained to take sustained blows, toughening his core. What he lacked in technique, being a bit of a rough diamond, he made up for in endurance. His plan was to outlast a stronger fighter, one he couldn’t outrun, and outlast he did.
Now while most accounts of the Ali/Foreman fight concentrate on his rope-a-dope, not too many talk about the one other advantage Ali had, the ring itself. If you’ve watched the fight, you saw that when he was leaning back on the ropes, he was leaning quite far back, further than you typically see. Turns out the ropes in that particular ring were looser than normal, allowing him to pivot further away from Foreman, letting the ropes taking some of the impact, and making it harder for Foreman to hit him with the force he was feared for. Whether the ropes were part of a plan, or if Ali made a situation work to his favour, we’ll probably never know. Personally, I highly doubt that Ali sat back and worked out the seemingly intricate physics of this plan beforehand, my guess is that he was working on instinct, that innate understanding which allowed him to figure out the intricacies without actually having to study them. What I do know is, when faced with a stronger opponent, possibly the better fighter at the time, rather than fight with his fists, Ali fought with his head.
Which brings me to the (random?) point of this strange tale, although I’m not sure how many of you made it this far (10 points and a gold star if you did, and thank you for indulging me). I’m learning to rely less on brute force and more on intellect, more so in business where every relationship with a client is disturbingly similar to 15 rounds in the ring with a huge bugger like Foreman. The reason Ali ’s rope-a-dope style struck a chord? Its simple, the idea of winning a fight by letting a stronger idiot hit me until he can’t hit any more, and then knocking him on his ass with minimal effort, is rather appealing.
My problem with business is that everyone is always looking out for themselves, and by association always looking to get one over on me. Often times I’ll walk into a contract negotiation with nothing but my Type A obsession with perfection and a random price tag for my (allegedly) very valuable services in my head, thinking my knowledge and experience count for more, at the table, than my lack of a BMW in the parking lot. The prospective client, on the other hand, has a vague idea of what he expects from me and, unfortunately, a misguided notion that it won’t cost him much to get it, because I don’t have the BMW in the parking lot. The ensuing negotiation is nothing more than a sparring session, with the big bad client looking to pummel me into monetary submission. Now while brute force and arrogance could possibly get me the deal I want, it rarely, if ever, works out that way. What actually happens is I dance around, ducking heavy blows, landing one or two light ones of my own, until finally, frustrated with trying to pin me down, the client finally gives up and either knocks me out cold with a ‘take it or leave it’ offer (never good), or calls off the fight completely (even worse).
And that’s where rope-a-dope comes in. By employing this strategy, said big bad client gets the satisfaction of pounding at me, in his mind with excellent results, he must be wearing me down with his powerful body hits, but at the end of the day, having successfully avoided the fatal blows, in part by using the ring to my advantage, I get what I really want, the knockout punch. Simply put, he gets to make what he considers the best deal possible, after seemingly serious negotiation, and I get my price, my real price, not the higher one he thought we were fighting over. The moral of the story? Just because I look like the lesser fighter in the ring, that doesn’t mean I’m going to lose, I’ll probably get my ass kicked, but I won’t lose. All I need is a good plan, a clear head, patience and one good right hook. If I could learn to talk shit like Ali, well, that would be a bonus.
