Promoter Don King had lured both fighters to Zaire with the promise of a $5 million purse, and 60,000 people packed the 20th of May Stadium. Foreman, younger and feared for his punching power, was the heavy favourite. Ali spent round after round leaning on the ropes and letting Foreman pound his arms and body, a tactic he later called the rope-a-dope. By the eighth, Foreman was exhausted, and a sudden Ali combination sent him to the canvas.
Ali had been stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing induction into the U.S. Army, and at 32 few expected him to beat Foreman, who had flattened Joe Frazier and Ken Norton inside two rounds each. The fight itself had been delayed five weeks after Foreman was cut above the eye in training, and Ali used the extra weeks to win over the crowds of Kinshasa.
In the ring Ali abandoned the dancing style that had made his name. From the second round he lay back on the ropes, covered up and absorbed Foreman's punches while taunting him. Foreman later remembered hitting Ali hard to the jaw in the seventh, only for Ali to hold him and whisper, "That all you got, George?"
Near the end of the eighth round Ali came off the ropes with a burst of right hands and a left hook, and Foreman stumbled to the canvas and was counted out. Some estimates put the worldwide television audience as high as one billion, and the night became the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings.
Key people: Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Don King