George Foreman throws a punch at Muhammad Ali, who is employing his rope-a-dope strategy during the October 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” title fight. Two boxers, one throwing a punch against the other, who is leaning against the ropes, avoiding the hit.
30 September 2021
Rope-a-dope is a boxing strategy wherein the fighter leans against the ropes, covers up with his gloves and arms, and lets the other fighter try to land effective punches. The ropes act as a kind of shock absorber, and the arms and gloves take most of the beating, leaving the fighter relatively unscathed while the opponent tires themself out with the ineffective blows. The strategy is most closely associated with the 30 October 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. Ali won by knockout in an upset after Foreman was tired from delivering ineffectual punches against Ali.
The term, however, isn’t recorded until several months after that fight. From a widely syndicated story that appeared in US newspapers on 11 May 1975:
Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali has come up with a name for the style of fighting in which he leans against the ropes and lets an opponent flail away as he did against George Foreman and Chuck Wepner.
“It’s my ‘Rope a Dope Defense,” said Ali while training Saturday for his nationally televised title fight with Ron Lyle next Friday night in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Some claim, however, that Ali may not have come up with the term all on his own. In his 2008 memoir, My View from the Corner, famed trainer and cornerman Angelo Dundee wrote:
George Kalinsky, the official Garden photographer, clued me in as to just how seriously years later. According to George, about a month or two before the fight Ali, who was then in New York, called John F.X. Condon, publicist for the Garden, and asked if he could come over to talk. The Garden being “dark” that day, John invited Ali to come over and invited George to sit in. Suspecting that something was bothering Ali, Condon asked him what was the matter, and Ali admitted he was concerned about Foreman, saying he was “too big” and “too strong.” Remembering a photo he had taken of Ali sparring at the 5th Street Gym where he was leaning back over the ropes, far away from his sparring partner, George said, “Why don't you try something like that? Sort of a dope on the ropes, letting Foreman swing away but, like in the picture, hit nothing but air.” By the end of the meeting, George remembered, Condon had somehow changed “dope on the ropes” to “rope-a-dope."
Whether you believe the story in its entirety or not, it might give you a clue to what Ali's mind-set was like before a fight.
Kalinsky himself told essentially the same story, differing in only a few minor details, to the Wall Street Journal in 2013. This could be a case of Kalinsky misremembering or even deliberately burnishing his own legacy—he is the one, after all, who told the story to both Dundee and the Wall Street Journal. And Dundee expressed doubt about its veracity, only repeating the story to illustrate how seriously Ali was taking the upcoming fight with Foreman. And Ali was almost as good a wordsmith as he was a boxer; he was certainly capable of inventing a clever term all on his own. Finally, and most damning to Kalinsky’s story, it seems unlikely that Ali would call on a publicist and a photographer for advice on boxing strategy.
But to be fair to Kalinsky, Ali was very savvy, both as a boxer and as a self-promoter, and he was used to relying on an entourage of people around him for advice. It’s plausible that he might call upon a publicist and a photographer to help him come up with a catchy term for his new strategy—not in coming up with strategy itself, just in naming it.
Still, just as we give credit to the named author of a book and not its ghostwriter, or to a politician and not their speechwriter, we can safely give credit to Ali for rope-a-dope regardless of who thought of it. After all, he was the first to publicly utter the term.
Sources:
“Ali’s Style: Rope A Dope.” Asheville Citizen-Times (North Carolina) (Associated Press), 11 May 1975 2B. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Dundee, Angelo, with Bert Randolph Sugar. My View From the Corner: A Life in Boxing. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008 172. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Gardner, Ralph. “Madison Square Garden’s Eye.” Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2013. ProQuest: Wall Street Journal.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, modified September 2019, s.v. rope-a-dope, n.
Photo credit: El Gráfico, 1974. Fair use of a low-resolution photograph to illustrate the topic under discussion.
Sources:
Yale Book of Quotations.