Muhammad Ali would still tease George Foreman about Rumble in the Jungle 40 years on after they became best friends
MUHAMMAD ALI would still tease George Foreman about their Rumble in the Jungle 40 years on - after the pair became inseparable.
Ali famously defeated Foreman in Zaire - now the Democratic Republic of the Congo - in 1974 with over ONE BILLION viewers watching worldwide.
5
And he did so using his famous rope-a-dope tactic - allowing Foreman to punch himself out before winning in round eight.
The build-up was bitter and the rivalry carried on post-fight to lead to what was an expected rematch.
But after Foreman claimed to have died in his dressing room after losing to Jimmy Young in 1976 - he found God and retired.
It also paved the way for Foreman to form a brotherhood with Ali - up until the boxing great's death in 2016.
Ali's grandson, MMA star Biaggio, told SunSport: "My grandpa and George, they were very, very close. They spoke all the time.
"The only memory I have with George myself was from my grandfather's 70th birthday party.
"We met George there, I was 12 years old and even at 12 years old, I knew who George Foreman was.
"I had seen the fight with him and Poppy and I was like, 'Oh, George Foreman, nice to meet you.'
"He was such a nice guy, like super humble, down to earth and of just a very successful businessman at that point too.
"So, really, that's like the only memory I have from George, but I do know that him and my grandfather, they were really close."
Ali retired in 1981 after 61 fights and three heavyweight title reigns - but he was sadly diagnosed with Parkinson's disease three years later.
Although that did not stop the quick-witted sports great from throwing verbal jabs to his rival-turned-friend Foreman.
Biaggio, 26, revealed: "Poppy was a jokester, man. Like he would always joke about certain things.
"It's crazy when I would visit him in Arizona and he'd be sitting on his like reclining chair, I would shake his hand and in my head, I'd be thinking, 'This hand knocked out George Foreman in Africa.'
"Certain things like that I would reminisce in my head and then at the same time I'm like, 'But you're just my grandpa.' It was a very strange feeling my whole life really.
"But yeah, they definitely had some banter, you know, Poppy was a jokester, he's always joking."
Foreman made a comeback in 1987 after ten years out and became the oldest heavyweight champion of all time aged 46.
I would visit him in Arizona and he'd be sitting on his like reclining chair, I would shake his hand and in my head, I'd be thinking, 'This hand knocked out George Foreman in Africa.'
Biaggio Ali Walsh
But the multimillionaire businessman - who made over £150million through his cooking grills - died in March at 76.
Ali meanwhile passed nearly ten years prior but Biaggio - an unbeaten MMA fighter and brother Nico a professional boxer - continue on the legacy.
Middleweight Nico has 12 wins, two losses and one no-contest in his 15 boxing bouts while Biaggio - a former American football prospect - is 2-0 in the cage.
Biaggio - signed to the Professional Fighters League - returns on June 27 in Chicago - but wants to compete all over the world - like his grandfather before him.
He said: "I wanna just fight. So, anywhere it is, that'd be great.
"And I think it's cool too, you get to travel and get to see a lot of new places and stuff. I'd never been to Saudi Arabia before until I fought there.
"That's what's so cool about this job, you get to travel and see new places and destinations, places you never been to.
"All are possibilities, especially with the PFL, man, I love the PFL."
5
5
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
54.60 Africa review – a freewheeling, weeklong tour around the continent
There is abundant charm, humour and a pointed sense of play fuelling Femi Elufowoju Jr's musical drama re-centring the narratives around Africa. Its charisma is reminiscent of his previous rollicking production at this venue, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, which featured some of the same actors. This is not as successful, despite its infectiousness. Ultz's set design is loose, initially bearing a coffin at its centre. The premise is that 11 travellers must embark on a quest across all 54 nations in Africa within a week, spurred on by ancestral mother Mama Africa (Suzette Llewellyn). It is not altogether clear what will happen if they fail despite the symbolic coffin; the play does not dwell on raising the stakes. The job of the characters is to 'demystify and justify' the continent. Based on writer-director Elufowoju's own travels, the collective odyssey encompasses personal, political, social and even environmental history along with myth and ideas around belonging. Spoken scenes are accompanied by interludes of exuberant song and dance. The performers are always entertaining: Munashe Chirisa oozes comic talent as a shopkeeper in Uganda and a traffic warden in Seychelles; Liana Cottrill is an astounding dancer; The Ganda Boys (Denis Mugagga and Daniel Sewagudde) weave music around scenes; while Elufowoju, following an illness in the cast, does a fine job of reading a part. We briefly hear about the colonial history of Cameroon and at one passport control, an officer challenges a traveller's dual African/British identity. We sweep reverentially into Robben Island, briefly stopping inside Nelson Mandela's former cell, and push through to Tunisia and a bristling encounter in Libya. Sometimes it is hard to work out what is happening. Scenes are often brief – giving little time to connect with characters – and heavy-handed in their messages. The drama feels baggy and more like sketches or riffs that contain little tension, story or characterisation. Maybe it is a deliberate endeavour to disrupt or diverge from a – western? – dramatic narrative so it is not led by these traditional elements. What takes their place is joyful but broad-brush, maybe too ambitious in what it is trying to achieve. Where it shares the same inventive staging and bubbling joy as The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, there is little of its magnificent storytelling, despite the 11 adventuring storytellers. At the Arcola theatre, London, until 12 July
BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
The 12 best books of 2025 so far
From multigenerational family sagas to speculative dystopias – the very best fiction of the year so far. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie More than 10 years have passed since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's acclaimed Americanah, so the arrival of her new novel is a big literary moment. Dream Count is built around interconnecting storylines and the friendship of three Nigerian women whose lives have not worked out as they had envisioned. Recounting the characters' hopes and struggles, the novel interweaves childhood and early-adult memories with the women's current lives. It is "worth the wait," says The Observer, and is like "four novels for the price of one, each of them powered by the simple but evergreen thrill of time spent in the company of flesh and blood characters lavishly imagined in the round." The book explores "big themes" according to the New Statesman – masculinity, race, colonialism, power. "A complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. Extraordinary. " (LB) We Do Not Part by Han Kang We Do Not Part was released in English translation in February, although it was originally published in Han Kang's native South Korea in 2021, and therefore helped contribute to the body of work that won her the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Drawing comparisons with her Booker Prize-winning bestseller, The Vegetarian, and similarly blurring the lines between dreams and reality, We Do Not Part explores the relationship between two women, Kyungha and Inseon, while uncovering a violent and forgotten chapter in Korean history. The LA Times calls We Do Not Part: "exquisite and profoundly disquieting". It writes of Han Kang: "her singular ability to find connections between body and soul and to experiment with form and style, are what makes her one of the world's most important writers." (RL) Stag Dance by Torrey Peters The follow-up to Torrey Peters' critically acclaimed debut Detransition, Baby is a collection of tales, each with an intriguing premise, ranging in genre from romantic to dystopian to historical. In The Masker, a young party-goer on a hedonistic Las Vegas weekend must choose between two guides, a mystery man or a veteran trans woman; in The Chaser an illicit boarding-school romance surfaces; in the titular Stag Dance a group of lumberjacks in the 19th Century, working deep in the forest, plan a winter dance – with some of the men volunteering to attend as women. The Chicago Review of Books compares the collection favourably to Peters' debut, describing the stories as "seductive, dazzling, and history-making once again". The Guardian is similarly effusive: "The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement." The writing is "mischievous rather than sanctimonious", it adds, and "it is clear she is having a great deal of fun". (LB) Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah "A quietly powerful demonstration of storytelling mastery" writes The Observer of Theft, the 11th novel from the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Set against the backdrop of postcolonial East Africa, situated between Zanzibar and Dar-Es Salaam, Tanzania, Theft is a coming-of-age tale exploring the inner lives of three teenagers – Karim, Badar and Fauzia – who bond despite growing up in very different circumstances. "A tightly focussed, beautifully controlled examination of friendship and betrayal," writes The Economist, while The Wall Street Journal praises Gurnah's "restraint", adding: "he builds his fictional worlds cumulatively, giving equal regard to the 'many things' that make up experience. There are no single truths in this steady, mature novel, which may be why it feels so true as a whole." (RL) Universality by Natasha Brown Natasha Brown's celebrated 2021 debut, Assembly, was a short, precise novel and a dissection of class and race that was shortlisted for several awards. In her follow-up she examines how identity politics is cynically deployed, satirising on the way cancel culture and the worlds of publishing and journalism. The story begins with a dubious article attempting to unravel a mystery involving an illegal rave, a missing gold bar and a banker. Soon the novel moves on to the fallout from the exposé, and the knock-on effect of the people affected by the crime. "It's all enormous, nasty fun," says the Literary Review. "Infidelity, exploitation and hatred abound… Brown's main purpose is to satirise and skewer the socio-economic forces that have shaped life in the UK since the late 2010s." Universality is "very funny", says the New Statesman. "Brown is an astute political observer, easily dismembering cancel culture and our media circus." (LB) The Names by Florence Knapp Knapp's debut novel begins in 1987, as Cora Atkin is pondering three different names for her newborn baby boy: Gordon, after her abusive doctor husband; Bear, the choice of her older daughter, Maia; or her preference, Julian. With the premise that each potential name offers a unique destiny, the narrative splits therein, revisiting its characters at seven-year intervals in a manner that recalls Sliding Doors. And despite its dark subject matter, critics have praised The Names for its upbeat, uplifting effect. The Standard writes: "Knapp's deftly woven story is at once a big, bold experiment, a playful exercise in nominative determinism, a meditation on fate and a coming-of-age story", while The Washington Post calls the novel: "a profound, deeply compassionate examination of domestic abuse," which is "startlingly joyful and paced like a thriller". (RL) The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong Ocean Vuong's second novel The Emperor of Gladness: "may well be the first millennial Great American Novel", according to Art Review. It is: "perfectly tuned", and "as wide in scope as it is quiet and tender". It tells the story of Hai, a young gay man who has run away from home, and his coming of age in the rural northeast in Obama-era US. It also explores his friendship with Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow with dementia. Hai finds work in a fast-dining chain, and bonds with his mixed bag of new colleagues, who discover connection in their past hardships. The Emperor of Gladness is: "a fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain," says The Observer. (LB) Eden's Shore by Oisín Fagan "A tremendous romp of a tale", this brutal seafaring epic's protagonist is Angel Kelly, a late-18th-Century slaver headed to Brazil with the goal to found a utopian community; chaos ensues and he washes up on the shores of an unnamed Spanish colony. With grisly attention to detail, Fagan spares little in describing the violence of the slave trade with the blackest of humour and an experimental approach to form. "Eden's Shore is a rich and beautifully told tale of toxic adventurism" writes the TLS, while the Financial Times writes: "Alexander's capacious performance is made to encompass the visceral, physical experiences of the journey – disease, sex, seasickness, violence – and its more cerebral aspects, in which the politics, philosophy and idealistic utopianism of the day find expression." (RL) Dream State by Eric Puchner A multi-generational family saga, Dream State explores themes of love, betrayal, and the effects across generations of the choices we make. Beginning in 2004, the story is set in a rapidly warming, fictionalised version of Montana's Flathead Valley, with the lake at the valley's centre the nucleus of the story. Dream State traverses five decades, and: "gradually coalesces into a family history that feels monumental", says Lit Hub. The effect is: "hypnotically telescopic, a vision of people we come to know across decades. Puchner's manipulation of time is among his novel's most magical elements." His narration: "can slip from funny to harrowing as fast as young man can ski to his death". Oprah Winfrey selected Dream State as a book club pick, describing Puchner as a "master storyteller" and the book as: "an exquisite examination of the most important relationships we have in our lives". (LB) The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction, Lalami's fifth novel is a nightmarish speculative tale about the terrifying reaches of technology and surveillance. As Sara returns to LAX airport from a conference, she is stopped by the Risk Assessment Administration, who determine – using data from her dreams – that she is about to harm her husband. She's transferred to a retention centre to be monitored for 21 days, where she finds – along with other dreamers – that her journey back to her family becomes more and more out of reach. "A scarily credible vision," The Spectator writes of The Dream Hotel, continuing that it: "taps deftly into the terrors of our times", while The Economist calls it: "a riveting tale of the risks of surrendering privacy for convenience". (RL) Confessions by Catherine Airey The debut from new voice Catherine Airey has been widely praised. Confessions traces the trajectories of three generations of women as they experience the weight of the past in all its complexity. In 2001, newly orphaned by 9/11, New Yorker Cora Brady, on the cusp of adulthood, is offered a new life in Ireland – where her parents grew up – by an estranged aunt. "The narrative zips along with the crackling intelligence of Donna Tartt, full of twists and zips, and genuine surprises," says the Irish Independent. "Confessions is an astonishing and remarkable novel and truly deserving of all the accolades coming its way." The Guardian says: "The book is a saga: its serious pleasures are its expansiveness and range, and Airey's rare, particular instinct for scenes or worlds that are interesting to be with, from 1970s New York art kids to early female gamers." Confessions, it concludes, is "a cool, bold image of female pain and liberation". (LB) Flesh by David Szalay Szalay's most celebrated work, All That Man Is, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, explored 21st-Century manhood through the lives of nine different men. One man's journey from teen to adulthood is the subject of Flesh. We first meet 15-year-old István in Hungary where he lives with his mother, then as he begins a relationship with a much older woman that has tragic consequences, joins the army and then rises to the top of London society. With Flesh, Szalay employs an even more pared-down version of his spare, minimalist prose to explore the meaning of a life. "Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid…" writes the Guardian, "it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language." The Observer praises Flesh's: "searing insight into the way we live now" calling it: "a masterpiece". (RL) -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
The secret recovery tool Julio Cesar Chavez Jr is using to prepare for Jake Paul clash
On 28 June, Jake Paul and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr will meet in the ring for the former's 13th professional boxing bout, and the latter's 62nd. This is one of many stark differences between the pair. As a fitness writer, my main interest is what they have been doing to prepare physically for the fight, and there have been contrasting approaches here, too. Over the last few months, Paul has been perennially online, as is customary. Across various videos he can be seen training on the track, in the ring and in the gym as he primes himself for the cruiserweight clash. Chavez Jr, on the other hand, has been less forthcoming with details about his preparations. There is one clip from last month showing him hitting a circuit of hurdles, sled pushes, Versaclimber intervals, slam ball chest throws and battle ropes, dressed in head-to-toe sweats. But beyond this, training insights have been few and far between. A recent video with DAZN captures him working through some footwork techniques, with coach Jorge Capetillo revealing his 'conditioning is very well [sic] – he's been doing between 10 and 12 rounds [ in training ] so I feel comfortable he will put in a great performance'. After this, Chavez Jr heads home to put his feet up on the sofa while watching TV with his team. As he does this, he is zipped into a pair of inflating boots that rise up to his hips. So what are these odd-looking contraptions, and how could they help Chavez Jr's training efforts? Chavez Jr's recovery secret The boots are called Hyperice Normatec compression boots, with the latest release - the Normatec Premier – costing a cool £999. They are a popular recovery tool among elite athletes, with users across the NBA, NFL, top-level tennis, PGA Tour and more. But how do they work? They contain five chambers which inflate from the bottom up, applying 'dynamic air compression' to your legs like a pump-operated masseuse. You can select from seven compression levels, and choose to apply extra pressure to any of the five compartments to target areas in need of particular attention. 'Our patented Pulse technology delivers precise treatment to five overlapping zones by using biomimicry to replicate the natural muscle pumps and one-way valves of the legs,' a Hyperice spokesman explains. The idea is that the pulsing compressions improve circulation through the limbs, removing waste products and acting as a catalyst to recovery. The intended result is a body that feels fresher post-exercise, with freedom of movement and minimal delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). The scientific term for these compression boots, and others like them, is 'pneumatic compression devices'. Over the last 25 years, there have been several studies exploring the effects of 'intermittent pneumatic compression' (IPC) administered in this way. A 2024 review of existing research, published in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, concluded: 'The wide and diversified use of IPC as a recovery method demonstrates the existence of benefits made available by it, although empirical due to the few studies carried out for this objective.' It went on: 'There is a positive response from the IPC when compared to passive recovery, which seems to make it an equipment of interest and efficiency for the recovery of athletes and exercise practitioners after competitions or even training stages.' Or, in layman's terms, athletes subjectively report feeling good after using the boots. For recreational fighters, £999 might be a tall price to pay for this. But for the sporting elite like Chavez Jr, every little helps, and if it means he can train with greater quality and consistency it may be worth it. The review goes on to say that more research is needed to fully understand the mechanisms behind IPC and uncover the optimal protocol for using it with various types of training. 'There is a need to find the best form of recovery on an individual basis and according to the sport practice,' the study adds.
