The Shot Not Heard Round the World
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“We’re landing in Zaire at about two in the morning,” remembers Ali’s business manager, Gene Kilroy, about the challenger prefight, “and right before we get off the plane, Ali looked at me and he said, ‘Gene, who don’t they like over here?’ I said, ‘I guess white people.’ Well, Ali laughed and said, ‘How can I say that George Foreman is white? With you standing next to me? Somebody might think you’re George Foreman and shoot you with a poison dart. Who else don’t they like?’ I said, ‘Belgium.’ He said, ‘That’s good.’
“So we walked out and it was pitch-black. You couldn’t see anybody out there, but you could hear them. ‘Ali! Ali! Ali!’ So Ali put his hands up for everybody to be quiet. Then he said, ‘George Foreman’s a Belgian!’ And the crowd went wild. They started yelling, ‘Ali boma yé! Ali boma yé!’ I turned to our translator and asked, ‘What are they saying?’ and he says, ‘That means “Ali, kill him!”’”
For the sullen Foreman, any advantage that came with being the champion was lost. By the time he cut his right eye while sparring, postponing the fight a month, he was thoroughly bugged by the overwhelming response to Ali. “George could not understand it,” says Leon Gast, whose film about the fight, When We Were Kings, won the 1996 Oscar for best documentary. “But where Ali was out and all over, meeting people, signing autographs, always accessible, Foreman was in his compound the whole time.” So Foreman decided to change his tactic by countering Ali in the war for Africa’s affection and positioning someone opposite the butterfly-and-bee routine of Ali and his wild-eyed sidekick, Drew “Bundini” Brown. He turned to the loudest mouth in his camp, Elmo, taking him out of the ring and giving him a bullhorn and a short script to get everybody’s attention—“Oyé! Oyé! The champion George Foreman! Foreman boma yé!”—to which Elmo added a bit of his own poetry: “The flea goes in three! Muhammad Ali!”
That’s the image of Elmo that the boxing world took home, of a tall, lanky fighter in brightly striped street clothes, constantly screaming, “Oh yeah! Oh yeah!” (Elmo seems to have misunderstood his instructions.) Wherever Foreman went, there went Elmo, in the hotel lobby, around the hotel pool, in the gym, at the weigh-in. “Oh yeah! Oh yeah!” In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story, even Ali remembers hearing “Henderson, The Champion’s chief clown,” screaming at ringside during the fight. In Norman Mailer’s Playboy story, the one that would get him sued, the Pulitzer prize—winning author described Elmo as looking “like some kind of lean wanderer in motley—the long stride of a medieval fool was in his step . . . Oyé . . . Foreman boma yé. . . And Foreman . . . seemed confirmed in his serenity by the power of the other’s voice, as if Elmo were the night guard making his rounds and all was well precisely because all was unwell.”
And of course, nothing was well with Foreman. Ali pulled off the greatest upset in sports history. The legend of that night is of Ali against the ropes, letting Foreman punch himself out; of Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, begging him to dance; and Foreman’s corner letting big George charge on. “I had spoken to George several times before the fight,” says Elmo now. “I said, ‘Keep Ali in the center of the ring.’ And during the fight, I jumped up in his corner and told him again. But a group of guys grabbed me and pulled me back. And they let him follow Ali to the ropes and fight that bullfight.” Foreman’s cousin Willie Carpenter, who helped coordinate the sparring partners in Zaire, says Elmo is right to claim a place in the legend. “I think Elmo jumped up in the corner and tried to give George some instruction,” he says. “I don’t think George cared for that too much. We asked Elmo about that afterwards, and he said he’d probably just seen something we hadn’t seen.”
WITH HIS BAGS in my office, there was no need to worry about Elmo staying in touch. He kept in such steady contact, in fact, that you could tell the weather by it. If it was cool out, as parts of August and September unseasonably were, Elmo would just call. I’d get to work and find a voice mail left by someone with a cell phone that Elmo had encountered on the street and persuaded to call my number. I’d hear a voice say, “It’s an answering machine,” and then Elmo’s voice in the distance, “Tell him ‘Oh yeah’ called.” Pause. And then a confused, “Um, ‘Oh yeah’ called,” and a click.
But on hot days Elmo would stop by. A couple times I returned from lunch and found him asleep in a chair in the lobby. I’d walk him to my office to let him check on his stuff, and on the way, he’d hold each door for anybody passing through. “Good afternoon, ladies,” he’d say. “Don’t mind me. All I did was whup Ali.” That was his way. One day I found him in the alley behind the Salvation Army with four men sitting on the curb in front of him while he paced back and forth, pointing at his newspaper clipping, explaining how he’d beat up on Ali.
Occasionally we’d eat at Mike’s Pub, an old burger place near my office, where I tried to get Elmo to talk about life now. He said he’d been living off monthly social security checks of $340. The past four years or so he’d been in Vallejo, California, living with a longtime girlfriend and their seventeen-year-old daughter, but he said he didn’t know their phone number. The mailing address he gave me was for a street that didn’t exist. For twelve years before that, he said, he had lived rent-free at an apartment complex, collecting for the landlord.
But Elmo wanted to talk about boxing. He steered the conversation to his protégé, a kid named Adrian Havas who fought for Elmo’s Oh Yeah Boxing Club, in Reno, in the late seventies. When I talked to Havas, he remembered listening to Texas R&B tapes in Elmo’s Bonneville on long drives to fights, with Coach Elmo decked out in bright plaid leisure suits and matching hats. Elmo booked the fights in places Havas might otherwise have avoided, like a Carson City prison. But there they were, the white sixteen-year-old son of a well-heeled car dealer, fighting a convict twice his age, while this aging club fighter in plaid raced around the ring trying to inflame the crowd. “I’d shout, ’The flea will go in three,’ ” said Elmo. “That was my ballyhoo, even in Reno.”
“Elmo had taken a lot of punches through the years,” said Havas, “and when I was sparring with him, sometimes I connected. But he never hit back. There were many times I wished I had seen him in the ring for real, because it’s such a brutal place, and he never seemed to have that killer instinct.”
Shockingly, Elmo did fight during that period. In 1979 Montana granted him a license to box despite the suspensions in California and Nevada, and he was knocked out in the fifth round by Pinklon Thomas, a 21-year-old undefeated fighter who would win the heavyweight championship five years later. Elmo was a day away from his forty-fourth birthday.
Elmo didn’t have many specifics about what had happened after that, not even in the recent years. He said he’d found the halfway house in Austin by chance: “I was walking down the street and there it was.” Even though he didn’t meet its recovering-addict or fresh-out-of-jail requirements, they let him stay. But when his behavior grew erratic—a friend of his told me that Elmo had been going to the bathroom in places other than the bathroom—he was asked to leave. All Elmo would say was, “A problem developed with a couple of the other inmates.” So now he was concentrating on the chore that had brought him to Texas. He said he’d come to get some money from an attorney. He’d decided that since the Mailer jury had awarded him $105,000 and his take had been far less, his lawyer must have kept the rest.
