Jack Anderson: The long-term disease of the knockout blow

Even though it was written 50 years ago, lines from Norman Mailer's The Fight still resonate.

RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE: Former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (R) and his compatriot and titleholder George Foreman (C). Ali won and got back his title. Pic: -/AFP via Getty Images

It’s exactly 50 years since reviews first began to appear in US newspapers about a book that remains one of the best about sport – The Fight by Norman Mailer. Mailer’s life and writing was prone to chauvinistic excess but even his enormous ego was bewitched by the magic of Muhammad Ali.

The Fight was, of course, an account of the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle' between Ali and George Foreman, hosted by Mobutu, the then dictator of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), for the heavyweight championship, in an exercise that we would now call sportswashing. Some things in boxing never change: Zaire then; Saudi today. Professional boxing rarely worries about the colour of your money, just that you got a lot of it.