The entire world wanted to watch the fight. The fight itself, between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, was a global event, orchestrated by Zairean President Mobutu as a showcase for African power and liberation from the colonial yoke. Hunter’s frenetic, free-wheeling journalism for Rolling Stone magazine, combined with his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and his extraordinary account of the following year’s US election, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, meant that, by the time of the Rumble in The Jungle, fought in Zaire in 1974, Thompson was one of the most in-demand, highly-paid and celebrated journalists America had ever produced. It could so easily have been so very different. Thompson blew everything just as Muhammad Ali confirmed himself as one of the finest heavyweight boxers the world would ever see. But in the dead of night, in a Kinshasa swimming pool, Hunter S. A moment when the most pugilistic of writers mixes it with the greatest athlete of the century. This was supposed to be the highpoint of his career. A Herculean drug taker and an individual already spoken of in his home country as being one of the most incendiary, vital authors and reporters of his generation. Cigarette smoke emanates from his mouth, swirling up into a soot-black sky unilluminated except for an intense floodlit glow a few miles beyond the fence of the hotel complex. Thompson is floating motionlessly towards the edge of a swimming pool.
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