Muhammad Ali’s clash with George Foreman on October 30, 1974, produced one of the great title-winning performances of all time, burnished the legend of the man known as “The Greatest,” added new phrases to the boxing vocabulary – from “Rumble in the Jungle” to “rope a dope,” effectively launched the career of Don King as a mega-promoter and even yielded a pretty catchy tune. It also provided money and publicity to an autocratic ruler, a habit that the boxing business has recently rediscovered and embraced.

That the fight ended up in what was then known as Zaire stemmed from a combination of Ali’s financial demands and King’s inability to raise the necessary capital from investors in the United States. Ali’s camp wanted $5 million to challenge Foreman – chump change now but at the time an unheard-of sum. It was not only twice as much as any boxer had been paid for a fight before but also more than the likes of Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano had earned over the course of their entire careers. 

The notion was largely dismissed by promoters, except for the insanely ambitious King, who just three years earlier had listened to Ali’s loss to Joe Frazier on the radio in his prison cell and who very much wanted not just a piece of the action but also to be at the center of it. He persuaded Foreman and Ali to sign contracts that promised they would fight for him if he could somehow produce $5 million for each of them. To general surprise, King succeeded, although he had to go to an unexpected source to procure the funds.

Joseph-Desire Mobutu seized power in what was then – and is once more – the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1965. After five years of absolute power, he permitted sham elections in 1970 in which he was the only candidate for president and embarked on a system of Africanization that included banning western dress and names, the renaming of the country to Zaire and his adoption of the name Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga – or “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.”

Mobutu consolidated power through a variety of means, beginning with public executions of his political rivals, expanding to bribery and coercion, and concluding with the establishment of a new constitution that effectively made him synonymous with the state.

His motivation was not just power for power’s sake; it was also the opportunity to loot the country for his personal financial gain. In 1970, it was estimated that he had stolen 60 percent of the national budget; by 1988, his offshore bank accounts were believed to contain $50 million. After securing the Ali-Foreman fight, he established a Panamanian shell company that ensured any profits from the spectacle would be personally enriching rather than benefiting his countrymen. And just in case any of them felt like protesting the injustice or committing any other nefarious acts that might detract from the event, he allegedly rounded up 1,000 criminals and held them beneath the stadium where the fight took place – before executing 100 of them afterward.

With the Rumble in the Jungle having proven such a success, at least in the short term, for Mobutu, Ali and King, two of the three repeated the trick the following year with the “Thrilla in Manila.”

Ferdinand Marcos had become president of the Philippines in 1965, the same year in which Mobutu had seized power in Congo; unlike Mobutu, he had done so through democratic means, winning a presidential election ahead of 11 other candidates. He was re-elected in a landslide four years later, but by this stage he had set off on an increasingly autocratic path. 

In 1972, Marcos declared that there was a need to “reform society” by placing it under the command of a “benevolent dictator” – which would, of course, be him. That benevolence did not extend to his opposition, many of whom he imprisoned or killed, including rival Benigno Aquino, whom he jailed following the imposition of martial law, allowed to leave for exile in the United States and then had assassinated upon his return to the country in 1981. 

And, like Mobutu, Marcos fleeced his country for millions and millions of dollars – as much as $10 billion, according to one subsequent estimate, which was a significant achievement given his official salary never exceeded $13,500 annually and roughly half of his subjects scraped by on the equivalent of two dollars a day.

And so, unsurprisingly, when Marcos caught wind of the prospect of a third fight between Ali and Joe Frazier, he stumped up the money to bring it to his fiefdom. And, boxing being what it is, he got what he wanted. As with Mobutu’s public relations coup the previous year, he was aided in his attempt at what we now call sportswashing by the memorable violence of the fight itself, which justifiably continues to generate awe and earn plaudits almost five decades later.

The flirtations with Mobutu and Marcos were one-off events; the sport’s ongoing seduction by Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is proving a more prolonged and passionate affair.

In 2019, promoter Eddie Hearn was repeatedly forced to defend taking the heavyweight title rematch between Anthony Joshua and Andy Ruiz to Saudi Arabia; multiple news reports about the fight also mentioned, for example, that “146 beheadings have taken place in Saudia Arabia this year alone – many in Riyadh's Al-Safaa Square, just 6 miles [10 kilometers] to the south of the luxury downtown hotels where Joshua and Ruiz Jr. will be staying.”

Five years later, it feels as if much of that opposition has been quieted, or has simply elected not to continue voicing its reservations in the face of boxing’s increasingly over-the-top paeans to Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and the man who, over the past couple of years, has pushed himself to the front and center of the desert kingdom’s pugilistic charm offensive.

Yet the concerns that were expressed in 2019 are no less valid now. While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman can point to a series of social reforms – women can drive now, all by themselves; never mind that as recently as November 2018, women who campaigned for the right to do so were imprisoned, given electric shocks and accused of “undermining state security and aiding enemies of the state” – his remains an authoritarian government in which dissent is squashed.

Although he denies responsibility, he was unquestionably the man behind the brutal murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, who shortly before his death publicly criticized two of the crown prince’s “very thuggish” closest advisers: Saud al-Qahtani and Turki Alalshikh. Al-Qahtani took the fall for Khashoggi’s murder, but Alalshikh made it clear where he stood when he posted a photo of the two of them on social media in July.

While Alalshikh is apparently comfortable with using social media to his own ends, it would appear he feels differently when it is used against him: an Egyptian worker in Saudi Arabia was reportedly sentenced to 19 years in prison for criticizing Alalshikh in a 2019 tweet. Also in 2019, authorities arrested tribal prince Sheikh Faisal bin Sultan bin Jahjah bin Humaid after he criticized Alalshikh for “spending hundreds of millions of state funds on entertainment events while many in the country live in debt.” (King Salman agreed to release him the following year.) 

Boxing is scarcely alone in looking the other way, or actively prostrating itself, to take the money on offer from oppressive regimes. Witness the shameless contortions FIFA chief Gianni Infantino went through to ensure Saudi Arabia will stage the 2034 World Cup, for example. But perhaps there is something about boxing – a sport and a business that involves men and women pulling themselves out of poverty by reordering each other’s brain cells, and that has always been in the thrall of odious characters, from Frankie Carbo to Daniel Kinahan – that makes it especially receptive to such approaches. And, hey, who cares about a few executions and a little torture and suppression if we end up with Conor Benn against Chris Eubank Jnr, amirite?

In the end, dictators’ luck tends to run out. Mobutu was eventually turfed from power in May 1997; one week later, Zaire was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. Marcos was forced into exile in 1986, succeeded by the widow of the rival he had had killed. For boxing fans, though, their legacies are uncomplicated: They are the men who enabled two of the greatest heavyweight fights of all time.

Mohammed bin Salman and Turki Alalshikh are presently basking in even greater praise from a sport desperate for someone to impose order; it says a lot about the business that the consensus is that, as long as the money is available, the relationship will end only if and when either man becomes either bored with or embarrassed by their association with boxing – not the other way around.

The only safe prediction seems to be that, when and if Riyadh and boxing do go their separate ways, boxing will sink into another existential crisis until someone else with bottomless pits of money and a shadowy past bats their eyelashes in the sport’s direction. If money is on offer, boxing will take it, no matter its provenance. It always has and it always will.