In a TV interview, King stated that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was involved in making the payment for the purse money for the athletes and other major expenses, although the precise process was not made clear.

Fred Wyman, an American advisor to Zaire's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, persuaded Mobutu that the publicity such a high-profile event would generate would help his regime, and Mobutu agreed for the fight to be held in his country. However, as King did not have the money, and was not welcomed to stage an event of such a profile in the United States, he began seeking an outside country to stage and sponsor the event. Such an amount of money, quite enormous for those days, was purported to prevent other top boxing promoters from attempts to arrange a Foreman vs. King managed to get Ali and Foreman to sign separate contracts saying they would fight for him if he could get a $5 million purse. ĭon King arranged the fight with music businessman Jerry Masucci, who took his record label's showcase group, the Fania All-Stars, to play at the venue.

Decades later, the bout would be the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary film When We Were Kings. The fight grossed an estimated $100 million (inflation-adjusted $500 million) in worldwide revenue. This included a record estimated 50 million viewers watching the fight pay-per-view on closed-circuit theatre TV. The fight was watched by a record estimated worldwide television audience of one billion, becoming the world's most-watched live television broadcast at the time. The fight is famous for Ali's introduction of the rope-a-dope tactic. It has been called 'arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century' and was a major upset, with Ali coming in as a 4–1 underdog against the unbeaten, heavy-hitting Foreman. The event had an attendance of 60,000 people. The Rumble in the Jungle was a heavyweight championship boxing match on October 30, 1974, at the 20th of May Stadium (now the Stade Tata Raphaël) in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), between undefeated (and undisputed) world heavyweight champion George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

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