A Genuine Box-Office Attraction

Before he came to produce such blockbuster movies as “The Terminator,” “Platoon” and “The Last Emperor,” the great passion of John Daly was prizefighting. He boxed as a lad in England, as his father and uncle had, and later, purely by chance, it was Daly’s last-minute intervention that helped to stage what many considered the fight of the century, George Foreman vs. Muhammad Ali.

That one, “The Rumble in the Jungle,” brought big-time heavyweight boxing to a new neutral corner of the world. And this weekend John Daly--not the golfer, mind you--is doing it again, acting as one of the promoters for a worth-pay-per-viewing card Saturday in the exotic setting of Hong Kong.

There, on the southeastern coast of China, where British rule is drawing to an end after more than 150 years, Daly is pleased because “maybe Britain can at least go out with a bit of a bang.”

Although no monumental bouts along the lines of Foreman-Ali are scheduled, this promotion from Hemdale Special Events, called “High Noon in Hong Kong,” should at least be entertaining and will be rushed out on video cassettes within a week. Tommy Morrison resurfaces to meet an awkward but undefeated Brit with the adorable name of Herbie Hide. The card also features Ray Mercer and Frank Bruno, two heavyweights in search of a Requiem, plus, far more appealing, one of Southern California’s battling Ruelas brothers.

Difficult to tell which heavyweights are and aren’t legitimate these days. England had a heroic figure for a while in Lennox Lewis, until one Oliver McCall recently turned Lennox’s legs to pudding.

“They were right to stop it,” Daly said this week on the phone from London. “Lewis’ legs definitely gave way.”

Twenty years earlier, before Daly had become executive producer of many distinguished films (“Salvador,” “The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Hoosiers”) including a couple of Oscar-winning Best Pictures, he was witness to another heavyweight fight in which one of the principals was made to wobble and stagger. It was a night he will never forget--or a morning actually, since Ali and Foreman stepped through the ropes in Zaire, Africa to begin their jungle warfare at 4 a.m.

Long before that fight was set, Daly was sitting and shivering one afternoon inside a Hemdale Film Corporation office in London, where a coal strike had caused businesses and residences to go without proper heat. On this dreary day, in a room illuminated by kerosene lamps, Daly had a surprise visitor, a passerby who’d seen his sign.

Knowing of the Daly family’s long association with boxing, the stranger explained that he was directly involved in an attempt to bring together the two most famous names in boxing, Foreman, the unbeaten heavyweight champion, and Ali, the once and future king, in a spectacular promotion, probably bound for Madison Square Garden in New York. But the financing necessary to secure this promotion was crumbling, and a deadline was to expire within hours. The man was desperate.

Unable to resist, Daly seized the moment. He began making calls to associates from Chicago to New York to Oakland, trying to arrange funding by that day’s close of business. There were headaches galore, not the least of which was Daly’s endeavoring to read the fine print of documents in a room dim as a cave.

“But boxing was always the No. 1 sport of my life, so I was positively thrilled,” he remembers.

That was 1973. The following year, Foreman-Ali was set, not for New York but for Kinshasa, Zaire, where the fighters were lured by sums of money unprecedented in boxing. Daly went along for the wild ride, sitting ringside and viewing one of the most unforgettable spectacles in sport.

His father, a lightweight with about 300 bouts under his belt, went to Zaire with him.

“I was a very clever boxer myself, won lots of cups,” Daly says. “As I got older, boxing faded out of my life, but I always wanted to keep that bond with my father, who went on to manage many fine English boxers. Then this opportunity to be involved in one of the great sporting events of our lifetime came to me out of the blue. Perhaps it was fate.”

To this day, Daly can remember Foreman dropping by his office unexpectedly and everyone there in a panic, trying to steer George from the reception area before he spotted a prominently placed photograph of a triumphant Ali, standing over his victim.

The rumble in the jungle was quite a night. Around Round 2, when Ali began to sag on the ropes and not return Foreman’s punches, many at ringside feared the worst. A flop. Maybe even a fix.

“Foreman, remember, was a 6-to-1, maybe 7-to-1 favorite,” Daly says. “Millions doubted he could be beaten.”

But he was not among them.

“And I can prove it,” he insists. “There’s a version of it on film that captures me saying it.

“The round ends and David Frost, who was doing the broadcast of the fight, turns to me and says, ‘So. What do you think?’

“And I say, ‘Ali, KO, eighth.’

“Truly, I did.”

Let the record show that referee Zack Clayton counted out the fallen Foreman in the eighth round, as Ali danced in a nearby corner. It was they who had done the punching, but it was John Daly who was hooked.