Muhammad Ali’s historic “Rumble in the Jungle” WBC belt has sold for $6.18million at auction to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay.
Ali won the WBC heavyweight championship belt in 1974 with victory over George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where he employed his rope-a-dope tactic for the first time.
The fight marked Ali’s return to competitive boxing after he was stripped of his boxing license and his World Boxing Association title for refusing induction into the US Armed Forces to fight in Vietnam seven years earlier.
The belt first entered the public domain in 1988 when the contents of Ali’s late boxing coach Drew “Bundini” Brown’s storage lockers were sold at auction.