Half a century on: Rumble in the Jungle remembered

Over the last half century, the world heavyweight title has beaten an increasingly erratic and sadly inconsequential course.

It has traipsed its gaudy cloak through bust casino towns and dead-end leisure centres, pitching up most recently in the Saudi desert, and been contested in one spurious form or another on all five major continents.

It has survived so-called 'bite nights' and interruptions by errant paragliders, and been claimed both by those who deserve to be called all-time greats, and others who, in the words of Larry Holmes, were not fit to carry their jockstraps.

Now, as 58-year-old former champions prepare to cash in by lacing on the gloves against YouTuber Jake Paul, it cannot be long before it endures the ultimate indignity of being scrapped out among social-media celebrities.

In the thousands of rounds and hundreds of venues and forest-loads of hype and bluster that have followed it, the so-called 'richest prize in sport' has never again reached the heights it scaled on 30 October, 1974 in the African nation then known as Zaire.

It was about more than Muhammad Ali's audacious and some said ill-advised attempt to become the first man to win the heavyweight crown for a third time, three years after his previous bid ended in a savage 15-round loss to Joe Frazier in New York.

More than the expected anointing of a new superstar in George Foreman, the savage-punching Texan who had scored an ominously impressive second-round knockout over Frazier to take the world title in Kingston, Jamaica the previous year.

More than the maniacal ego of a power-crazed dictator in Mobutu Sese Seko, a man so predisposed to splashing his nation's cash he would also build a Concorde-sized landing strip in the middle of the forest in order