Rope-a-dope take punishment in the belly". Kalinsky told him: "Do what you do in a training session: Act like a dope on the ropes." Ali then replied: "So, you want me to be a rope-a-dope?" According to Angelo Dundee, Kalinsky told Ali: "Why don't you try something like that? Sort of a dope on the ropes, letting Foreman swing away but, like in the picture, hit nothing but air." The publicist John Condon popularized the phrase "rope-a-dope". The maneuver is most commonly associated with the match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, known as The Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman was
George Foreman vs. Ken Norton winning the bout by first-round knockout. For his second defense, Foreman was matched up against Ken Norton for a March 1974 bout held in Caracas, the capital and largest city in Venezuela. Norton was coming off two successive fights against Muhammad Ali in 1973, winning the first fight in March by split decision (famously breaking Ali's jaw in the process), and then narrowly losing the second by another split decision in September. Norton's impressive performances against Ali made him one of the top heavyweight contenders for Foreman's titles, but the future hall-of-famer was installed as a 3–1 underdog against the