To be honest, I don't know much about boxing, but I was curious about this strategy called rope-a-dope, made famous by Muhammad Ali:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope-a-dope
http://youtu.be/eWkTUWEQp4U

The idea is to hug the ropes, play defensively, and take the punches, until your opponent tires out, and you can take him out with combinations. My question: Does this strategy ever backfire? Has anyone developed an "Anti-rope-a-dope" strategy?

In my uneducated evaluation, it would seem like the rope-a-dope strategy is inherently quite risky, in that you are allowing your opponent to throw all the first heavy punches, which means there are a lot of chances for him to KO you if he can find a way through or around your defenses.

Muhammed Ali was one of a kind.

And he was a master at doing what today would be called "talking smack." Much of what he said before a match was designed to psych out his opponents and the audience. And it worked.

You can't generalize about boxing strategy from Ali any more than you can generalize about horse racing from Secretariat.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote some stories about early british boxing when it was 20 3 minute rounds. In a couple this was an issue. The strategy was to kind of reverse the rope-a-dope. When the opponent is tired come back with an attack that forces the first attacker to defend on the rope, and then feign exhaustion to draw the still tired opponent into attack with a feigned rope-a-dope but avoid being boxed in, and catch him off guard with a flurry of reserve strength.
Having read what I wrote I'm not sure it answers the question as : who rope-a-doped first? but the idea of the feint in reverse might.

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I think Sun Tzu (The Art of War), with commentary, might put what I was trying to say better.

In chapter five on Energy, Sun Tzu said, verse 18 :

Apparent confusion is a product of good order;
apparent cowardice, of courage;
apparent weakness, of strength.

Tu Mu commentary:
The verse means that if one wishes to feign disorder to entice an enemy 'he must himself be well disciplined. Only then can he feign confusion. One who wishes to simulate cowardice must be courageous, for only then is he able to simulate fear. One who wishes to appear to be weak in order to make his enemy arrogant must be extremely strong. Only then can he feign weakness.

the down side is getting hit in the head like that D E S T R O Y S the brain

This seems to be made look so easy in Rocky series but in reality it's not that easy, at least was not with me.

I was in boxing in early teenage before I combined kick-boxing and TaeKwonDo to my routine.
To be honest, I have a broken nose and all I remember was beaten up by a tall opponent when I was 17 just because I never was good with fighting 'hugging' the ropes or we call it here cornering. Once I got near the ropes I felt locked, no punches, no ducking just a good beat up. Or may be it was just my small stature or whatever. But this never worked for me to be honest.

Regards.

No one fights like that anymore bro. That style came with ali and went with ali! The last we will ever see of it. Boxing is more banging than anything now a days!

There are bangers defensive fighters with an offensive edge. the only fighter to defy this is Mayweather! He somehow fights with both style and rapidly adapts to fight. Only one that is in mayweathers class is pacman!!

Banging...? Defensive fighters with an offensive edge...? You're confusing me, bro.