George Foreman 1948 –

Professional boxer

Juvenile Delinquent

Doused “Smokin’ Joe”

Marked More Milestones

Sources

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George Foreman is an unlikely hero in a savage sport. A former heavyweight champion of the world, Foreman returned to professional boxing after a ten-year retirement with the idea of regaining his lost crown. In doing so, “he also dealt a crashing blow to conventional wisdom which insisted that middle-aged men had no business pursuing world heavyweight championships and instead ought to play with their grandchildren,” noted Ebony’s Hans J. Massaquoi.

Foreman’s checkered career includes juvenile delinquency, an Olympic gold medal, dramatic victories and defeats in boxing’s professional ranks, and years spent as a preacher and youth leader. Even in his years away from boxing he has been the subject of media attention-not all of it flattering-and his return to the ring has sparked heated debate on his talents and potential. The boxer himself, a fundamentalist Christian, declares that he has returned to his sport in order to raise money for the youth center he is developing in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. He refuses to concede that his advancing age could weigh against him in a field where stamina and agility factor heavily into most victories. “40 is no death sentence,” he told Time magazine. “Age is only a problem if you make it one.”

If he seems assured at mid-life, Foreman was certainly adrift as a youth. He was born and raised in the Fifth Ward, a poor neighborhood on the north side of Houston. There he made a name for himself as a brawler, drinker, petty thief, and gang leader, quitting school before he got to the ninth grade. Lester Hayes, a member of the Los Angeles Raiders football team, grew up in the same neighborhood and described the George Foreman he remembered in Sports Illustrated. Foreman, Hayes said, “was a very, very big kid and had a reputation for savage butt kickings. That was his forte. So by the early age of 12, I had met George Foreman twice and I found both occasions extremely taxing.” Hayes added: “I will say this of George. He was a smart gangster in that he would tax you first and then kick your butt. But he wasn’t a very nice thing.”

Foreman told Sports Illustrated that he thought a hero was someone with “a big, long scar down his face, a guy who’d come back from prison, a guy maybe killed a man once.” He even went so far as to wear bandages on his

At a Glance …

Born 1948 in Houston, TX.; married five times; fifth wife’s name, Mary Joan; nine children from three of his five marriages, including five sons named George. Education: Earned GED, 1967.

Job Corps, Grants Pass, OR and Pleasanton, CA, c. early-mid 1960s; amateur boxer, 1966-68; won gold medal in heavyweight division in 1968 Olympic Games; went professional in 1969; became heavyweight champion of the world, January 22, 1973, by defeating Joe Frazier; lost title to Muhammad Ali in 1974; retired from professional boxing, 1977; returned to boxing, 1986; defeated in 12-round championship title bout, April, 1991, against Evander Holyfield; became heavyweight champion of the world, November 5, 1994, by defeating Michael Moorer. Minister and youth leader, 1977-86, working primarily out of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ (founded by Foreman) in Houston. Author, By George (with Joel Engle; autobiography), Random, 1995; George Foreman’s Knock-Out-the-Fat Barbeque and Grilling Book (with Cherie Calbom), Random, 1996.

Addresses: Home-Houston, TX. O/fr’ce-George Foreman Community Center, 2202 Lone Oak Rd., Houston, TX 77093-3336.

own face so it would seem like he had a scar. Without any proper role models Foreman just drifted, with no clear idea how to make a life for himself. He was growing up in a single-parent family and spending most of his time in the streets. “I remember once,” he said in Sports Illustrated, “two boys and myself, we robbed a guy. Threw him down. I could hold the guy because I was strong, and the sneaky fella would grab the money. And then we’d run until we couldn’t hear the guy screaming anymore. And then we’d walk home as if we’d just earned some money on a job, counting it. We didn’t even know we were criminals.”

One day Foreman was watching television at his Houston home. A commercial came on featuring athlete Jim Brown, one of the few men Foreman actually admired. In the commercial, Brown urged young people to join the Job Corps in order to “be somebody. “Foreman took the challenge. All alone, the teenager traveled from Texas to Oregon, where he joined a Job Corps camp. All was not rosy right away, though-Sports Illustrated contributor Richard Hoffer described the youth as “principally a thug in a new outfit.” Shortly after joining the Job Corps, Foreman was involved in a savage fistfight in the town of Pleasanton, California. When a group of counselors could not pull Foreman off his victim, they called upon the supervisor, Doc Broadus, for help. Broadus stepped in and stopped the fight, noticing in the process that Foreman seemed to be crying out for understanding, that he was indeed a confused boy wasting his strength in fits of frustration.

Broadus’s special interest was developing boxers. He took Foreman to the gym and began to teach him how to channel his energy for productive purposes. In a short two years, Foreman developed into a powerful amateur heavyweight. He not only qualified for the 1968 Olympic Games, he won the gold medal in his division. His many victories notwithstanding, Foreman still remembers his moment in the 1968 games as the highlight of his life. He told Sports Illustrated: “None of it felt as good as when I was poor and had just won that gold medal, when I wore it so long I had to have the ribbon restitched.”

Foreman turned pro in 1969 and began to move through the ranks toward the championship. He made his mark quickly, going undefeated through forty fights and winning more than half of those within two rounds. “My opponents didn’t worry about losing to me,” Foreman told Sports Illustrated. “They worried about getting hurt.” Despite this track record, Foreman was an underdog when he entered the ring against world champion Joe Frazier in 1973. Frazier had stunned the world by beating Muhammad Ali and was thought to be invincible. Not only did Foreman beat Frazier, he knocked the champion down six times in a brutal TKO victory. Foreman went on to defend his championship belt against Ken Norton, another highly-ranked contender, and knocked him out in less than two rounds.

This set the stage for one of the most dramatic fights in modern history, the October 30, 1974 meeting between Foreman and Ali in Zaire. The crowd of 60,000 was squarely in Ali’s corner, booing Foreman loudly as he attacked the former champion with flurry after flurry of punches. In Muhammad Ali, Foreman had finally met his match. The wily Ali absorbed six rounds of punishment from Foreman, taunting him all the while, and then Foreman was spent. Ali knocked Foreman down in the eighth round, and Foreman was unable to rise before the count of ten. It was his first loss, and it came in spectacular fashion. Years later, in 1997, the “Rumble in the Jungle” would become the subject of an acclaimed documentary entitled When We Were Kings.

The impact of that loss rocked Foreman for years to come. Sports Illustrated correspondent Gary Smith wrote: “Out of nowhere, [Foreman] had won adulation by mauling people in a boxing ring; now that he had lost for the first time, he lived with a quiet terror. He couldn’t stop spending money or conquering women.... He was flailing at love and acceptance the same way he did at Ali, thinking he could win them by exertion of muscle and might.” Foreman does not like to dwell on those years now. He admits his life was completely out of control. “After I’d lost to Ali, “he said, “I’d decided I needed more hate. Pd hit you in the kidneys or on the back of the head. I’d beat women as hard as I beat men. You psyche yourself to become an animal to box, and that’s what you become. A lion sleeps 75 percent of the day, the rest he eats and breeds—just like a boxer.”

Surrounded by false friends and the useless trappings of a lavish lifestyle (including a lion, a tiger, a $21,000 German shepherd, and a half dozen luxury cars), Foreman more or less made a spectacle of himself. On March 17, 1977, he climbed into the ring in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a match with lightly-regarded Jimmy Young. For Foreman the fight was no more than a tune-up match for a return against Ali, but he lost a 12-round decision to Young. That fight marked a true milestone in Foreman’s career. After returning to the dressing room, Foreman became ill and began to be obsessed with death.

Foreman told Sports Illustrated that he found himself plunged “into a deep, dark nothing, like out in a sea, with nothing over your head or under your feet. Nothing but nothing. A big dark lump of it. And a horrible smell came with it. A smell I haven’t forgotten. A smell of sorrow.... And then I looked around and I was dead. That was it. I thought of everything I worked for. I hadn’t said goodbye to my mother, my children. All the money I hid in safe-deposit boxes! You know how paper burns and when you touch it, it just crumbles. That was my life. I looked back and saw it crumble, like Pd fallen for a big joke.”

Foreman began babbling in his terror and was taken to the hospital. On the way, he said, he felt the saving grace of God restoring him to life. “I said, I don’t think this is death,” he remembered. “I still believe in God. And l said that and I was back alive.... I could feel the blood flowing through my veins. For a moment, I felt I was somebody.“Overnight, Foreman became a zealous Christian. He quit the ring and began a new career, preaching on Houston street corners and in fundamentalist churches. Eventually he opened his own church, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, in a mobile home. There he ministered to a small flock, trying to avoid the limelight as much as possible.

Even though he had found Jesus Christ, Foreman still had not taken a firm grasp of his life. Within a space of two years-1981 to 1983—he was married and divorced three times. One of his wives fled to Barbados with the couple’s two children, and he flew there and literally stole them back. That experience forced him to face yet more unsavory facts about his life. Foreman told Sports Illustrated: “We’re all like blind men on a corner-we got to learn to trust people, or we’ll never cross the street. I’ve come to find out love is allowing yourself to be weak and vulnerable and hurt. I used to think that was weakness, even after I’d become a preacher. All those women that were leaving me were just trying to get me to say `I love you’ like I really meant it, instead of just giving them things.”

Between 1983 and 1986 Foreman seemed to have found peace at last. His small church and a gym he had built next to it filled his days. He remarried and fathered the last of three sons-all named George. Gradually, however, the expenditures for the church and gym began to erode what funds he had left from his boxing days. At the same time, some of his eight children were nearing college age. Foreman tried to raise money by serving as a guest minister, but he found that experience humiliating. At the age of 40, he decided to return to the career that had proven so lucrative for him in his 20s-boxing.

Immediately Foreman faced yet another challenge. His love of fast food and home cooking had sustained him through the 1980s, but it had also caused his weight to balloon. He estimates that on his first day back in training he weighed nearly 315 pounds. As reporters scoffed, he announced his intentions to fight and began to work out vigorously, eventually bringing his weight down to 267. Few in the boxing establishment praised Foreman for his comeback, especially when he began to book “easy” fights against no-name opposition. NBC boxing commentator Ferdie Pacheco told Sports Illustrated: “This is pathetic. It shouldn’t be allowed. He’s overage, inept. This whole thing is a fraudulent second career to build a money fight with [Mikel] Tyson.”

Indeed, Foreman did have his eye on “Iron Mike” Tyson, then the heavyweight champion. “Tyson was 10 years old the last time I had a match,” Foreman said in the Boston Globe. “I’m fighting guys he just fought and beating them. It still only takes me one punch. Whump. The power is still there.” Foreman proved that power to a certain extent by turning in 24 victories, 23 by knockout, between 1986 and 1990. In January of 1990 he met former contender Gerry Cooney in Atlantic City (a match locally known as “The Geezers at Caesars”), knocking him senseless in the second round. Despite his constant battles with weight and the slower reflexes of age, Foreman finally signed for a title match, not against Tyson but against 28-year-old Evander Holyfield. That bout, which took place in April of 1991, ended in defeat for Foreman, although he was not easily beaten-the fight went 12 rounds.

The money Foreman had earned since making his comeback enabled him to build a spacious new athletic center for underprivileged youngsters in Houston, but he refused to relinquish his dream. For his own kids and for others, Foreman felt “I had to set an example,” he explained in Ebony. “I think it’s a crime for a man who’s made as much as me to ask for donations,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I want kids with murder on their faces. I’ll trick ’em with boxing and sports to get them straightened out and going to school.” He spent the next four years earning himself another go at the championship.

By November of 1994, Foreman had fought his way back into the championship ring, this time with 26-year-old Michael Moorer, who had stripped Holyfield of his title. “People don’t know what it took for George to make it back,” aide Mort Sharnik revealed to Esquire. “The bumps, the bruises, the cuts. The loneliness. The self-doubt. The unmerciful effort to reach a higher condition each time out. Going against age and weight ... and a conventional wisdom that was mean and full of contempt. But he’s a man of large intelligence.” Foreman’s mental attitude, fortitude, stamina-and one walloping punch delivered two minutes into the tenth round--ended the jeers of all his critics and made him, at 45, the oldest man to regain the heavyweight title in the history of the sport. In one fell swoop, Foreman was back on top, holding the titles of the World Boxing Association (WBA) and the International Boxing Federation (IBF) formerly held by Moorer.

Against the wishes of the WBA, Foreman defended his crown against Alex Schultz in April of 1995, rather than against Tony Tucker, the number-one-ranked contender at the time. In so doing, Foreman was stripped of his WBA title. Shortly thereafter, Foreman was forced to give up is IBF title for refusing to fight Schultz again that fall. Though he had earlier vowed to give up boxing after 1995, then after 1996, matches were being planned even in 1997. Though Foreman did step into the ring from time to time, none of the bouts received as much attention as the historical one on November 5, 1994.

Meanwhile, Foreman planned to spend the rest of an active life in Houston, training others in the sport that had provided him with so many ups and downs. He published an autobiography entitled By George and for a short time had appeared in George, a 1992 ABC-TV sitcom about an overweight, middle-aged former boxing champ plotting a comeback. The series lasted only eight weeks, but as Ebony predicted, “from street tough, to Olympic star, to bad guy boxing champ, to minister of the gospel, to big brother to troubled youths, to TV actor and pitchman, to American folk hero ... it won’t be the last they have seen and heard of Big George.”

Boston Globe, March 11, 1987.

Ebony, July 1995, pp. 86-92.

Esquire, February 1995, pp. 99-102.

Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1996, sect. C, pp. 1, 4.

New York Times Biographical Service, May 1995, pp. 774-775.

Philadelphia Inquirer, September 17, 1989, September 23, 1990.

Sports Illustrated, October 8, 1984, July 17, 1989, January 29, 1990.

Time, July 24, 1989.

Washington Post, January 12, 1990, January 17, 1990.

—Mark Kram