George Foreman redefined boxing with an unlikely, late championship reign

THEY said he was chasing an impossible dream when George Foreman started a comeback after being inactive for 10 years. But Foreman proved the critics wrong, knocking out Michael Moorer in an upset to become world heavyweight champion for the second time, at the age of 45.

Foreman, who passed away peacefully at his home in Texas on March 21, aged 76, was one of the heavyweight history’s biggest hitters, with 68 KOs in his 76-5 record. 

The win over Moorer was widely hailed as a feel-good moment, with Foreman the betting underdog but the public’s sentimental favourite. 

This was in wide contrast to the perception of Foreman as a sullen, brooding bully when he faced Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle. 

You could even say there were three versions of Foreman. 

There was the 19-year-old who waved a miniature Stars and Stripes after winning the Olympic heavyweight gold medal in Mexico City in 1968, gaining the approval of the wider American public after the Black Power protests by athlete activists Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the same Games.

Foreman’s gold-medal triumph seemed the perfect redemption story, a teenaged Foreman having been what writer Hugh McIlvanney described as a “wine-drinking vandal and trainee mugger” in Houston’s Fifth Ward district. But a stint in the Job Corps, the residential training and educational programme, brought some structure and discipline into Foreman’s life. It was in the Job Corps that Foreman was introduced to boxing.

One could say that Foreman basked in the glow of public affection in the US after Mexico City.

Things had changed by October 1974, however, and a scowling Foreman was very much the villain of the piece when he faced Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle.

But then we had the final iteration of Foreman and the enduring one, that of an avuncular, generous-spirited man who could even be called loveable.

The cooking grill that bore his name made Foreman millions. He even starred in an eponymous TV sitcom, George, that had a brief run (1993-1994) on the ABC network in the States.

Yet the smiling, good-natured Foreman familiar to so many was in almost total contrast to the fighter who bludgeoned his way to the heavyweight championship in the 1970s.

Big and strong at 6ft 3ins and around 220lbs when making his first run at the championship, Foreman relied mainly on power. It seemed that everything he threw was heavy: The right hand, the uppercut, the left hook. Even his jab was a jarring weapon.

But there were flaws in his technique. Foreman, in the first instalment of his ring career, could be clumsy and easy to hit. His punches tended to become slow and ponderous when fatigue set in. An opponent who could move around the ring and be somewhat evasive was a problem, as was seen when the much smaller Gregorio Peralta, of Argentina, gave Foreman two difficult fights.

It was Foreman’s struggles with Peralta that no doubt formed part of the reasoning of those who picked Ali for the upset over Foreman: The big man could be outboxed and his stamina was suspect. (ABC TV’s Howard Cosell noted that Big George looked “really tired” in the 10th and last round of Foreman’s first meeting with Peralta. The decision in Foreman’s favour was roundly booed.)

But when Foreman had an opponent who stood right in front of him, he looked like an unbeatable monster. Canadian iron man George Chuvalo, who twice went the distance with Muhammad Ali, was overpowered in three rounds. Foreman’s thudding jab had Chuvalo’s left eye swollen after two rounds, and in the third round Chuvalo was subjected to what commentator Don Dunphy described as “an awesome battering”.

Still, Foreman was the underdog when he challenged Smokin’ Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title in the Don King-promoted Sunshine Showdown in Kingston, Jamaica on January 22, 1973.

One writer who saw the upset coming was Walter Bartleman of the London Evening Standard. Bartleman told me he watched closely as Foreman’s punches put indentations in the heavy bag during a gym session and that he couldn’t help wondering what would happen if Foreman connected with a big punch against Frazier. The veteran writer discussed the fight with Foreman’s trainer, Dick Sadler, who assured him that Frazier’s come-forward style would be perfect for the younger, bigger Foreman.

“The more I thought about it, the more I thought Foreman could do it,” Bartleman told me. “Everyone was picking Frazier. I thought long and hard as I was writing my preview but I finally ended up picking Foreman.”

Bartleman’s judgement proved to be correct, with Foreman knocking Frazier down six times in a two-round destruction.

It was soon apparent in that fight that Frazier was in deep trouble. A right uppercut in the opening round dropped Frazier for the first of six visits to the canvas, prompting commentator Howard Cosell to exclaim: “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!” Two more knockdowns followed before the first round ended. 

Looking back at the fight, it seems amazing that it wasn’t stopped in the second round after Foreman clubbed Frazier to the canvas for two further knockdowns. Then Frazier went down yet again, his feet actually leaving the canvas in a sort of after-shock effect from a right uppercut. Six knockdowns in all. 

Referee Arthur Mercante seemed in two minds as to whether to allow the fight to continue, only waving the finish when Frazier’s trainer and manager, Yank Durham, got up onto the ring apron as if preparing to step through the ropes to save his stricken fighter. 

Foreman’s annihilation of Frazier was followed by a second-round demolition of Ken Norton in a title defence in Caracas. Norton didn’t have a bad first round, backing up but scoring with some jabs and hooks, but Foreman simply walked through him in the second, knocking Norton down twice — there was almost a third knockdown when Foreman staggered Norton into the ropes, but referee Jimmy Rondeau didn’t give an eight count. 

Hugh McIlvanney was impressed, writing of the “harsh simplicity” of Foreman’s performance. “The twenty-five-year-old world champion has now grown to a full awareness of his fearsome capacity for destruction,” McIlvanney wrote in The Observer.

It was small wonder, then, that so many observers thought that Foreman would be too strong, too heavy-handed and simply too much for Ali. But this was a classic case of form not always being a reliable guide. Foreman had inflicted brutal defeats on Frazier and Norton, fighters who had beaten Ali. But Ali was too smart, too skilled, too experienced — and it could also be said too tough — for Foreman in scoring an epochal knockout.

Foreman came back with a dramatic victory, getting off the canvas to knock out dangerous Ron Lyle in the fifth round of a sensational fight at Caesars Palace. He followed this with a fifth-round win over a diminished Joe Frazier.

But what was to be the first chapter of Foreman’s career came to an end when crafty contender Jimmy Young outpointed him in a 12-round fight in Puerto Rico. Foreman wobbled Young in the seventh round but couldn’t finish the fight. An exhausted Foreman was knocked down in the final round. 

In the dressing room after the fight, Foreman experienced what he believed to have been a spiritual conversion. He related in his autobiography that he fell to the floor and felt himself “transported to a far-off place”. He was having thoughts of death: “This is death. This is what it’s like to die.”  But, he added that “a giant hand lifted and carried me out of that nothingness”.

Trainer Gil Clancy instructed Foreman to tell the media that his dressing-room collapse was due to heat prostration. But Foreman believed he had found God.

And so, after 10 years’ inactivity, and now a preacher, a 37-year-old Foreman returned to boxing. His immediate goal was to raise funds for the youth and community centre he had established, but he believed he could regain the heavyweight championship.

It was difficult, at least initially, to take the comeback seriously. Foreman had ballooned in weight to 315lbs. Ten years out of the ring was an awfully long time. But Foreman got his weight down to 267lbs for his first comeback fight, a fourth-round TKO win in Sacramento over the hapless Steve Zouski. “I knew that, as a preacher, I’d no longer be able to use anger as a motivation in the ring,” he recounted in his autobiography. “I’d have to win my matches with an absence of rage and a minimum of violence.”

There were, of course, many doubters. His early comeback opponents were of lowly repute. When Foreman stopped Carlos Hernandez, a Cuban-born New Jersey heavyweight, in the fourth round in Atlantic City, Srikumar Sen of The Times wrote that Foreman’s performance “resembled more a freak show than a boxing match” while John Beyrooty wrote in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that Foreman’s comeback was making a mockery out of boxing. 

Frank Warren provided London fans with a brief in-person glimpse of Foreman: A one-round KO of over Terry Anderson, “whose blubbery shape finished nose-down on the canvas,” as Hugh McIlvanney reported. 

But the cynics began to take the comeback seriously when Foreman blew out Gerry Cooney, faded but still a big name, in the second round in Atlantic City in January 1990. This was a more measured Foreman than we saw years earlier in his younger days. “Foreman’s punches were thrown with excellent form,” I reported from ringside for the now-defunct Boxing Weekly. “They were what you would call educated punches, not the wide, looping blows often associated with Foreman.”

Promoter Bob Arum talked of Foreman meeting Mike Tyson in a $100-million blockbuster co-promoted with Don King. But the following month Buster Douglas put paid to that idea.

However, Foreman fought valiantly against Evander Holyfield in a title attempt, then lost to Tommy Morrison in another try.

But on November 5, 1994, Foreman, behind on points, knocked out Michael Moorer in the 10th round to prove that even the most improbable of dreams sometimes come true: The heavyweight title regained, at 45 years of age, more than two decades after he first won the championship.

It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did.

Foreman boxed just four more times, retiring after losing a majority decision to Shannon Briggs in Atlantic City.

In a sport with many larger-than-life characters in its long history, Foreman’s life was larger than most. He fathered five sons — all named George — and five daughters, one of whom, the late Freeda Foreman, had a brief pro boxing career.

Foreman was truly one of a kind.

The world keeps turning, but it seems an emptier place with his passing.