OPINION:
George Foreman — one of the most famous men on the planet — stood on the modest altar in a metal warehouse on a side street in Houston.
Twenty-seven years earlier, the former heavyweight champion said God spoke to him in a dressing room after losing a fight to Jimmy Young in the scorching night heat of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Since then, he had been preaching the Word, and, despite a journey that included disappearing from public view and then re-emerging with an improbable second heavyweight championship, Foreman would always return to the modest Church of the Lord Jesus Christ to preach to his small congregation.
On this July 2004 Sunday evening, they came to Foreman’s church to ask him to pray for troubled friends, bless travel plans and strengthen their faith.
“The work I do here is the most important thing in my life,” Foreman told me after the service. “This keeps me grounded.”
Foreman died Friday at the age of 76. If you believe the Word that the two-time heavyweight champion so passionately believed, the work he did in that small church opened the gates for him in an afterlife, where he surely has been having some more conversations with God.
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On this earth, the lives Foreman lived were both cursed and blessed. He started as a tough Houston gang kid before becoming a celebrated Olympic hero and then an angry and feared heavyweight champion.
His second act saw him as minister, TV pitchman and a beloved heavyweight champion again at 45.
I was ringside at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas the night of Nov. 5, 1994, when Foreman, after taking a beating from 26-year-old Michael Moorer for nine rounds, delivered one of the most beautiful short right hands I’ve ever seen in the 10th round to put Moorer on the canvas and win back the championship he lost to Muhammad Ali 20 years earlier.
The roof of the arena seemed to nearly lift off from the reaction of the crowd of more than 12,000.
Foreman — wearing the trunks he wore when he lost his title to Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle in 1994 — ran over to his corner, knelt and prayed.
Trainer Angelo Dundee — who had been in Ali’s corner that early morning in Zaire — jumped into the ring to slap Foreman on the back in celebration.
I sat down at my computer to pound out history and my hands were trembling. I didn’t see God, but it was close to a religious experience.
“I was just thanking God,” Foreman told me in a conversation years later. “I said ‘God, if I win this, I’m going to get on my knees and say, Thank you Jesus.’ When I won it, I went right to my knees. I was so grateful.”
His gratitude seemed justified. Few people have undergone the kind of public transformation — from feared villain to beloved icon — that Foreman had.
After the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Foreman said he got some pushback from the political left for waving an American flag after winning the gold medal bout.
“It went political, and for a long time I had a chip on my shoulder because I wanted to enjoy myself,” Foreman said. “I had been rescued from nothing, from the gutter. I wasn’t going to go out there and not parade around with a flag.
“I got meaner, and then I met Sonny Liston, who had been the heavyweight champion of the world,” he said. “He kept a chip on his shoulder and I figured, ‘Hey, if you’re going to be champion, you’ve got to be mean and tough, disagreeable.’ And I copied and imitated him. I became better at being Sonny Liston than he did. Later on, I realized that was not the way to live.”
After building up a 38-0 professional record, he brutally beat champion Joe Frazier in two rounds in Jamaica in January 1973. He followed that up with two more impressive defenses, including stopping Ken Norton, who had broken Ali’s jaw in an upset victory a year earlier, in two rounds in March 1974. Then came Zaire in October 1974, where many believed Ali would be seriously hurt facing Foreman. Instead, Ali used his now-famous rope-a-dope strategy to tire Foreman out and stop him in eight rounds.
“I put some hard punches on Ali,” Foreman told me. “He beat me, but I was the one that did all the hard punching in that fight. Then, maybe in the seventh round I put it on him, I hit him with a hard shot. I thought maybe he was going to collapse. Maybe the sixth round. He said, ‘That all you got George?’ That was frightening to me.”
Still, Foreman carried resentments from that fight. “I beat the count in the Ali fight, but they still counted me out,” he told me.
Foreman had five more fights after that before he lost to Young and retired to become a minister. There was never a rematch with Ali. Why not? “I said real simple — one was scared, and the other was glad of it,” Foreman said. “We both lived content not having to fight one another again.”
Foreman’s next life as a minister kept him out of the ring for 10 years before he realized he needed to raise money for the George Foreman Youth Center.
He weighed nearly 270 pounds when he had his first comeback fight in May 1987, a sixth-round knockout of Steve Zouski.
He became a novelty act, a staple of talk shows, while he piled up 19 wins over three years. Then he knocked out Gerry Cooney in two rounds and went 12 rounds with heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, losing a decision, and people started to take him seriously.
“They were saying things about me, I didn’t like it, but I had to laugh,” Foreman said. “So I decided to have fun with it too. But my jab got better, my right hand got better and there I was, building up the knockouts, one by one, all over again.”
He had become the lovable George Foreman and laughed his way into a career as an advertising pitchman, with his record-breaking sales of the George Foreman Grill, so successful that the company decided to finally pay him $140 million just to continue to use his name. He retired from boxing in 1997 with a 76-5 record and 68 knockouts.
It was a righteous path from his start in Houston’s poor Fifth Ward.
“A compassionate society does not give up on its underprivileged,” Foreman said. “That’s what happened. I was able to leave Houston, Texas, and go all the way to Oregon, thanks to the Job Corps programs — people I’ve never seen, places I’ve never seen. They put their hands on me and molded me into being an Olympic gold medalist and heavyweight champion and now world traveler, all because of a society that didn’t give up on me.”
Amen, brother. You will be missed.
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