Big George’s fury wasn’t good for your fate.
Levi Forte, “The Battlin’ Bellhop” of Miami Beach, ended up with three broken ribs when he fought Foreman.
Jack O’Halloran flew straight through the ropes.
Bob Hazleton got 33 stitches in his mouth.
Rufus Brassell, the Lima heavyweight he knocked out in the first round, said it best: “The first time he hit me in the face, it went numb. I had no feeling in my cheeks or lips. It was like going to the dentist.”
Our confrontation came in June of 1993, a few days before Foreman was to fight Tommy Morrison. I stopped by his workout in the Las Vegas Hilton, and when he finished, he met me at the ring apron.
A day earlier he’d become angered and walked out when an Australian writer called Morrison — he of the mom and apple pie press releases; red, white and blue trunks; bottled blond hair; supposed John Wayne lineage; and Rocky V movie fame — a “Great White Hope.”
It was a throwback term to a time many white Americans wanted any Caucasian they could find to uncrown any Black heavyweight king.
I’d come to ask George why he’d been so incensed. I was a bit flippant and before I got the whole question out, his plumpish features suddenly hardened and his smile evaporated:
“You may as well change the topic. I’m not gonna talk about that.”
We knew each other — I’d covered some of his fights over the years and had interviewed him several times — so I just sat down on the apron and waited for him to calm down and eventually he sat next to me and said:
“When you’re a single man, you can say all that kind of cantankerous, downright filthy, illiterate, offensive, sickening, disgusting, putrid junk. It’s foul. It’s trash
“But when you get to be a man raising kids, you should be completely responsible and avoid anything like that. There’s no room for it in the world.”
He told how he wouldn’t let his children compartmentalize people by their skin color: “If someone comes to the door and I ask who it is, they’re going to have to draw a picture before they can say it’s a white man or a Black lady.”
Foreman happened to see his 15-year-old daughter, Georgette, across the Las Vegas Hilton ballroom and called her over:
“What are the two words, I tell you never to use about people?” he asked.
She didn’t hesitate: “Black and white, Daddy.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
‘It haunted me’
I thought of this exchange — and many more we had over the years — when I heard the 76-year-old Foreman died Friday in a Houston hospital.
A few years back Ring Magazine rated him one of the 25 greatest fighters of all time, and the ninth greatest puncher.
His 76-5 record included 68 knockouts.
He won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
Four years later in Kingston, Jamaica, he destroyed Joe Frazier, the unbeaten heavyweight champ, knocking him down six times in the first two rounds.
A year later, Muhammad Ali outwitted him in the ring in Kinshasa, Zaire, and took his crown — and his confidence — with an eighth-round knockout, a demise the African crowd celebrated.
After another loss in 1977 to Jimmy Young, he retired, became a preacher and ballooned up to 340 pounds.
I remember talking to him in Indianapolis then, and he walked with a cane and had trouble catching his breath.
And then he shocked everyone and returned to the ring in 1987,
Seven years later — 45 years old and weighing 250 pounds — he became the oldest man in history to win the heavyweight title when he stopped the heavily favored Michal Moorer, who was 18 years younger, 15 pounds lighter and unbeaten in 35 fights.
Although he trailed on all scorecards, Foreman landed a big right hand — he called it his “ham hocks and chitlins” punch — in the 10th round that crumpled Moorer
Thankfully, that day of our tete de tete, he didn’t add one of those soul food exclamation points as he explained why he hated reducing his sport with skin color.
The day he won the gold in Mexico City, he walked around the ring with a tiny American flag stuck in his mitt. It ended up being the best-known and most misunderstood act of his career.
At those same Games, U.S. track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith had been booted out of the Olympic Village for giving a single-fisted, black power salute during the national anthem.
Foreman’s flag waving was interpreted by some as a slap in the face to Smith, Carlos and other Black protesters, and he was unfairly painted as an Uncle Tom.
“I was just proud right then and then someone handed me that flag,” he said. “I wanted to show that pride. I wasn’t thinking anything about politics, but a lot of people got mad. All that stuff put a chip on my shoulder.”
In 1974, when he went to Zaire to defend his heavyweight title, he suddenly experienced the worst twisting of race and ring.
“That problem haunts me more than anything,” Foreman said. “I was so happy about going to Africa. I had me those dashikis, and I was in the mood for the motherland and all that.
“But from the start I was made to feel an outsider. Like I didn’t belong. Ali promoted it. And during the fight there were all those people — people from my homeland, too — yelling for him to kill me.
“Right then I felt homeless.”
As the years passed, Foreman vowed never to get into that situation again.
Back in 1990 before he fought Adilson Rodrigues, I sat with him in his 13th-floor suite at Caesars Palace, and he talked about the Ali loss as he never had before:
“My whole world got changed. I was the heavyweight champ and wasn’t afraid of him at all. I knew he was frightened, but he fought me like a cat. An alley cat. He mugged me.
“He did a number on me. Handed me a beating I couldn’t get out of my mind. I’d wake up at night sweatin'. It was like somebody threw buckets of water on me. It haunted me.”
That helped bring on his retirement at age 28. He went through a few marriages, became a preacher and ended up with 12 kids, seven girls and five boys he all named George.
In 1985 he married his wife, Mary, who was with him when he died.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Dreaming big
When he fought Moorer, Mary helped him find the old orange velour trunks he’d worn to fight Ali. He thought it would set the stage for redemption.
“The elastic was shot so once we got George squeezed into them, we taped them to his leather cup,” trainer Angelo Dundee, who worked Foreman’s corner, told me with a laugh.
“By the end of the first round, they were starting to slide and it took me and the referee, Joey Cortez, to pull them back up on George.”
Foreman explained his sartorial insistence later:
“I know these shorts are kinda tight and make me look a little chubby. But written on them was ‘George Foreman, Heavyweight Champ.’ I wanted to get back to that moment.”
Dundee — knowing Foreman was 33 pounds heavier than that night he fought Ali — wasn’t sure the stitches would hold, so he brought a spare pair of white satin trunks into the corner, “just in case.”
If Foreman’s corner wasn’t sure of his pants, it didn’t doubt the power of his punch, and when it landed in the 10th, Moorer fell backwards onto the canvas.
As Cortez counted Moorer out at 2:03 of the 10th, Foreman — his lips swollen, his left eye beginning to close, his arms, chest and back scraped and bruised from many of Moorer’s 641 punches — knelt in his corner and offered a prayer.
Right then, the world of boxing should have offered a prayer of thanks, as well.
Foreman had gone from aging leftover to a beloved, larger-than-life hero.
After Foreman regained the title, Dundee, who was in Ali’s corner that night in Zaire, explained the transformation:
“The biggest change in George is that he likes who he is these days. Before the Ali fight in Zaire, he was an introvert. He was suspicious and bitter.
“Once he got to liking himself, he just blossomed. It changed his whole outlook.”
After he retired again in 1997, Foreman became a TV fight commentator, continued with his ministry and had great success selling his George Foreman Grill.
He lived in a 45-acre compound outside Houston and raised Black Angus cattle.
As I think of George Foreman today, I remember something he said after the Moorer fight:
“The way I saw it, if you’re living, you should be dreaming. I figure, don’t let anyone tell you what you can’t do. You just go out there and prove yourself. Don’t let people talk you down, they don’t mean no harm.
“They just got that thing called a mouth.”
I know what he meant.
Because of mine, I nearly got a taste of ham hocks and chitlins one day.
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