Until his sudden death in Texas last week, George Foreman was the last surviving great of heavyweight boxing’s golden era. It was an age defined by Foreman, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, who all fought each other in the 1970s.
Foreman etched his name in sporting history with his 1974 fight in Zaire against Muhammad Ali. Foreman, at that point, was undefeated in 37 fights by the time he was due to face Ali in ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’. After knocking out Joe Frazier in two brutal rounds, Foreman was the undeniable favourite. Yet despite his apparently unassailable size, power and confidence, he was knocked out by Ali in the eighth round. It was as if he had absorbed Foreman’s power when resting on the ropes for seven punishing rounds.
The defeat to Ali, who by then was at his peak, led to a dark period in Foreman’s life. Only a few years later, he retired at the comparatively young age of 28 to pursue a career as a preacher. In a tale all-too-familiar for ex-boxers, Foreman soon found himself broke, aimless and depressed.
Foreman’s great misfortune was to have encountered Ali not only in his prime, but also at the precise moment that he wanted to prove himself to the world for one final occasion. The match was then immortalised in books such as The Fight (1975) by Norman Mailer and the documentary, When We Were Kings (1996). Foreman has since come to be seen as the final, necessary hurdle for Ali to overcome in order to cement his legacy as The Greatest, rather than a talent in his own right.
But this picture is far from complete. Ali’s victory was indeed remarkable, but this was no one-sided beating. Mailer writes that the only time he ever saw fear in Ali’s eyes was when he returned to his corner at the end of the first round against Foreman. Given some of the punches Ali took, it was a miracle he even remained standing by the eighth round. What’s more, he was never the same person afterwards. He had a few memorable victories, but his powers started to wane noticeably.
Foreman, on the other hand, would go on to pull off a remarkable comeback – a feat arguably more impressive than Ali’s in The Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman spent 10 years out of the ring before he decided, mainly for financial reasons, to start boxing again in 1994. He was overweight, had lost his hair, and seemed like a relic of a bygone age, as stars like Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis were now dominant. Foreman landed what was widely expected to be his final world-title fight against Michael Moorer.
Moorer vs Foreman was like a mirror image of the Ali fight 20 years earlier. Foreman, now 45 years old, was to face an undefeated 26-year-old, who had just vanquished Holyfield. No sane person expected anything other than a comfortable victory for Moorer.
When he entered the ring in Las Vegas, Foreman looked every bit his 45 years. His gloves hung indifferently at his waist, he even had small folds of fat, Tyson Fury-style, hanging over his trunks. He plodded around the ring, seemingly unable to throw more than two punches at a time. As it turned out, two punches were all he needed.
‘Don’t punch with a puncher’ is one of the most frequently repeated mantras in boxing. And Foreman, despite his years, remained a puncher, if not exactly an athlete. (Mailer described watching Foreman bludgeon a heavybag as ‘one of the more prodigious sights I’ve seen in my life’.) In the 10th round, after a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it left-right, Moorer was out cold, and Foreman knelt in prayer in his corner.
In the same year as his boxing comeback, the world was also introduced to the George Foreman Grill. The ‘Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine’ became a staple in homes across the US and UK. Some obituaries have gone so far as to describe the grill and the Foreman-fronted infomercials (‘So good I put my name on it!’) as a ‘cultural phenomenon’. He would go on to make significantly more money from the grill, reportedly earning more than $200million, than he ever did from boxing.
Foreman’s life, with its many ups and downs, was like a movie script. Big George Foreman, the 2023 biopic, practically wrote itself. There was the troubled youth, growing up in poverty with six siblings, dropping out of school and turning to crime. Then there was the trainer who ‘sees something’ where others notice only a petty criminal, followed by the humiliation of defeat against Ali and his final chance at redemption against Moorer.
Foreman is justifiably considered among the greatest boxers in history. He not only defeated Joe Frazier, but also Ron Lyle and fellow hall-of-famer Ken Norton. He had 81 professional fights, winning 68 of those by knockout. Only one boxer ever managed to knock him out in return: Muhammad Ali, the undisputed greatest.
Boxing careers, more than any other sport, are shaped by their generation and their opponents. Sugar Ray Robinson needed Jake LaMotta to be great, just as Ali, Foreman and Frazier needed one another. It is this class of competition that has eluded the great modern boxers like Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk. A fight with the stakes of ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’ seems unlikely to ever happen again, as the best boxers find every conceivable excuse not to share the ring with each other, and as rivalries between promoters have become more significant than those between boxers.
Boxing’s decline has been slow and painful to witness. Foreman, the man and the fighter, is another reminder of what has been lost and what we are unlikely to see again.
Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.
