The plaintive clanging of the round keeper’s bell in a silent arena is the boxing equivalent of a twenty-one-gun salute. Recently, the bell rang ten times in honor of the two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman. As a reporter who once covered the small boxing beat for The Wall Street Journal, I was privileged to enjoy numerous conversations with the “virtuoso of violence” who spread love and peace as easily as he flung feed to the chickens on his Texas farm.
In the 1970s, Norman Mailer described Foreman as “the toe of God.” Tastes have changed since then. Boxing is currently on the ropes, having slipped off the sports page of major newspapers. So for readers whose main association with the big guy is the George Foreman Grill, permit me a paragraph to reintroduce this extraordinary boxer.
Raised in poverty in Houston’s notoriously violent Fifth Ward, Foreman was a physical outlier. He was a thickly muscled 6’3”: his superpower was his super power. In time, he would develop into one of the hardest punchers in pugilistic history. After some scrapes with the law, the undisputed king of neighborhood bullies enlisted in the Job Corps and soon thereafter began his brief but glorious amateur boxing career. With a meager résumé of only twenty-four amateur bouts and battling elite opponents who were veterans of hundreds of fights, the nineteen-year-old Foreman put a string of foes to sleep and punched his way to a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics.
He turned professional in 1969 and took the heavyweight crown from Joe Frazier in 1973. Then came the unforgettable 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, in which an aging Muhammad Ali snatched the title-belt from Foreman with an upset knockout victory. In 1977, trying to rebuild his résumé and secure a rematch with Ali, Foreman dropped a unanimous decision to the unheralded Jimmy Young.
After collapsing in the locker room after the fight, the emotionally crushed Foreman had an overpowering religious experience. Most observers chalked it up to dehydration, but Foreman recalled, “In that dressing room, after the fight, I died. I saw death, hell, and I called out to Jesus. That moment changed my life forever.” At twenty-eight—after only his second defeat—a distraught Foreman hung up the gloves, was ordained, and started a season of street-corner preaching.
A decade later, out of condition and tipping the scales at close to three hundred pounds, the monster whom Ali had nicknamed “The Mummy” announced he was returning to the ring in order to make some money to support a Youth Center he had opened in Houston. The boxing cognoscenti were skeptical; there was even some debate as to whether it was even safe to let the aging flabby behemoth back into the ring. They were in for a surprise. Like I said, Foreman was a physical outlier with preternatural power in his huge fists. In 1994, just five years shy of fifty and clad in the same trunks he wore in his loss to Ali, Foreman achieved redemption, regaining the heavyweight crown via a knockout victory over Michael Moorer, a previously undefeated gladiator almost nineteen years younger than Foreman. In 1997, Foreman quit boxing for good, and in 1980, Rev. Foreman founded The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, where he served as pastor for many years.
Before his road-to-Damascus experience, the young George Foreman was such a menacing figure that many opponents succumbed to fear before they even stepped in the ring with him. In one of our early tete-a-tetes, Foreman ruefully confessed that when he was climbing the rankings as a young boxer, he would actually go into bouts hoping to beat his foe to death. I had never heard this horrible confession from another boxer. Before the first bell, most fighters retreat to their corners to utter a quick prayer for their mutual safety. But pre-conversion Foreman imagined that having killed someone in the ring would make him all the more intimidating to other fighters. Fortunately, Big George never realized this ghoulish ambition.
As that intellectual heavyweight Søren Kierkegaard observed, it is in fact a rare person who learns from experience and escapes from endlessly repeating his or her cycle of blunders. Foreman was such a person. After his losses and the dark years of depression that followed, Foreman evolved from being a wrathful and self-serving Goliath to a humble and intensely jovial servant to others. One afternoon, I asked Foreman the preacher and Youth Center boxing coach, “How can you devote yourself to teaching teens how to bust someone in the cheek while preaching the Word of the God-man who commanded us to turn the other cheek?”
Foreman explained, “You can’t be successful in boxing unless you learn to control your emotions. And people who can control their emotions are more peaceful than those who can’t.” His knowledge of the importance of self-control in boxing was distilled from painful personal experience. Because of Foreman’s hyper-aggression in Part I of his career, he would gas out early in a fight. In fact, Ali’s brilliant rope-a-dope strategy was born of his insight that the murderous maniac in Foreman would quickly punch himself out. Ali deployed this strategy even before the opening bell rang by enraging Foreman with a steady flow of prefight taunts. Ali’s ploy was genius, Foreman recalled, “In the third or fourth round, I hit Muhammad with a shot around the neck. The air went out of him, he groaned and was hurt. I thought, ‘Ah, now I got him.’ But no. Muhammad had incredible determination and an incredible ability to absorb punches. The next round he would tie me up and bait me, whispering, ‘Come on, is that all you got, George?’ And I was thinking, ‘Yup. That’s about it.’”
Even at the amateur level, boxers have to learn to get their emotions on a leash and avoid the energy-draining fight-or-flight mode. Many of those drawn to boxing come to the sport to vent their anger or to overcome insecurities and fear. But again, serious progress requires learning how to keep your cool. Foreman was right: people who can control their emotions are more peaceful than those who can’t. I suggested an addendum. The search for self-control answers to philosophy’s first commandment, “Know thyself.” After all, in trying to master your emotions, it helps to be able to identify them. And make no mistake: everyone who commits to the sport of boxing can count on becoming better acquainted with the emotions that make them tick.
Foreman was happy to expand on this theme: “There are thousands of kids who come from homes where there is nothing but shouting, slamming doors, anger, and fighting. These kids—and I was one of them—go to school with a chip on their shoulders. Naturally, they get into trouble just like at home. It’s nothing but criticism in school or worse—being ignored and written off. These kids don’t get any affirmation. Then maybe they find a boxing gym and when they stick with it there is finally someone, a coach slapping them on the back, telling them they are good at something. We all need the sunshine of affirmation and when these kids get some of that sunshine, they blossom.” Chuckling, Foreman continued, “Sometimes there is a bonus. Most men can’t help but appreciate fighting skills, so when their boys or girls start competing, fathers who have been largely absent from their lives often suddenly start showing up at the bouts and even the gym. When the stars align, boxing even has the power to nudge family life in a better direction.”
Maya Angelou once offered this nugget of wisdom, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” After his conversion, Foreman always made the people around him feel good. He put it this way, “You don’t become successful by just being talented; you become successful by making others feel important.” Foreman’s dear friend, former world champion Raul Marquez, said of his pal, “George was all heart. A humble, accessible giant who made everyone feel seen.” Foreman had escaped from his old cycle of uncontrolled rage into a habit of uncommon kindness.
