George Foreman’s life was extraordinary, and his transformation fit for a giant

Boxing - George Foreman bt Terry Anderson , Heavyweight Contest - London Arena 25/9/90
Mandatory Credit:Action Images
George Foreman - USA — George Foreman was a titan both in and out of the ring. (Action Images)

If you were around in the 1990s, the George Foreman you knew was a gentle giant. You could see the dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, which was often. He would talk about his faith in such a warm way that even if you didn’t believe, you wanted to believe. The old boxing heads would tell you about his transformation from what he was in the 1970s, back when he was boxing’s heavyweight champion. The words they used made no sense.

Brooding. Mean. Terrifying.

Impossible when talking about the teddy bear who knocked out Michael Moorer just shy of his 46th birthday to recapture the heavyweight title. “Big George" was the sweetest, most inexplicable man in sports. Everybody rooted for him. When he started selling his George Foreman Grill around that same time, people bought it. He went on talk shows and made everyone laugh. He had such a joy in life that you’d assume that nothing bad had ever happened to him.

It wasn’t that at all. It was that nothing could kill him.

Foreman died at 76 years old Friday, leaving behind one of the single greatest legacies in sports. He authored some of the biggest knockouts in boxing’s history, the most celebrated of which came some 20 years apart. In 1968, he won Olympic gold for the United States at just 19 years old, just a few years removed from being a wayward child in Houston’s Fifth Ward, in which he dropped out of high school and committed petty crimes to make ends meet. After he won gold in Mexico City, he famously walked around the ring waving a small American flag, a gesture that meant different things to different people right in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, but a powerful sight.

(Original Caption) 10/26/1968-Mexico City, Mexico- George Foreman of Houston, TX, waves a small American flag after he won the Olympics heavyweight boxing gold medal to climax America's greatest effort at an Olympics. The US walked away with 45 gold medals, 27 silvers and 34 bronze. Foreman scored a second-round technical knockout over Ionas Chepulis of the Soviet Union. — George Foreman waves a small American flag after winning the heavyweight boxing gold medal at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

That was the first transformation in a life full of them.

As a professional, he raced out to a 37-0 record in the span of five years, before truly arriving on the scene in Kingston, Jamaica, in January 1973 to face the mighty Joe Frazier, less than two years after "Smokin’ Joe" beat Muhammad Ali in the “Fight of the Century.” It was there that Foreman turned the boxing world’s blood cold, knocking Frazier down six times before the fight was mercifully stopped in the second round. The aftershocks carried over the decades, and Howard Cosell’s words from that night have become like a soundtrack to the fight game’s psyche as Foreman stood over the scene.

“Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”

Yet it wasn’t the victories that ultimately came to define Foreman’s life. It was the defeats and epiphanies and genuine convictions, the leaps of faith he took which came to define him. It was the greatness he inspired. When he fought Muhammad Ali in the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, he was regarded as an indifferent juggernaut come to execute the “People’s Champion.” Such a Goliath figure was he that many close to the fight worried for Ali’s life, which from the Foreman perspective was a dark place from which to work. He did what an unreachable champion cast in such a light might as well do. He leaned into it. He dialed his conscience down to the dead level of zero and let the world wobble through his intimidation.

Norman Mailer, who was there for both camps and captured it all in his book “The Fight,” spoke of such fears on the brilliant 1997 documentary, “When We Were Kings.”

"Foreman hitting the heavy bag is one of the more prodigious sights I’ve had in my life,” Mailer said. “Of all the people I’ve seen hitting the heavy bag, including Sonny Liston, no one ever hit it the way Foreman did. At the end of hitting the heavy bag there would be a huge dent about the size of a small watermelon."

Foreman had to be regarded as nearly invincible for Ali to reach the magnitudes that he did by beating him. It was a crushing blow to Foreman, who was just 25 years old at the time. He bounced back to win a few more fights in the 1970s, but the sheen of invincibility was off. Yet the lights within came on. He said he heard the voice of God in his 1977 fight with Jimmy Young out in the sweltering heat of Puerto Rico, and that was enough to have him walk away from the fight game for a decade. His calling was the pulpit out in Houston. He wanted to help people. He became a preacher.

Out of the spotlight, he changed into the benevolent force that emerged by the early 1990s as boxing’s unlikeliest champion. As a man given over to faith, he was a personal exhibit in resurrection, a rise from the ashes story wholly made over from what remained of the memory’s stronghold on the guy with the German Shepherd and the overalls, whose power made the hair stand on end. Here was the smiling minister, happily rotund in his mid-40s, a jiggling middle that only served as testimony to his new grill, packing preternatural power in his second act. Whatever was vacant before was now full, solemnity all but purged, packing a vibrancy that spoke to everyone.

World Heavyweight champion George Foreman holds press conference the morning after beating Joe Frazier. (Photo by UPI Color/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images) — World heavyweight champion George Foreman holds press conference the morning after beating Joe Frazier. (UPI Color/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Impossible? Just a word.

Foreman wasn’t bitter about the fight with Ali. In fact, Foreman was Ali’s biggest fan. He said Ali was the greatest man he’d ever met in his life. Tied to him forever, Foreman found more love and acceptance in that fight than he would’ve if he’d have won. This was the legacy of “Big George." Happiness was a byproduct of his discoveries. This, too, changed all narratives.

Then he won the heavyweight title against Moorer in 1994. It immortalized him in the end, yet in that moment it humanized him. Imagine that. George Foreman came from such a place of unspeakable mute rage, of such a detached place in those early days, that it took a nearly impossible act to bring him back down to Earth. When Ali was lighting the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, Foreman was still on top of the boxing world. It didn’t make sense.

And he wasn’t intimidating in the slightest. He was the lovable, relatable human being. A father, a grandfather, a husband, an entrepreneur, a man of dedicated faith. It made you wonder if the world really knew Foreman at all when he terrified the heavyweight ranks in the 1970s. George himself would be the first to tell you he didn’t. But he never forgot who he was, and he loved who he was enough to fill that terrifying figure in.

“Big George,” what beautiful colors you used.

2d 2:16 PM ET ago

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