George Foreman's greatest feat? The complete metamorphosis that led to a brilliant second wind

George Foreman lands a punch on WBA and IBF heavyweight champion Michael Moorer during their Nov. 5, 1994 fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Foreman won via 10th round knockout.

(John Iacono via Getty Images)

My earliest memory of George Foreman is from a TV commercial in 1991 advertising his bout with Jimmy Ellis. I remember it very clearly.

It starts with Foreman in a full gray sweatsuit, jogging through the streets with his face buried somewhere deep in his hood. He lumbers past a man who reaches up to hand him a cup of water while cheering him on. Next he passes through an open air fruit market where a vendor hands him an apple. Classic stuff, really. Straight out of a Rocky montage. Then the comedy sets in.

An old woman in a bakery hands him a cupcake, which he cheerfully scarfs down without ever breaking stride. Then it’s hamburgers, one in each fist. Then it’s several pizzas, followed by rotisserie chickens and a giant party sub. The voiceover tells us: “George Foreman is hungry to fight again — and only HBO’s got it.”

This was not subtle messaging, but it worked on me. Here’s a fat old man who will nonetheless compete in a professional boxing match, which is strange and unexpected and therefore interesting. And so, as a 12-year-old kid, that’s who I thought Foreman was. Some old bald boxer with a sense of humor about himself.

I didn’t realize there’d ever been any other version of him. Not until some rainy Sunday a year or two later when my dad showed me the “Rumble in the Jungle,” Foreman’s famous 1974 title fight against Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire.

I had a hard time believing this could be the same person I knew from the TV commercial. This was a colossus of a man, with a physique chiseled out of stone. He had big hair and a steely glare, no hint that he had ever once laughed, much less poked fun at himself. He wailed away on Ali with looping, thumping hooks. When I observed that Ali seemed to be doing nothing but leaning on the ropes and taking it, my dad told me: “Just watch.”

We all know what happened then. How Ali “rope-a-doped” Foreman straight into his trap. How he wore him out and put him down. How he pulled off the impossible upset, snatching Foreman’s heavyweight title and cementing himself forever as a boxing icon. In the movie about his life starring Will Smith, this is the freeze frame climax. Play the music and roll the credits. As a viewer, you don’t even think to ask yourself what became of Foreman after that.

After news spread that Foreman had died last week at the age of 76, the obituaries mostly dwelled on three key points in his life: the loss to Ali, the shocking knockout win over Michael Moorer to make him the oldest man to win the heavyweight title, and the enormous financial success of the “lean mean fat-reducing grilling machine” that bears his name.

To hear people tell it, Foreman basically disappeared between the years 1975 and 1994. He simply went away as one man (the big, brooding monster who Ali dethroned) and reemerged as another (the kindly old grandfather who could help you cook a burger in your dorm room). The actual process of this metamorphosis tends to get forgotten entirely, which is a shame, since it too is an incredible story of growth and resiliency.

For instance, did you know that the year after his loss to Ali, Foreman returned to the ring in a regrettable gimmick event that would see him fight five opponents in one night?

Howard Cosell, who called the action next to Ali at ringside, called it a “sad charade.” Foreman, looking noticeably heavier and clumsier than he had as champ, clowned around in between heaving haymakers at overmatched nobodies. One of the fights was stopped after Foreman seemingly instructed the referee that his opponent had had enough. Two of the bouts restarted after being called off, as both men continued throwing punches and even wrestling each other to the mat amid a melee of bodies.

This version of Foreman, as Cosell put it, was “an obviously troubled young man who has lost his confidence in the wake of his loss to Ali.” He was 26 years old, a former champ. The event was meant to reignite fan interest in the hopes of setting up a rematch with Ali. Instead it inspired pity and scorn. Look how far Foreman had fallen, was the general consensus. The loss to Ali broke him, and he’ll never be the same again.

That could have been it. That could have been the way he was remembered forever by the sport of boxing.

A year later he was knocked down twice by Ron Lyle before coming back to win by fifth-round knockout. He’d go on to win his next four, including the rematch with former heavyweight champ Joe Frazier, before losing a unanimous decision to Jimmy Young in Puerto Rico in a fight that, according to Foreman, very nearly killed him.

“It was the most profound thing that ever happened to me in my life,” Foreman said later. “That night in the dressing room after Jimmy Young, I was so tired and so hot, and I just couldn’t keep fight, fight, fighting for my life. Then I heard a voice in that dressing room that asked, ‘Do you believe in God? Why are you ready to die?’ I had just been talking about God. I didn’t really believe in religion. I started fighting, trying to make a deal. Still then, I wasn’t fighting anyone I knew. I said to the voice, ‘Look I am George Foreman. I can give money to charity and for cancer,’ and the voice answered me back, ‘I don’t want your money, I want you.’”

Foreman would not fight again for another 10 years. He became an ordained minister. He opened the George Foreman Youth and Community Center in Houston. When he did finally return to the ring in 1987, he said it was primarily to earn money for the youth center. At 38, his plan was to fight Mike Tyson in a big money showdown between boxing’s past and present.

That fight never materialized, but he did reel off 24 straight wins, all but one of which ended inside the distance. That set up his 1991 heavyweight title fight against Evander Holyfield, which in a strange way would be one of his finest hours, even in defeat.

You go back and watch that fight and you see a very different Foreman from the one who battled Ali in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not just physically, though of course there was that, too. But stylistically, this was a Foreman who had improved his defense and his footwork along with his mental game.

Ali had broken Foreman psychologically as much as physically. He exhausted the big man while also making him question everything he’d come to believe about himself as a fighter. For his entire career up to that point, power had been enough. He wasn’t much of a boxer. He didn’t know how to manage his own energy or set his own traps, and hadn’t ever mattered. Joe Frazier once compared being in the ring with Foreman to being stuck in an alley with a Mack truck. There was no finesse. He was just going to put his foot on the gas and run you over.

Ali had exposed the limitations of that approach, revealing to Foreman just how much he didn’t know. In order to fully recover from that experience, he had to become not only a different fighter, but a different person. In the Holyfield fight, it was apparent that he had.

Foreman, at 42, absorbed a staggering 355 punches in that fight, with jabs accounting for only about one-third of that total. Holyfield battered him with everything he had. Foreman stood up to it and fired back with his clubbing right hands. As Holyfield recalled later, Foreman threw that right like he didn’t care which part of the appendage he hit you with. No matter what Holyfield hit him with in return, Foreman was still there, still enduring, a man who’d been through so much as a person that there was no longer any way to break him as a fighter.

In a peculiarity that makes sense only in fight sports, Foreman’s crowning achievement came on the heels of a loss. There was really no good reason for him to get a title shot against Moorer coming off a decision loss to Tommy Morrison the year prior. But Moorer had taken the title off Holyfield in a somewhat controversial majority decision, and now he wanted to get paid before turning his attention to the actual contenders in the heavyweight division. Foreman was a proven draw, but also a fat old man. He’d be easy work and there’d be good money in it. So went the theory, anyway.

Just shy of his 33rd birthday, Moorer easily outboxed and outmaneuvered Foreman for most of the fight, as expected. But this was a Foreman who knew himself. All he had to do was last and wait for his chance. In the tenth round, it came. Moorer slowed down and, as Foreman had predicted, stood in front of the challenger a moment too long. This time Foreman wasn’t loading up for a knockout with every punch, as his younger self would have. Instead he was calmly firing punches that, even at 45, arrived with tremendous force.

Foreman was nearly 50 when he finally retired for good after a majority decision loss to Shannon Briggs in 1997. By then his signature grill had made him many millions of dollars. He was known to younger fans as much for his good-humored, grandfatherly presence on HBO fight broadcasts as for his own exploits in the ring. During the Madison Square Garden riot following the Riddick Bowe vs. Andrew Golota fight, it was Foreman’s voice that could be heard on the audio, telling one fan who was eager to participate in the havoc: “Don’t do it, son. Go back to where you’re seated at.”

To those of us who first got to know this gregarious later version of Foreman, it seemed impossible to believe he was ever the brooding menace who glowered across the ring at Ali. Foreman the terror. Foreman the humorless knockout artist. Foreman the clumsy boxer with dynamite in his fists and malice in his heart.

He was a man who, in the depths of defeat and despair, remade himself into something better. He was living proof that people can change. All they have to do is suffer. And learn. And grow.

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George Foreman’s greatest feat? The complete metamorphosis that led to a brilliant second wind

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