George Foreman could take a punch.
Foreman, who died Friday at his home in Houston, was better known for other things. Like, most obviously, throwing a punch. He’s remembered as one of the hellaciousest hitters the sweet science ever saw, and his ring record (76-5 with 68 knockouts) and lots of YouTube highlights bolster that. The uninitiated can and should watch him seemingly lift Joe Frazier off the ground with a shot in 1973, or send former great white hope Gerry Cooney into retirement for good some 17 years later, or transport Michael Moorer to LaLa Land in late 1994. And outside the squared circle, Foreman famously shilled no-frills grills, and named all five of his sons George.
But when I think of Foreman, as I and lots of fight fans have been doing since the death news broke, what first comes to mind is how underappreciated the guy’s chin was. Yes, he really did hit like a truck. But for all his punching prowess, Foreman could take as good as he gave. And take he did.
He was reduced, reputation-wise, to a plodding thrower of haymakers who'd been outconditioned and outthought after he was knocked out in the eighth round by Muhammad Ali in their 1974 matchup in Zaire. Foreman kept on fighting for another 23 years, but never really shed the rep or bothered to try.
Yet that same fight, forever known as “The Rumble in the Jungle,” is what got me to reconsider Foreman’s abilities. This was an event that for decades I thought I knew everything about. I grew up a massive Ali fan, and the leadup to his bout with Foreman was bigger than for any sporting event of my life to that point. I'd been aware since I was a young lad that Ali had been exiled by the boxing world for refusing induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, and thereby became a face of the anti-war movement. Foreman, along with being bigger, stronger, and younger than Ali, was the establishment pick, a guy whose most famous photo pose was from waving a small American flag after winning a gold medal match at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968. Foreman was quiet and aloof even after knocking Joe Frazier down six times in two rounds in their 1973 bout to take the heavyweight championship. The beating Foreman doled out in the "Down goes Frazier!" fight was so outrageous that Ring Magazine named it Fight of the Year, the most one-sided to ever get that honor. I was completely in Ali’s corner, though I didn't think he had much of a chance.
I was a paperboy at that time, and was in bed when the opening bell for Ali-Foreman rang. I recall sleeping anxiously and being eager as hell to get to my stacks of newspapers at the corner long before dawn to find out how things went, and feeling shocked and as happy as sports can make a kid when I saw “Ali Kayoes Foreman in 8th” on the front page above the Washington Post’s nameplate. I sat on the curb and stayed on cloud nine while reading all the fight articles before delivering a single paper.
Fast forward to 2014. While working on a story built around the 40th anniversary of their scrap, I re-read those Post stories, and rewatched Foreman vs. Ali on YouTube several times. The archival newspaper articles reinforced the image of Foreman as a gassed plodder worn out by Ali’s rope-a-dope tactics; the featured column of the issue of the Post that I delivered the morning after, for example, was headlined “A Tired Sandpile Collapses.” “[Foreman] frightened no one—except those who feared being in the way when he crashed,” wrote Barry Furlong. “When finally he did crash, it was not as a great oak falls but as a tired sand pile collapses."
But the vintage videos of the bout were a completely different story. They blew up a whole lot of my lifelong conceptions about how the fight had gone. Upon further review, Ali hadn’t simply outsmarted his opponent. The way I re-saw things, Ali beat the hell outta him, round after round after round. The guy wasn’t called The Greatest for nothing. Instead of having his conditioning or fight plan bashed, it seemed to me Foreman deserved way more kudos for merely surviving as long as he did. The scorecards enhanced my opinion that the biggest fight of Foreman’s career is misremembered as one guy throwing punches and the other guy taking them: Ali, the alleged punch-taker, was actually up on every card by multiple points after seven rounds; one judge didn't give Foreman a single round that night. The real story is that the fight lasted into the eighth only because Foreman withstood several fistic barrages from Ali that would have floored anybody without his tungsten chin.
After “discovering” Foreman’s otherworldly toughness during my Rumble in the Jungle revisitation, I also rewatched several of his post-Ali bouts for the first time in decades. Damn if he didn’t withstand brutal onslaughts during his 1976 donnybrook with Ron Lyle, his first fight after the Zaire setback. And in the 1991 defeat to Evander Holyfield, in which the younger Holyfield spent the entire seventh round landing bombs with both hands but couldn’t put Foreman away. And on the way to doling out the legacy-cementing knockout of Michael Moorer in 1994, the same year he lent his name to the grill. The nearly 46-year-old Foreman had survived nine rounds of punishment from Moorer and was in need of a knockout when he hit the champ with a perfect straight right hand to the chin. Moorer slumped to the canvas and stayed there well beyond the 10 count, and Big George had the heavyweight title back, 20 years after he’d lost it to Ali in Zaire.
Foreman retired from fighting in 1997. The Ali fight is the only knockout loss of his 28-year career.
Foreman was 76 years old when he died. No cause of death has been released.
