George Foreman

#1By round ten on November 5, 1994, George Foreman was behind.

#2Across from him was Michael Moorer, the 26-year-old heavyweight champion. Moorer was 35–0, faster on his feet, and ahead on every judge’s scorecard.

#3Foreman was 45. He’d lost his previous fight to Tommy Morrison and hadn’t fought in 17 months.

#4And he was wearing a pair of faded red trunks.

#5They were the same trunks he’d worn 20 years earlier, when Muhammad Ali took the heavyweight title from him.

#6Moorer had been controlling the fight. Foreman’s left eye was swelling, and in Moorer’s corner, trainer Teddy Atlas kept giving the same warning: don’t stay in front of Foreman’s right hand.

#7Moorer had every reason to feel he was winning.

#8He was.

#9Then came round ten.

#10Foreman reached with his left and followed with a short right.

#11Moorer fell backward.

#12The referee started counting.

#13Ten.

#14Moorer didn’t get up.

#15At 45 years and 299 days old, George Foreman had become heavyweight champion of the world again.

#16He didn’t sprint around the ring. He walked to his corner, dropped to his knees, and prayed.

#17That was a long way from the George Foreman who’d first become champion at 24.

#18Foreman grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward. His family didn’t have much money, school went badly, and as a teenager he fought, got into trouble, and eventually dropped out.

#19One of the turns in his life came through the Job Corps, a federal program that offered young people education and job training. There he met boxing coach Charles "Doc" Broadus.

#20Broadus took a big teenager who already knew how to fight in the street and started teaching him how to fight in a ring.

#21The results came fast.

#22Foreman won heavyweight gold at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Then he turned professional and won his first 37 fights. Thirty-four ended by knockout.

#23In 1973, he challenged heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, the man who had handed Ali his first professional loss.

#24Foreman knocked Frazier down six times in two rounds.

#25At 24, he was heavyweight champion of the world.

#26And he looked frightening.

#27He rarely smiled. He stared opponents down, walked forward, and hit with enough force to make even elite heavyweights look overwhelmed.

#28After 37 fights, no one had beaten him.

#29Being powerful had started to feel like more than something Foreman could do.

#30It was getting very close to who he thought he was.

#31Then he met Ali.

#32The fight happened in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974.

#33Foreman was the favorite. He was younger, undefeated, and had been crushing top heavyweights. Ali was older and widely considered past his best.

#34But Ali didn’t fight the way Foreman wanted him to.

#35He backed toward the ropes and let Foreman throw.

#36Foreman kept punching. Ali kept surviving.

#37The punches were still heavy, but Foreman was spending more and more energy to throw them.

#38In the eighth round, Ali attacked.

#39Foreman went down.

#40He didn’t beat the count.

#41It was his first professional loss, and his heavyweight title was gone.

#42What happened afterward bothered him too.

#43Before Kinshasa, people had been afraid of him. Now they came over, patted him on the back, and treated him with sympathy.

#44Foreman later described that period as a kind of grieving. He felt as though he’d lost part of himself.

#45But the familiar version of the story often jumps ahead too quickly.

#46Foreman didn’t lose to Ali and immediately quit boxing to become a preacher.

#47He kept fighting.

#48He started winning again. In 1976, he beat Joe Frazier for a second time.

#49And he wanted Ali again.

#50Foreman wanted another chance to erase what had happened in Africa and prove that the old version of himself was still there.

#51Ali hadn’t ended Foreman’s career.

#52He’d left him with a loss he couldn’t accept.

#53In March 1977, Foreman fought Jimmy Young in Puerto Rico.

#54He lost by decision.

#55After an exhausting fight in severe heat, Foreman returned to the dressing room in bad physical shape. What happened there became one of the most important events in the way he understood his life.

#56Foreman said he felt as if he were dying. He described falling into emptiness, calling out to God, and believing that God had pulled him back.

#57There was also a medical reality: he’d been through a punishing fight in oppressive conditions and needed treatment. The religious meaning was Foreman’s interpretation of what he experienced.

#58For him, though, it changed everything.

#59He left boxing at 28.

#60Then he became a minister.

#61Foreman preached in Houston and later opened a youth and community center for local kids. The man who’d once built an image around intimidation was now standing in front of congregations with a Bible.

#62His feelings about Ali changed much more slowly.

#63Years passed before Foreman said he could finally admit the simplest version of what happened in Kinshasa.

#64He lost.

#65Ali beat him.

#66For years, that had been difficult to say.

#67At one point, Ali himself called Foreman.

#68He praised him and encouraged him to return to boxing, even mentioning opponents such as Ken Norton.

#69Years earlier, Foreman might have heard exactly what he wanted to hear.

#70This time, he said no.

#71He was a preacher.

#72Foreman stayed out of professional boxing for nearly a decade, which makes his 1987 comeback harder to explain as simple nostalgia.

#73Something practical had changed.

#74His youth center needed money.

#75Foreman had been using his own money to keep the place going, and the financial pressure was growing. Later, he often told a story about going to a church to raise funds.

#76The congregation gave an offering.

#77It wasn’t enough.

#78So the pastor asked them to give again.

#79Foreman sat at the pulpit watching.

#80These weren’t rich people. Yet they were reaching into their pockets one more time because a former heavyweight champion needed help keeping his youth center open.

#81Foreman said he felt embarrassed.

#82He decided he’d make the money himself.

#83There was one profession he knew very well.

#84Boxing.

#85There was a problem, though.

#86George Foreman was 38 years old.

#87And he weighed more than 300 pounds.

#88Foreman tried to fit into his old boxing clothes.

#89They didn’t fit.

#90He bought a scale and stepped on it.

#91305 pounds.

#92About 138 kilograms.

#93Foreman decided the scale must be wrong.

#94So he returned it.

#95He bought another one, then avoided stepping on that one for a while.

#96Eventually, he started training. He ran, worked on his body, and tried to rebuild a professional fighter after nearly a decade away.

#97There’s a story from that period about his wife, Joan. Foreman told her to drive ten miles from home and pick him up after he’d run there.

#98By the time she found him, he’d already made it ten miles, turned around, and was running back.

#99In March 1987, almost exactly ten years after his previous professional fight, Foreman returned.

#100He was 38 and weighed 267½ pounds.

#101He stopped Steve Zouski in four rounds.

#102The boxing world didn’t suddenly decide it was witnessing history.

#103A lot of people laughed.

#104He was too old. Too heavy. And many of his early opponents weren’t top contenders.

#105Some of that criticism was fair. Foreman wasn’t jumping straight into elite competition.

#106Instead, he used real fights to rebuild what ten years outside the ring had taken away.

#107One fight. Then another. Then another.

#108In 1988 alone, he fought nine times.

#109After seeing one of his comeback fights on television, Foreman’s oldest daughter, Michi, teased him.

#110She said she thought she had the wrong channel.

#111For a moment, she thought she was watching sumo wrestling.

#112The younger Foreman had once struggled even with people feeling sorry for him. After Ali, sympathy itself had felt unbearable.

#113Now his own daughter was making fun of his body, and Foreman could laugh with her.

#114The comeback version of George Foreman had a different public face.

#115He joked about his age. He joked about his stomach. He joked about food.

#116There probably wasn’t one single reason for that change.

#117He’d spent years as a minister. He’d become a father to a large family. He’d worked with kids at his youth center. He’d gotten older, won fights, lost fights, and lived for years without being heavyweight champion.

#118Still, being likable wasn’t enough.

#119Eventually, he had to fight someone who could prove whether this comeback was real.

#120In 1990, he knocked out Gerry Cooney in the second round.

#121Then, in 1991, came reigning heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield.

#122Foreman was 42.

#123Holyfield was 28.

#124Holyfield was faster and landed hard.

#125Foreman kept fighting.

#126They went all 12 rounds.

#127Foreman lost by decision.

#128But the reaction afterward was completely different from the early comeback years.

#129A 42-year-old man had just gone the distance with the heavyweight champion. Holyfield later talked about hitting Foreman with everything he had and still being unable to put him down.

#130Foreman didn’t win the belt that night.

#131He won credibility.

#132People could no longer dismiss the comeback as just a novelty act.

#133That was one of the big differences between the two Foremans.

#134The younger one had experienced defeat as something that threatened his identity.

#135The older one could lose and keep going.

#136And he needed that ability, because he lost again.

#137In 1993, at 44, he fought Tommy Morrison. Morrison refused to stand still in front of him. He moved, punched, and got away.

#138Foreman couldn’t catch him often enough and lost the decision.

#139Then came a 17-month layoff.

#140By the time Foreman got a shot at Michael Moorer, he was 45, coming off a loss, and hadn’t fought in well over a year.

#141This wasn’t the clean final step of a perfect comeback.

#142There’s a tempting way to retell the Moorer fight.

#143Foreman gave away the first nine rounds, waited patiently, and sprung a perfect trap.

#144It’s neat.

#145It’s also too neat.

#146Moorer was genuinely beating him.

#147He was faster, landing more often, and swelling Foreman’s eye. All three judges had Moorer ahead after nine.

#148Foreman still had one thing that mattered.

#149The right hand.

#150At 45, he didn’t have to be the better fighter every minute if he could still end the fight in one exchange.

#151Teddy Atlas knew that. That’s why he kept warning Moorer not to linger within reach.

#152Then came the tenth.

#153Left. Right.

#154Moorer went down.

#155Nine rounds of scoring suddenly didn’t matter.

#156Twenty years earlier in Kinshasa, young Foreman had spent his power while Ali waited for him to tire.

#157That doesn’t mean old Foreman copied Ali’s rope-a-dope against Moorer. He didn’t. And it doesn’t mean losing nine rounds was part of a secret plan.

#158But age had changed what Foreman could ask of himself.

#159He didn’t need to control every minute.

#160He needed one opening.

#161He got it.

#162The red trunks made the scene look like a 20-year revenge story.

#163But by 1994, Foreman and Ali were already friends.

#164They’d spoken on the phone. They’d talked about religion. Their families had grown close.

#165The younger Foreman had wanted to erase the Ali loss.

#166The older Foreman could become champion again without erasing it.

#167After Moorer fell, Foreman went to his corner and prayed.

#168The minister who had emerged after the Jimmy Young fight was still there after the boxer became champion again.

#169And the second reign wasn’t especially clean.

#170Foreman lost his WBA title in a dispute over a mandatory defense. He later beat Axel Schulz in a highly controversial decision. When the IBF ordered a rematch, Foreman gave up that belt too.

#171There was no long second dynasty.

#172He just kept fighting.

#173In 1997, Foreman was 48 when he fought 25-year-old Shannon Briggs.

#174They went 12 rounds.

#175Briggs won a majority decision.

#176The crowd booed, and plenty of observers thought Foreman had done enough to win.

#177This was exactly the sort of result that once might have consumed him.

#178The 1974 loss had taken him years to make peace with.

#179This time, Foreman wished Briggs well.

#180Then he retired.

#181He hadn’t learned how never to lose.

#182He’d learned that losing one fight didn’t have to decide who George Foreman was.

#183The version of Foreman people met during the comeback also turned out to matter outside boxing.

#184He smiled. He joked about being old and heavy. He talked about food. He became “Big George.”

#185Eventually, that personality became attached to the George Foreman Grill.

#186Foreman didn’t invent the grill, and he wasn’t immediately excited about it. The product reportedly sat around unused for a while before he finally tried it.

#187Then he started promoting it.

#188His name moved from boxing arenas into kitchens around the world.

#189A comeback that had begun partly because his youth center needed money ended up creating a public identity worth far more commercially than his fists.

#190But one of the most revealing things Foreman kept in his office wasn’t a picture of any victory.

#191The photograph came from Kinshasa.

#192Muhammad Ali was standing.

#193George Foreman was on the canvas.

#194For years, that had been the moment Foreman wanted to undo. He’d felt as if part of himself disappeared when he lost. He wanted another fight, another chance, another ending.

#195He never got the rematch.

#196Instead, something stranger happened.

#197Ali became his friend.

#198At the 1997 "Academy Awards," when Parkinson’s disease made the steps to the stage difficult for Ali, Foreman helped him up.

#199When Ali died in 2016, Foreman again described feeling as though part of himself had gone.

#200He’d felt something similar in 1974.

#201But for the opposite reason.

#202Back then, it was because Ali had beaten him.

#203Now it was because Ali himself was gone.

#204And Foreman kept the photograph.

#205Ali standing. Foreman down.

#206The right hand that knocked out Michael Moorer didn’t erase it. The heavyweight title at 45 didn’t erase it. Neither did the money, the fame, or the business success that came later.

#207When George Foreman died in 2025, his family remembered more than a boxer.

#208A minister. A husband. A father. A grandfather. A man who worked with young people in his community.

#209And, among all of those identities, a two-time heavyweight champion.

#210In 1974, being champion had been so close to Foreman’s idea of himself that losing the title felt like losing part of who he was.

#211Twenty years later, he became champion again.

#212By then, champion was only one of the things George Foreman had become.

#213Maybe that’s why he could leave the picture on the wall.