AMERICA AT LARGE: Former heavyweight champion espouses the critical role of the written word to boxing
THERE ARE few things in life that give George Foreman as much pleasure as eating, although these days reading may be one of them. We're coming up on the anniversary of his first visit to Ireland 12 years ago, a trip for which he prepared by reading the late Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and a few weeks ago the two-time heavyweight champion and I were reunited at my alma mater, the University of Kansas, where we shared the dais with KU professor Robert Rodriguez at a boxing symposium.
The format had assigned Big George the anchor leg, but after listening to the presentations of Dr Rodriguez and myself, he delivered a message about the critical role of the written word to boxing as a sport. “I lived some of the moments these guys were describing,” he told his audience. “You can watch all the videos in the world, but if it weren’t for what has been written about those events they wouldn’t have much meaning at all – to me or to anybody else.”
Our party had come straight to the Kansas Union ballroom from Genovese, one of three downtown Lawrence restaurants owned by Mexican-born Alejandro Lule Hernandez, a lifelong boxing aficianado who arrived in the land of the gringos as a migrant worker in California almost 40 years ago.
What nobody seemed prepared for that night was just how much food Alejandro had prepared. No sooner would the mahi-mahi platter be devoured than another course would emerge. Alejandro told George about having won him a $25 bet on the first Frazier fight not long after he’d slipped across the border. “I was working in the fields in Stockton, California,” he related. “I offered to bet a guy $15, and he said ‘Make it $25’, so I did. I was only making $15 a day picking onions back then.” Foreman, who had spend some time in Northern California back then, arched his eyebrows. “I didn’t realise they grew onions in Stockton,” he said.
I reminded him of a scene in Leonard Gardner's Fat City, when aging middleweight Billy Tully hires on as an onion-topper and spends an afternoon in the fields surrounded by migrant workers. "That's right!" exclaimed Foreman. "I'd forgot all about that." Then, after expressing his admiration for the book, he asked after its author. "You know, I spent some time with Leonard Gardner down in Caracas before I my fight there," he recalled.
It might be a surprising revelation to sportswriters who recall the glowering, menacing figure that was Foreman in 1974, but even then the novelist was able to cut through the veneer to separate the public image (one Foreman had modelled on Sonny Liston’s) from the man.
Gardener's 1974 Esquirepiece opened with a description of one of the many press conferences Foreman and Ken Norton endured in the run-up to the first heavyweight championship fight contested in South America, and while the novelist could empathise with the plight of the newsmen obliged to create daily dispatches, Gardner was more sympathetic to the boxer besieged by silly questions. He described an interlude during one of these media cluster-plucks when a particularly dumb interrogatory was met by a stony silence.
“Foreman did not answer,” Gardner described. “The man kept holding out his microphone. Close to 20 reporters were crowded into the cubicle and all looked expectantly at Foreman, whose mouth and eyes remained closed. The silence became unsettling, then bewildering and a little demeaning. It went on for what seemed a minute. Had he fallen asleep? At last someone spoke. “Why wouldn’t you answer that question” “Oh, that was a question? I thought it was a statement.”
The press was headquartered at the Caracas Hilton, as, ostensibly, was Foreman, although the champion had days earlier quietly relocated to a small, less bustling hostelry called the Avila. Gardner, accompanied by press agent Bill Caplan, went to visit him. Foreman's defences came down as they conversed beside the swimming pool: He spoke slowly and carefully, without gestures and with little change in pitch, his voice low and restrained and softened by a black Texas accent. He had grown up in Houston, one of seven children supported by his mother, who had been a cook and a barber and a strong influence on him, and as he talked about her now it was evident there were still close ties between them. When he was fourteen she had suffered an emotional collapse and been hospitalized, and in the time she was away Foreman had dabbled in drunkenness, truancy, vandalism, strong-arm robbery and purse-snatching. But depressions had come with the hangovers, he quit the robberies for fear his violent partner was going to hurt someone, and as a purse-snatcher he was a total failure; undone by his victims' cries for God's assistance, he was compelled to run back and return all the purses.
Much has been made of Foreman’s ability to recast his image in concordance with his religious conversion and subsequent comeback, but in looking back at Gardner’s rendition of that soul-baring conversation, one can’t help but wonder how much of it was a matter of Big George reinventing himself in his second incarnation, and how much the result of people just not asking the right questions during his first.
On the day of the symposium, the university hosted a luncheon. Prominent KU athletes of the past were on hand, NFL Hall of Famer Gale Sayers and Ron Marsh among them. As freshmen 49 years ago Sayers, Marsh and I lived together on the third floor at Joseph R Pearson Hall. Even in 1961 it was obvious Gale was the most talented freshman running back in the country. Ron often cleared the path for him.
Ron was a boxer back then. He’d won a couple of Golden Gloves titles before he came to school, and after graduation, too small for a NFL career, he turned pro. He was too small for that, too. There was no cruiserweight division back then so Ron was dwarfed by his heavyweight opponents. He tried dropping to light heavyweight, and in his next-to-last fight beat fourth-ranked Andy Kendall to put himself in the world’s top 10. Then he abruptly quit and worked as a schoolteacher for 35 years.
Later Foreman and I were about to be photographed with former Jayhawk basketballers Bud Stallworth and Al Lopes. "Wait a minute!" Foreman ordered. "Gale Sayers! Ron Marsh! Come over and get in this picture!" Since Marsh left boxing not long after Foreman turned pro, I couldn't help wondering how George remembered him. "Boxing magazines," he explained. "The whole time I was supposedly going to high school, I never read a book. I didn't even know how to read until I got to the Job Corps, and since that was also the time I started boxing, those were the first things I ever read. I used to read every issue of Ringfrom cover to cover. Reading books – like Fat City– came later. "And," he added with a wink, "reading books like Angela's Ashescame even later than that."
