Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (28 page)

Sprawled comfortably on the commodious couch of his ranchhouse in Marshall this winter, as George was reminded of the controversy his impromptu flag-waving ceremony caused, he offered an answer in the relaxed and self-contented style of the new George Foreman. I had been present at the Tommie Smith-John Carlos protest at the track-and-field Games back in ’68, when these black Mercuries had defiantly given the Black Power salute during the playing of our national anthem celebrating their success in the 200-meter dash. Smith (who won the gold medal) and Carlos (who won the bronze) had been unceremoniously dismissed from the American team and sent home in disgrace (to White America, but as heroes to militant young blacks).

“Nope, it may have looked like that,” George was saying, “but I wasn’t even thinking about what Carlos and Smith were trying to do. I was just a big kid who couldn’t believe how lucky I was—instead of trouble in the Fifth Ward, here I was a world champion and my name up there and when they played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ I was thinking about the Job Corps and how America had given me a chance I never expected to have—it was the proudest moment of my life—even bigger than knocking out Joe Frazier five years later and becoming professional champion of the world.

“I didn’t have no problem with John Carlos,” George went on, “I just wasn’t into that. I was waving that little flag for the Job Corps and thinking, where would I be without it and the chance it gave me to be somebody instead of a bum and running from the cops.”

I remembered George strutting around that ring at Arena Mexico and worrying that the heavy-fisted winner would come across as a gold medal Uncle Tom—such was the spirit of ’68.

“I went back to Front Street in the back of Houston, thinking
I’d be a big man, shucks I was only nineteen, and before that I’d been a thug, a desperado, a wine-drinking brawler, and I was only waving the flag because I was happy—a fella called Sergeant Rogers gave it to me for good luck, and when I won I wanted them to know what country I’m from. But back on the street a dude I used to mug with, instead of giving me the handshake, he says, ‘What’s wrong with you, George, waving your silly-ass American flag? Carlos and Smith, they stood up to the Man.’

“Well, that put a chip on my shoulder. And then I met Sonny Liston. You know, I was winning fights, knocking out almost everybody in two, three rounds, even George Chuvalo, who went the distance two times with Ali. But Ali was in style, all the young dudes, they shouting ‘Ali, Ali,’ and that irritated me, so when I knock Joe Frazier down six times I figure I can’t be like Ali, so maybe a champ should be like Sonny.”

As I listen to the relaxed, garrulous, folksy-funny, rancher-preacher-youth center reformer in the winter of 1991, he comes across as a Hyde into Jekyll transformation from the Sonny Liston clone I interviewed at the posh Hotel Intercontinental in unposh Kinshasa, Zaire, when he was getting ready to defend his heavyweight title against 2½-to-l underdog Muhammad Ali.

Prizefighting, the uninitiated may have trouble understanding, involves the most complex psychological conflict of any individual sport. If two able fighters are in contention, one must impose his will on the other. Karpov and Kasparov understood this in their recent confrontation for the world championship of chess. Ali was a master of the art of psychological game-playing in his challenge to the twenty-five-year-old champion George Foreman. George had destroyed the undefeated and seemingly indestructible Joe Frazier in less than two rounds and a year later humiliated the leading contender Ken Norton in the same brief time frame.

But in the battle for identity in the weeks building to the showdown, Ali was piling up more points every day. Ali was
Black Power, Black Prince, Black Magic. Poor George—how could the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world be defined so pejoratively?—scowled and glared and treated the press as if it were his enemy, which indeed it was. Ali, whose gift for public relations matched his boxing skills, had an appetite for press conferences not unlike Jack Kennedy’s. Somehow he managed to make the big black bopper from the backstreets of Houston a great
white
hope, or dope, and poor George didn’t help matters by going everywhere with a pet police dog. Apparently nobody had told him that the breed was a symbol of oppression used by the Belgian police to intimidate native troublemakers.

Everywhere Ali went he was greeted by Zairian cries of “Ali,
boma yé
! Ali,
boma yé
!” (Ali, kill ’em!) I stayed with Ali at the Presidential Villa some twenty-five miles out of the capital, took early morning walks with him, and little black children would literally pop out of the bush to shout their
boma yé
’s
.
If George was the champion of the world, you’d never know it from the loving throng around Ali and the hostile silences or jeers George couldn’t help provoking. George was floundering—in search of a persona. The battle of identity was a shut-out for Ali.

Ali wasn’t working on psychology alone. Boxing was a science, too. The only opponent Foreman hadn’t knocked out in a hurry was an aging South American light-heavyweight by the name of Gregorio Peralta. Night after night Ali ran Foreman’s Peralta fights, twenty rounds of them. One night he shouted, “Look how that old man’s laying back on the ropes! George out-weighs him by thirty-five pounds and he’s leaning on him and throwing them big heavy punches—and nothing. Peralta’s giving him shoulders and elbows and gloves. George’s getting tired! If Peralta can do that, what can I do? Six rounds and George’ll be so punched out he won’t be able to lift his hands.”

Ali choreographed that fight like Balanchine. It was a helluva fight, but if you had been with Ali you knew the ending, like running a movie you’ve seen before. Down and out in eight
went George. Three o’clock in the morning. Tropical rain. “Ali,
boma yé
!”

That morning going back to the Presidential Villa with Ali, and even sparring a celebratory round with him, I saw it through Muhammad’s eyes, as a Conradian morality play. Flash forward to Foreman’s ranch in Marshall, and I’m seeing it for the first time from the point of view of the dethroned and virtually deboned ex-champion:

“I felt deshelled in Zaire. Like a fish being cleaned. Ali taking the whole deal. It’s like having your backbone removed. Back in the dressing room it came down on me. Hey, I lost my heavyweight title. Like being raped. I couldn’t adjust to it. Devastated. I didn’t want to go home. Couldn’t face my people. Went to Paris, Georges Cinq Hotel four, five days. Then all the way to Hawaii. Had all the money I wanted. Bought everything in sight. Only thing I couldn’t buy was peace of mind.”

George had put Don King in business with the Ali fight, but naturally King Don had Ali now, and while he was still Foreman’s promoter, he made no effort to get him the rematch George felt he deserved. Nineteen seventy-five and ’76 were listless years, with George toying with five journeyman heavyweights in one night, almost getting flattened by Ron Lyle before putting him away in a messy display of The Manly Art of No Defense, an anticlimactic take-out of Joe Frazier again, three easy wins over what the fight game dismisses as “tomato cans,” and then another big scene in the George Foreman Movie, a dreary exhibition in the heat of San Juan in which George ran out of power and stamina like a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac sputtering to a stop with the gas gauge on empty. Jimmy Young, a shifty, ring-wise spoiler who seemed to have outpointed Ali for the title the year before, made George look clumsy and aimless.

George still blames the loss on the machinations of Don King, who can machinate with the best of them. King had a CBS deal pending, says George, and there were complaints that Foreman was dumping the tomato cans so fast there wasn’t
enough time for commercials. He was urged to “carry” Jimmy Young, George explains that humiliation to this day. But in the stultifying island heat he lost control of the match, until at the end he was stumbling around like the drunken wino he had been in his youth.

Now for the movie. Everybody figures this is curtains for George, another has-been shuffles off into the wings. But the airless dressing room becomes George’s road to Damascus. I had heard the transcendental story from others, but at the ranch George was reliving it. Even this skeptic was moved by his recital of revelation:

“I felt something come over me like I never felt in my life. I felt bombarded. I tried to tell myself, ‘It’s no disgrace, I showed I could go twelve rounds. I could go home and retire right now—and
die
.’ Where did that come in? I kept hearing a voice saying, ‘I don’t want your money, I want
you
.’ That
voice
! I knew it was God in the room. I felt a giant hand reach down and pick me up. ‘I’m dying for God,’ I think I was screaming. ‘Tell everybody I’m dying for God.’ I felt blood on my face and on my hands. Crucified! I jumped up and kissed everybody in the room. ‘I love you! I love you!’

“I used to make jokes about religious people. I figured the church was just for poor people singing songs. And all of a sudden I was one of them. Gil Clancy, my trainer, thought it was heat prostration and I went to the hospital, but the heat went away but God was still with me. I quit boxing [in 1977] and started preaching on streetcorners. On the same corners where I used to break heads just for the hell of it. Now I was loving those people, the way Jesus loves us. At first they laughed at me, Crazy George, maybe one too many punches, but my mind was clear as a bell, working better than ever. I saw what I had to do, build my own church, and a youth center, where kids could work out and live clean, study, and get off the streets. Put $300,000 of my own money into it. That’s one reason I decided to go back into boxing after a ten-year layoff,
to make some money to enlarge the Community Center and keep the church going.”

Whether you’re a fan of Born-Agains or not, these eyes have seen the Second Coming of George Foreman, not only at peace with himself at the ranch on the outskirts of the little town where he was born, but at the Youth Center, and the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, where I attended a service on a recent Sunday.

Outside an unpretentious stucco building, children in their Sunday best were gathering with their neatly dressed parents. The atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. Mostly blacks, along with a few Latino families and three or four Caucasians who also lived in the neighborhood. I talked with Charley Shipes, whom I recognized as a welterweight contender back in the ’60s, and with George’s younger brother, Roy, whom he put through Berkeley, and a young, well-built nephew, Charley Dumas, an instructor at the Youth Center who assured me in a surprisingly soft voice that George would be along to preach—even though he had flown in from a press conference in Washington, D.C., just an hour before. I turned around and there was George, driving up with two of his nine children, the four-year-old Leola and two-year-old George (George IV, as he’s known), with newborn George V in the arms of his young wife, Joan. All of George’s sons are named George, with nicknames to differentiate them. Big George was singing a snatch of a song to his kids as I came up and reintroduced myself. How pleasant he was, warm, friendly, happy—I couldn’t help mentioning how different he was way back in Zaire when he was outdoing his police dog in growling and glaring. “I don’t even know that George Foreman,” he laughed. “Don’t wanna know him. Sorry I’m late. Been doing interviews with Holyfield. Having fun. Come on in.”

The service was appealingly low key. No rolling and hollering. Two little girls with bright-colored bows in their hair sang “What The Lord Has Done for Me,” with George backing them discreetly on tambourine. Then Charley Dumas’s sweet-voiced “Let It Shine,” to his own guitar accompaniment and George as the rhythm section on tambourine.

Then it was George’s turn to take center stage, and a modest turn it was. Talking quietly, confidentially, in the low-key style of this place where there are no crucifixes, figures of Christ, or any religious adornments—just a few humble baskets of flowers. This suburb of Houston is called Humble, pretty well-named for the simple goings-on that Sunday morning. George talked about trying to give children a conscience, through the example of Jesus Christ, “so maybe they won’t steal your purse.” And he thought that “there’s gotta be more to life than just living. Habits gotta change here on this Earth. If you don’t spread it [good will] here, you’re not gonna spread it nowhere else, honey.” George’s sermon turns out to be a lot of down-home common sense. There are no pictures of Jesus in this church “because the painters who made the pictures were only using models. He’s blond, he’s got long yellow hair, all that stuff. You tear the pictures off the wall, you’re not tearing off Jesus. Even Michelangelo and da Vinci were painting models. Those were just boys they knew, not Jesus.”

In his big, baggy black slacks, black leather vest and loosened purple tie, George’s enjoying himself up there. He makes them laugh out loud at cults and superstitions. “You wear crosses around your neck, that’s ignorant. You don’t need no crosses to believe in Jesus. Jesus has never been a God—he’s a man. A good man. Jesus ain’t God. But what he died for—we gotta live for.”

Charley Dumas picks up his guitar and softly backs George up on a closing hymn, as George spreads love from his tambourine.

“I come every Sunday,” says a grey-haired white woman on her way out into the noonday sunshine. “And I bring my fourteen-year-old grandson. First time he came, he didn’t even know our preacher was a fighter.”

But up at the ranch, in the small but smartly appointed
gym, you can see that George is a fighter, again. What began as a laughingstock when he looked like an overstuffed giant sausage, all 260-plus pounds of him, knocking over big, brave and defenseless tomato cans four years ago, is getting more serious now. Since his return in 1987, he’s won twenty-four fights (twenty-three knockouts, one decision). Now, knocking off glass-jawed Gerry Cooney in two, or tenth-ranked Adilson Rodrigues in another two, doesn’t necessarily qualify him to become the first forty-two-year-old champion in the history of the heavyweight division, but ready or not, he’s earned a shot.