A man who moved with the times, George Foreman was a renowned two-time Professional World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. In the ring, he was merciless with his thundering blows, but outside the ring, he was a gentleman, a shrewd businessman and a minister who loved his family and humanity. Of all the heavyweights who reigned with the king, Mohammed Ali, none was as enigmatic as Big George. Foreman, who died on March 21, 2025, aged 76, was as ferocious in the boxing ring as he was astute in business.
[ad]  
Born on January 10, 1949, Foreman was ‘The Scary Guy,’ feared by his opponents and admired in equal measure by the boxing public, who saw beyond the tough mien as a family man.

The multiple-time heavyweight champion came into many boxing connoisseurs’ consciousness on January 22, 1973, when he crushed one of the toughest hitherto undefeated heavyweight champions in the game, Joe Frazier, at the Jamaica National Stadium in Kingston. The feat was significant because Frazier was still basking in the glow of his epic 15-round defeat of Mohammed Ali. But Foreman put him down six times before the referee, Arthur Mercante Sr., ended the bout.

To Africans, Foreman was that man who played a starring role in one of the greatest fights ever to be held in the continent, dubbed ‘The Rumble in the Jungle.’ The Rumble in the Jungle, staged in Congo (formerly Zaire) with Foreman as the main cast, ended up raising Mohammed Ali to its highest decibel, with the rope-a-dope tactics elevating boxing to a new high discussed several years after the battle in Kinshasha.
 
The rope-a-dope style saw Ali absorbing the Scary man’s hardest shots for seven rounds before taking down the exhausted Foreman, who fell face down with fast and vicious right-hand shots.

The defeat in Zaire dismantled Foreman’s sense of invincibility and psychiatrically destroyed the former champion.  Foreman returned to the ring in 1977 but was forced to retire for the first time after defeat to Jimmy Young in Puerto Rico. Foreman left the ring following the fight to pick up the Bible and become a preacher. But 10 years later, when his church needed money, Foreman returned to the ring as a new Foreman, who had reinvented himself with his own rope-a-dope style against heavyweight champion, Michael Moorer in 1994. He absorbed all that the champion threw at him, before dispatching the younger man in the 10th round.
[ad]
Once dubbed as one-third of the heavyweight boxing ‘holy trinity’, alongside Joe Frazier and Ali, his 76 victories would lead many to presume his glistening boxing career to be his greatest achievement. But all of those victories, all of his accomplishments, pale in comparison to what, or rather whom, he was most proud of, his family.
 
Foreman had 81 fights, 76 wins, 68 by knockout and eight by decision. Of his five losses, one was by knockout and four by decision. Foreman was also proudly the oldest heavyweight champion in history.

As a family man, Foreman was once asked why he named all his sons from his five marriages George Edward Foreman. The ‘Preacherman,’ who had 12 children, on his official website, explained his reason: “I say to them, ‘If one of us goes up, then we all go up together. And if one goes down, we all go down together.”
 
He also had another explanation for his choice of names: “If you’re going to get hit as many times as I’ve been hit by Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Evander Holyfield, you’re not going to remember many names.”
 
In business, Foreman bucked the trend of retired sportsmen, soon falling into penury. An astute businessman, he teamed up with an inventor, Michael Boehn, to launch the George Foreman Grill, which helps families make healthier choices at home. It is recorded that Foreman’s investment in the grill earned him more money than he ever made from boxing.
 
Following his passing, his children remembered him as “a devout preacher, a devoted husband, a loving father, and a proud grand and great-grandfather.”
[ad]