In Texas: Spreading the Word

By Gregory Jaynes

It is now eight years since George Foreman lost a twelve-round decision to Jimmy Young in Puerto Rico and moments thereafter found the Lord. There were those who blamed the former heavyweight champion's immediate change of plans --he gave up boxing--on hallucinations brought on by heat prostration. But Foreman said that, to his mind, an oppressively hot night in San Juan was one thing, a call from God something else, and he knew the difference. Off came the gloves.

After that, Foreman went back to Texas, state of his birth, on a self- assigned mission to spread the Word. This he did on street corners in Houston, as well as in any flyblown chapel of bedrock fundamentalism that would hear him out. Now and then, you would catch him in the papers (requiem for a heavyweight, that sort of thing), but for the most part the fighter kept his head down. Four years ago, he erected the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, twelve pews in a little metal prefabricated building on an acre of Houston ground. The church will seat 50, but capacity has never been reached. It does not matter, though, the giant whispers tenderly. "This is the only thing I've ever done that I really did with all my heart and stuck with it."

There is something incredibly pat and wonderfully sappy about the George Foreman story, a sort of factual mockery of the best-known work of Sylvester Stallone. This guy was bad, as he himself put it. He kept a lion and a tiger because they were bad. He had 47 fights and knocked out 42 men. He took the world title by half killing Joe Frazier in 1973 and then lost it the next year in Zaire to Muhammad Ali, who could not have been brought down that night by a tank. "I be alright when the swelling goes down," Foreman wrote in his journal. Then he took his rage to Toronto, where he whipped five fighters in one evening. In 1976 he savaged Joe Frazier again, all but beating his own chest and roaring over the body. Until the night he found the Lord, March 17, 1977, the only things in the world he feared were mice and lizards.

Foreman has told the tale so many times he could do it without thinking; nonetheless, the telling puts him in a sweat. "I was walking in the dressing room, trying to cool down. I was telling myself, 'You don't have to box. You can retire to your ranch and die.' Die? Where did that come from? I didn't put that word in there. But the word kept sneaking into my head. Then a voice said, 'You believe in God. Why you scared to die?' I said, 'I can still give money to charities and cancer,' and the voice in my head said, 'I don't want your money, I want you.' "

And then, George maintains, he died. "I was just nothing. I was dead. And a dirty smell come with it. I was dead, and I said, 'I don't care if I am dead, I still believe in God!' Whap! I was back." He started hollering hallelujahs, and the people in his dressing room "looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I did look crazy; all I know is since that day I wasn't a believer, I was a knower. Hallelujah, I'm saved! In all my wildest imagination I never thought up nothing like that. I sure didn't want to be no preacher 'cause that was the lowdownest thing in the world to me.

"I always thought preachers was lowlifes, weak people. It always looked like some kind of weirdo deal to me. Even their mouths looked funny to me. But since that night I've wore out more Bibles than I can count."

Foreman was 29 when he retired. He had run through millions, once spiraling into a depression because he could not think of anything new to buy; but he had done one smart thing: he had stuck $1 million into a pension fund. Today he lives off the interest.

"I bought a Cadillac last week," Foreman said the other day. "I mean, it's been eight years since I had a decent car. I love this truck"--as he spoke, he was driving his Ford pickup around his 200-acre ranch outside Marshall, Texas--"but it's a truck. I got rid of the Mercedes, the Rolls-Royce, all that stuff, because it made people stiffen up. Like they wanted to compete. They're more relaxed when I don't have a good car. But I needed a car, an American car, and I needed a big car because I'm a big man. But now I'm embarrassed to be seen in it. Maybe I'll sell it."

Living humbly is important to Foreman. He even shed himself of a grand place in Houston for an $81,000 house in a suburb called Humble. He preaches on the weekends and Wednesday nights, mows his yard, trims his hedges and spends two days a week on the ranch, threading his truck between slash pines and pin oaks to haul feed to his cows and horses. Animals are his passion--animals and sleeping and eating. "I think sleeping was my problem in school," he allowed. "If school had started at around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I'd be a college graduate today." Foreman dropped out of junior high school.

Eating has at times given him the dimensions of an outdoor sanitary facility. "People say George Foreman eats a dozen eggs and a pound of bacon for breakfast. That's a lie. I eat eleven eggs." He is trying to lose 45 lbs. to get down to an ideal 225. "It's sad. You work all your life to make it, and then you can't eat."

If any of this sounds dumb, it is because Foreman wants it to; his humor is self-effacing. He is neither dim nor punch- drunk. He has a sense of pride and confidence that seems to accompany enormous physical strength and the conviction that one is doing something right (financial solvency might play some part in this cheerful outlook as well, that and extremely early retirement). In any event, all Foreman wants to do is save souls and help young boys out of the gutter, his admitted childhood playground. "I saw some of the fellows I used to drink with standing around the corners in Houston awhile ago. They're still drinking, and they look 60 years old. That started me on the idea of bringing bad kids up here to the ranch this summer. Bad boys think cities is all there is. They don't know nothing about throwing a rock at a pig or pulling a fish out of the water. They read in a book, 'Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go!' But they don't know nothing about no river, no woods. They will when I get through with them."

As he spun through these revelations, Foreman was crawling in and out of his truck, opening and closing gates, feeding animals, trying to convince a colt that if he did not wean himself soon his mother would waste away, pausing to brag about his bass pond, saying he would never shoot deer because he is awed by them--his word, awe--and gently pulling back the branches of budding forsythia to clear the trail for a companion, who felt small.

"I'm hungry for knowledge," Foreman said suddenly, fairly shouting down a Texas wind. "I want to know the names of trees, plants, birds. I didn't have time before. Now I do. Things I don't know. Little things that everybody else knows. In the Bible you see two periods. You see 'Thou shalt not' and then two periods and then a whole list of things. Two periods. That's called a colon. I didn't know that. Probably the only man in the world who didn't know what a colon was. It's pitiful all I have to learn."

So he regrets the years boxing took away?

"No. I wouldn't have a bass pond, time to think, nothing. I used to hate Muhammad. Now I admire him. He's a sick man, but he's still the greatest show on earth. He found something in his brain that was bad the way he used it, though. He could sink inside, put his mind over his body and take all them licks from me and everybody else. He kept making those comebacks. The brain, man, it's something else."

Foreman opened the door to a gym he never uses. "Them licks hurt," he remarked, running a hand the size of a motorcycle battery along the ropes of his dusty ring. But then, he added, church is not exactly easy either. "You can get people to come by and listen, but that don't mean they'll join up with you. I have about five regulars. Every now and then I get another soul."