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Boxer, preacher, and grill super salesman George Foreman died in his longtime hometown of Houston in March.
Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong has been thinking about Foreman’s life and how he literally fought his way from rags to riches more than once.
The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
W.F. Strong [00:00:00] He was born in 1949 in Marshall, Texas, George Edward Foreman. He was the fifth of seven children. Life was hard. George grew up hungry, angry, and restless. By his own account, he was headed for the streets and he was headed for trouble. In his mid-teens he dropped out of school. He was big and strong, but he wasn’t strong in spirit. He fought, he stole, he drifted. His mother prayed that he would find another path. Then came the job corps. It was a government program that gave poor kids work training. George signed up thinking it was a way out of Houston’s fifth ward. It was there that a supervisor put a pair of boxing gloves on him. They fit like destiny. George hated losing. He hated being laughed at. In 1968 in Mexico City, George Foreman shocked the world by winning the heavyweight gold medal. He turned professional. In 1973 he fought Joe Frazier, Smokin’ Joe, and knocked him down six times in two rounds. Foreman became the heavyweight champion of the world. They said he was unbeatable. But then came Zaire, nineteen seventy four. The rumble in the jungle. Muhammad Ali rope a doped him, leaned against the ropes, let Foreman punch himself out, and beat him in the eighth round. The giant fell. Foreman spiral, he was lost. He retired, nearly died from exhaustion in a Houston locker room, and turned to preaching. Folks thought the fighter was finished, but in nineteen eighty seven, ten years after hanging up his gloves, George Foreman made the most unlikely comeback in sports. He was older, heavier, slower, but he was calmer, wiser, and stronger in spirit. People laughed when they saw him because he looked like a preacher in boxing trunks. And yet he kept winning. And on a November night in nineteen ninety four, at the age of forty five, George Foreman knocked out Michael Moorer to become the oldest heavyweight champion in the history. George Foreman wasn’t just a two time heavyweight champ, he was a two time American success story. That alone would have been enough, but here’s the twist. Not long after, a company approached him with a funny looking electric grill, portable, tilted, designed to drain fat. They asked George to put his name on it. He did more than that. He sold it. He smiled. He told America it was a lean, mean, fat reducing grilling machine. The George Foreman Grill went on to sell over a hundred million units worldwide. Foreman made more money from grills than he ever made from boxing. He passed on that winning legacy to his twelve children, including five sons. He named them all George. He explained that if one goes up we all go up. If one goes down, we all go down together. From the streets of Marshall to Olympic Gold to World Champion to kitchen counters around the world, George Foreman was one of the most inspirational success stories Texas has ever seen. I’m W.F. Strong, these are stories from Texas. Some of them are true.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
