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“It Happened!”

The moment Moorer let George knock him out

(The Ring Magazine/Getty)

As the 1990s continued and George Foreman’s products kept selling, he was meticulously picking heavyweight opponents and fight opportunities that kept his name in the ring discussion and reminded the division’s top competitors he was still out there, still active.

And on April 22, 1994, he and I, with Larry Merchant, called an upset victory at the top of the division, champion Evander Holyfield’s majority-decision loss to unbeaten but largely unheralded Michael Moorer, who was 26 at the time.

Moorer became history’s first southpaw heavyweight champ and intelligently cast his net for the opponent with whom he could combine the highest income-earning possibility and the logical expectation he would win and go forward to other title defenses. The answer was obvious. Moorer vs. Foreman was set for November 5, 1994, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. George was a big underdog, but he would have a chance to win back the heavyweight championship he had lost to Muhammad Ali at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire.

Moorer had dictated the late rounds against Holyfield to win the crown. He had a strong amateur pedigree and was groomed on the way up by the renowned Emanuel Steward at the boxing-revered Kronk Gym in Detroit. For this fight he was trained by another star, Cus D’Amato protégé and former Mike Tyson instructor Teddy Atlas. Since George was vacating his customary HBO chair to enter the ring, veteran expert Gil Clancy signed on to call the fight with Larry and me.

In the opening on camera, I asked Gil what chance he gave to Foreman to spring the upset, and the two-word answer was “very little.” At 45 years old, George would become the oldest ever to win the title if he pulled it off. He climbed into the ring wearing the same trunks he had on against Ali in Kinshasha, 20 years and six days before. And he had been trained for this fight by the same man who had trained Ali, another legend, Angelo Dundee.

Though an underdog, George was making it clear he understood the power of mythology and symbolism. For the opening of our telecast, he agreed to recite the lyrics of “The Impossible Dream.”

By this time in our relationship I had grown comfortable enough to engage George in frank discussions. He had volunteered advice on some intensely personal subjects—marital conflicts, parenting challenges, rough spots in my relationship with NBC—so I felt no compunction now about talking to him about his career. He knew I admired his strong-mindedness and gave him credit for wisdom outside the ring. And though I had expected he might take time away from ringside commentary to train for the fight, that hadn’t turned out to be the case. We covered a Lennox Lewis fight in London in late September and a Pernell Whitaker date in Norfolk, Virginia, in October.

On one of those occasions, I pulled him aside in an idle moment and asked a frank question: “George, how exactly do you plan to beat Moorer? I mean, he’s a southpaw, he’s a mover, Holyfield had trouble finding him, and Evander has quicker feet than you do. So what’s the plan?” I asked him at least twice, maybe more.

The answer was simple and adamant: “Jim, you watch. There will come a moment, late in the fight, he will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.”

“Let you knock him out? What does that mean?”

“You heard me. Just watch. When it happens, remember what I told you.”

If he wasn’t George Foreman I might have passed it off. But he was who he was, and I knew he didn’t take it lightly. If there was one thing I had learned working with him, he was a serious man. He never said things he didn’t mean. Though I wasn’t dwelling on it, the words were there in the framework of my approach as Merchant, Clancy, and I sat down to call the four-fight card that night, November 5, 1994, in Las Vegas.

Moorer and Atlas had a solid plan. The champ was sticking his jab and moving to his right, away from George’s still-formidable right hand. Both corners were businesslike, efficient, and calm. Scorer Harold Lederman might have found a round or two to give to George, but by the time we arrived at round 10, Moorer had a mathematical hold on the lead and the fight. Logic said George would have to sell out, take a risk of some sort to try to land a big shot. Otherwise, the predictable result was at hand.

Later I looked back on tape and realized that in the first minute of the 10th round, George had thrown a series of wide-sweeping left hooks, a punch he hadn’t featured in the fight up to that point. A few of the hooks landed, and in retrospect the purpose was to move Moorer over just a step or two in his stance, so Foreman could strike him with a right hand thrown straight from the shoulder for maximum power.

A classic jab and solid right-hand combination put Moorer down midway through the round, and he was nowhere near beating the count. If in fact Moorer had let George knock him out, he had been set up to do it by one of the greatest heavyweight punchers in history.

When the count reached 10, I had to find the right words to curate a moment of unforgettable boxing history, just as had been the case in Tokyo in the Buster Douglas–Mike Tyson fight four years and nine months before. This time I had better, less prosaic material to work with, thanks to what George himself had told me to expect.

“It happened! It happened!” I shouted into the mic without much more of an explanation.

I called fights for 31 years, from 1987 to 2018. I’ve never bothered to count them up, but I know there were hundreds, and that is by far the most famous call I delivered. It describes what took place between Foreman and Moorer. It describes what followed in 1974 when I traveled from Chapel Hill to Birmingham for a pipe-dream interview to seek a once-in-a-lifetime network television opportunity.

It happened, and boxing fans I don’t know still yell that to me in airports, on the streets of New York, and along the Vegas Strip.

Beyond that, I have no further explanation of how it did happen.