Keep in character

BUSINESS DAY, 12 APRIL 2001

SOME YEARS AGO, when George Foreman came rumbling back from the gloom and darkness of sporting middle-age to become the oldest man to win the heavyweight boxing title, twenty-odd years after his Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali, he discovered that the world of sports was entirely changed.

As late as the 1970s, a sportsman’s involvement in marketing and commerce seldom extended beyond wearing a particular sweatband, or perhaps posing for a still photograph for a magazine advertisement. Ali bent those rules, as he bent so many others, but even he was really only ever marketing himself. In the 1970s Foreman had the same dark, frightening charisma that Sonny Liston had a decade before. It was a charisma based on violence coupled with silence.

To read Norman Mailer’s account, for instance, of the weeks leading up to the Rumble in the Jungle, or to watch When We Were Kings, the outstanding documentary of the fight, is to see the same picture: Ali dancing and clowning and preening in the foreground, like a parakeet or a poppinjay, trying to distract our attention and probably his own from the brooding shadow of Foreman, stalking the background like a muscular jungle panther. In the film there is a dazzling montage of the two training in Kinshasa. Ali is skipping, smiling, chattering, chanting rhymes, philosophising about the nature of prettiness. There are beaming people standing around; some are sipping what seems to be champagne.

This is intercut with Foreman standing alone before a heavy bag in a dimly lit room, feet apart and rooted to the ground. He looks neither up nor down, swinging body blow after body blow into the bag, blows that cause the fundament to shudder, like a man chopping down a redwood. Each punch, Mailer tells us in his book, could stave the hull of a whaleship.

Watching today, knowing what happened, I still cannot imagine how Foreman could lose, how he did not kill Muhammad Ali. Such was the power of Foreman’s enigma, the force of his silence. He allowed us to invest him with our darkest fears and fantasies. He was like a principle of nature.

Then, when he returned, he discovered that sportsmen could make even more money out of the ring than in it. He became Smiling George, the cheeseburger spokesman. He appeared on chat shows and music videos. I had the misfortune to watch him star in his very own infomercial for George Foreman’s patented fat-free cooking skillets, or some such. A grinning Foreman cracked jokes and demonstrated how to fry a steak that tastes good without making you worry at the weigh-in. It was a depressing turn of events. It always is when this fantasy world of sport, in which we invest so much of our human desire for archetypes, for grand narratives, for good and evil, for epic tales and truths and mythic characters, is revealed to be made up of nothing more than people with sporting ability.

I was reminded of George Foreman while watching a recent cricket test match from Antigua. One of the commentators was Sir Vivian Richards who, in his own way, was a Foreman of the cricket pitch. He swaggered out to bat with an arrogance that was hostile. He owned the ground, he bullied and brutalised anyone who lined themselves against him. You feared for the safety or at least the mental well-being of his opponents. He was like a man apart, not quite bound by mortal rules.

Yet there he was, chatting away with Mike Haysman, yapping sweet pleasantries, making silly jokes and giggling like a small girl. At one point he took time out to promote an Antiguan movie in which his brother is acting – some Caribbean blockbuster titled The Sweetest Mango. He was, it must be said, utterly charming, but this was not the force of nature I had grown up fearing. This was not the concentrated essence of cricketing thunder. I liked him, but another sporting archetype quietly crumbled away. Say what you like about Geoff Boycott, but at least he is always in character.