[George Foreman] is proof that the American dream is just as real as it was 192 years ago.
RONALD REAGAN
On October 7, 1968 Sports Illustrated profiled the US heavyweight boxing representative to the upcoming 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Noting that the fortunes of American Olympic boxers had ebbed since they had won five gold medals in 1952, the article pointed out that the best prospect for gold at Mexico City was George Foreman, “The Fighting Corpsman,” as was printed on the back of his robe. “A spiritual descendant of Ali,” noted Gilbert Rogin, Foreman “is a poetaster with a proclivity for near rhymes and, like Ali, comes prepared to dwell on himself.” Excited about the magazine’s attention, Foreman recited poetry that bragged about his speed, his power, and his ambition. “George is nimble and George is quick / Watch me folks, ’cause I can really stick.” The nineteen-year-old Job Corps product also shared Ali’s lack of respect for his elders, including Ali himself. “Now everybody remembers old Cassius Clay,” he rhymed: “You may say Ali is good / If you feel you should / But if he got me in the ring and asked my name / Why, that poor boy would die of shame.” That they might meet in the ring seemed improbable at best given Ali’s banishment from boxing and Foreman’s youth and lack of ring experience. Yet six years later the fight was on.1
Over the course of the tumultuous 1968 Olympic Games, in fact, Foreman came to embody the very opposite of what Muhammad Ali stood for. As a proud graduate of the Job Corps, Foreman had become a symbol of the beneficence of American society in making it possible for poor young black men to develop the skills and self-discipline to succeed in life. As a potent political symbol Foreman was courted by both presidential candidates in the heated 1968 election campaign that was under way as he chased his gold medal. Much to his own amazement, he became a lightning rod for debates within the black community and the larger American society about the proper role of African American athletes in American life as well as the efficacy of the liberal policies of the Great Society versus a growing and insistent black nationalism. While Ali remained exiled from boxing and was prevented from traveling outside the United States after the State Department confiscated his passport once he was convicted for draft evasion on June 20, 1967, his defiant attitude toward the sports establishment played a key role in the movement to boycott the Mexico City Olympics and what came to be called the “Revolt of the Black Athlete.” At the same time, while both men earned adulation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, they also inspired virulent dislike. The definition of a sports hero was no longer clear cut.2
Unlike Ali’s youth in the North-South border city of Louisville, George Foreman’s boyhood was like that of many black youth who were lost to the streets of large American cities. Yet like Ali, boxing proved his saving grace. Born January 10, 1949, seven years after Ali, George grew up in dire poverty in one of the nation’s worst ghettos, Houston’s so-called Bloody Fifth Ward, in the section known aptly as “the Bottom,” where “anger and hunger shaped my youth.” The fifth of seven children, George was raised by his mother, Nancy Ree Foreman, a single parent forced to work two jobs, seven days a week. The man he thought was his father, and the actual father of George’s brothers and sisters, J. D. Foreman, was mostly absent, and before he was born, his mother had drifted into an affair with another man. The result was baby George. To avoid gossip in the small town of Marshall where she lived, and desperate to improve her economic opportunities, his mother moved the family to Houston shortly after George was born. When George was four years old, his parents separated, placing the entire burden of family support on his mother.3
The section of Houston that the family moved to, the Bloody Fifth Ward, was notorious as one of the most violent ghettos in the nation. In the shadow of modern downtown Houston, a dynamic city of the postwar “new” South overflowing with oil and petrochemical wealth, the ward still retained many of the features more reflective of the old South, including the small, dark two- and three-room shotgun shacks inhabited by rats and insects and situated on unpaved roads. When it rained for several days, the streets flooded. As with other city services, garbage pickup was poor. Crime was rampant, and policing, where present, was extremely brutal. It is no surprise that the neighborhood had one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Mrs. Foreman was lucky to find two jobs, one as a cook in a cafeteria, but the fact that the pay was scaled for black women’s labor meant that the family lived only one or two steps ahead of the landlord in cramped circumstances where hunger was a constant problem. “I was a big boy, so I was always hungry,” Foreman recalled. “It wasn’t till years later, after I started boxing, that I could remember my stomach feeling full after a meal.” For a large child like George there was never enough food, and what his mother managed to bring home from the cafeteria had to be divided among his siblings. Sometimes she brought home one hamburger from the cafeteria, cut eight ways: “It was such a luxury; I grew up believing that hamburgers were only for rich people.”4
At home young George was often mean as well as hungry. Besides the hunger that fed his anger, his rage was also sparked by constant teasing from his siblings. A lot of that originated in the question of George’s legitimacy, not that anyone mentioned this openly. Although he did not know he was illegitimate, the nonstop gibing by his siblings fed his belief that he had no solid place in his family or in the world. In response to the hostility, George fought with his siblings all the time. That rage at and distrust of the world and the people around him went a long way toward shaping the angry young man in every aspect of his life.
The rage that defined him was something his mother hoped to quell, because she knew what happened to angry young black men growing up in the South. In her experience, fiery boys in the Bloody Fifth who lacked fear and showed signs of rebellion against authority died early on, at the hands of either the police or other young black men. “The aim of the police was to tame you, to break your spirit,” Foreman recalled. They took pride in beating tough guys savagely to show them who was boss. A big, strong woman herself, Mrs. Foreman tried to beat the anger out of her troublesome son. She preferred, she said, that George be “more afraid of what she would do to me if I disobeyed her than any of the trouble I might get into in the streets.” Her efforts failed. With his mother constantly working—and for a year hospitalized with clinical depression—George lost whatever direction he had. He ran the streets with a rough crowd, getting into one scrape after another.5
His mother hoped that education might give him a more positive direction in life, but George took no interest in school. In fact, he managed to fail every subject in every grade. The object of his teachers’ scorn and ashamed of his raggedy, hand-me-down clothes, he played hooky constantly, happier on the streets than in hot, stuffy classrooms. With the dime his mother gave him for school, he would shoot dice with his buddies, using his winnings for Marlboros and wine. He was passed from grade to grade even though he could not read or write. When he was in the sixth grade a teacher told him that he would never get past junior high school, and at the age of thirteen he abandoned any hope of learning.6
Only sports held his interest in junior high. He discovered football, a rough contact sport in which he could channel some of his anger. As a big, strong defensive lineman he could sack a quarterback gleefully, bring down a running back, or smash an offensive lineman to the ground without compunction, and in the process earn praise, rather than blame, for his violent tendencies. His bad habits, though, landed him in trouble. The coach caught him smoking and kicked him off the team. With no interest in academic subjects, he dropped out of E. O. Smith Junior High School in the ninth grade without a degree. Too young to get a job, Foreman ran the streets with his buddies, drank cheap wine on the corners, smoked marijuana, dabbled in minor criminal activities, and got into fights.
If school could not save him from the streets, his mother reasoned, perhaps religion could help. Although working seven days a week prevented her from attending services on a regular basis, she was a believing Baptist who relied on the Bible for guidance and hoped that George might do the same. He never followed through. His brothers and sisters not only read the Bible; they prayed seriously and attended services as often as they could. In those days, however, George despised the church as something designed exclusively for the weak. As he put it, religion was for “men who couldn’t hit back anymore, women beaten by life—they bought religion. Nobody I looked up to.” For this discontented, rebellious youngster, churches were a scam where mercenary ministers preached pie-in-the-sky sermons to bilk the poor and the ignorant out of their hard-earned pennies. He said, “I would have been ashamed if any of the guys I went around with thought I believed in Jesus; Jesus was a hoax.”7
Trapped by race and poverty and lacking responsible male role models, an extremely alienated George Foreman, like many other young men raised in the nation’s ghettos, turned to robbery, violence, and vandalism to express his deep-seated rage and take what was missing in his life. “By the time I was sixteen years of age, I was a vicious, savage teenager, picking fights in school or wherever I went,” he recounted. Fueled by cheap wine and marijuana, he did not see robbery as a serious crime or the law as anything that applied to him: “For me, in those days, the law was the law of the jungle, where the end justified the means. Survival.” By junior high school, he remembered, violence “had become second nature. Everyone knew my reputation, and they knew it was a reputation I cultivated.” Growing up on the streets of Houston, “You had to learn to fight. That was my way of earning a reputation.” His street gang turned to the six-foot-one, 185-pound George as their enforcer, because they knew he would not back down. To back down in this dog-eat-dog world was to lose his “manhood” and his “identity.” Sometimes, he bragged, “[I] beat up two or three people a day. I was brutal, too. . . . Because my conscience was so encrusted with hate, it didn’t bother me to see people bleeding or knocked out cold.” Living in a world where survival seemed the only thing that mattered, young Foreman saw himself as “King of the Jungle,” a man whose fists and size provided his only measure of identity.8
Running the streets meant constant run-ins with the police, although in George’s mind that did not automatically make him a criminal. There did come a moment, however, when the realization finally hit him. After what looked like a successful mugging for him, the victim called the police. With dogs in tow, they descended on the neighborhood for a house-to-house search for the mugger. As police searchlights swept the area and the dogs began trying to pick up his scent, George desperately attempted to hide himself in the crawl space under one of the neighborhood’s shotgun shacks. Lying in the dirt, damp from the filthy water dripping down on him from the house’s pipes, he smeared himself with mud to ward off the approaching police dogs. At that crucial juncture, George came face-to-face with reality—he was a criminal barely existing at the margins of society. Fortunately for him, the police did not find him, but the harrowing experience convinced him to give up mugging at least and try to get a job and go straight. George’s brother got him hired at the moving company where he was employed, but after George slept through an evening shift, the boss fired him, not without a lecture on his total irresponsibility.9
George may have wanted to go straight, but how? After all, in 1965 he was a sixteen-year-old black junior high school dropout with a penchant for crime and dissipation and a total lack of usable skills. The only thing going for him was his desire to make his clinically depressed mother proud of him. As if by way of miracle, it was the Job Corps, an antipoverty program that was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, that helped young Foreman turn his life around and saved him from prison or an early grave. The answer to his dilemma arrived when his sister alerted him to an advertisement airing on television for the new antipoverty program that was seemingly designed for someone just like him. In the brief government-sponsored spot, all-time great football quarterback Johnny Unitas and legendary running back Jim Brown advised young men that they could overcome their impoverished backgrounds by learning a trade in the Job Corps. When George heard them endorse the program, he was determined to go. Mrs. Foreman was more than happy to sign the necessary papers to get her troubled son away from the bad elements that surrounded him. As far as the future champion was concerned, the experience changed his life.10
Foreman’s decision to join the Job Corps placed him at the center of the Johnson administration’s training plan, a key element in its desire to build a Great Society and eliminate poverty in the United States. Established in 1964, the Job Corps proposed to provide impoverished youth the skills, discipline, and character to lift them out of poverty. Much of the attention focused on young black men like George who came from broken homes, had dropped out of school, and were part of what The Negro Family: The Case for National Action—known as the Moynihan Report, for its author, then assistant secretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan—would label “a tangle of pathology” rooted in a matriarchal culture. The focus was specifically on males who needed government assistance and training to attain the proper skills and character necessary to support their families. This mode of breadwinner liberalism had roots in conventional assumptions about the nuclear family and its emphasis on traditional male roles as breadwinners and females as mothers and wives in the home. What was different about the Job Corps was that it would extend government help to those young men who increasingly made up the ranks of the chronically unemployed. Unbeknownst to George, just as he volunteered for the Job Corps, the assumptions on which it was based would come under criticism by black nationalists like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Stokely Carmichael who supported the need to undergird black patriarchy but distrusted the paternalism of American government programs. Equally critical, but perhaps with longer-lasting effect, were the growing ranks of the feminist movement, which challenged breadwinner liberalism as biased toward men as workforce participants and women as restricted to the domestic sphere. Furthermore, after the urban riots and the Moynihan Report, many political conservatives and disappointed liberals criticized these government programs as useless. They were convinced that black males from the ghetto were too immersed in a culture of poverty and family dysfunction to be helped by government programs.11
For George, however, the Job Corps proved a major turning point. In 1965 the Corps sent him an airplane ticket to the Fort Vannoy Conservation Center in Grants Pass, Oregon, an idyllic natural setting far removed in geography and spirit from the Houston ghetto. Surrounded by forests and mountains, he realized for the first time that there was a whole different world outside the Fifth Ward, like the setting of a Roy Rogers television episode or a place where he could imagine Beaver and Wally, from the Leave It to Beaver television program, on a Boy Scout outing: “This was the place of my heroes and fantasies, and where I now lived.” It was also a place where he learned construction, built roads and houses, and discovered that Job Corps personnel were “concerned with teachin’ you something.” The physicality of the labor appealed to him so much that he looked forward to getting up early in the morning and going back to work.12
Still, despite his newfound love for construction, George initially made few friends. In his case it proved easier to take the young man out of the ghetto than it was to take the ghetto out of the young man. Nearly full grown at six foot three and two hundred pounds, sixteen-year-old Foreman continued to use his strength to beat up his camp mates, many of whom were older than he was. Fighting was the only thing he knew, and if anyone did not give him full respect—and sometimes even if anyone did—George would smash him to the ground. In short order, he earned a reputation as the conservation center’s bully. Worried about his suitability for the Job Corps, the counselors discussed sending him back to Houston.13
Finally George made a friend, Richard Kibble, a hippie from Tacoma, Washington, who introduced him to the new youth culture that was beginning to sweep the nation. On their first meeting Kibble asked him why he fought with everyone all the time and asserted that fighting was not important. Together they listened to Kibble’s Bob Dylan records, which, according to Foreman, was when his real education began. Although he continued to fight with anyone and everyone, George discovered a love of learning. He learned grammar and vocabulary and for the first time in his life read a book. In fact, he began to devour books, especially the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which given its story of an alienated black young man who descends into crime and prison before being redeemed, must have spoken forcefully to him. It was through Kibble that he also made a few friends, most of whom he had beaten up at one time or another. While listening with them to the radio broadcast of the Muhammad Ali–Floyd Patterson bout on November 22, 1965, one of his new friends asked him why he did not take up boxing, since he liked beating up people so much. Excited by the challenge of the sport and the glamour of the heavyweight champion, six months later George transferred to the Camp Parks Job Corps Center run by Litton Industries near Pleasanton, California. Located about forty miles east of Oakland, the center would allow George to continue his education and make use of its excellent physical education facilities, including an already-established boxing program.14
The boxing program at Camp Parks was run by Nick “Doc” Broadus, one of the most important influences in George’s life. More than boxing, the forty-eight-year-old former amateur and professional fighter strove to provide Foreman with discipline, direction, and a strong adult male role model. Only five foot five, Broadus had a boxing résumé and a background in martial arts that earned George’s respect and made the coach fearless toward his towering young pupil with the hair-trigger temper: “You bigger than me, but I can handle you baby. Size don’t mean nothin’ to me.” Broadus told him: “I been in that jungle, too, George. Whatever you did, I was doin’ myself not long ago. But that’s ol’ history now, an’ our job is to make history.” As an amateur boxer Broadus had won one hundred straight bouts and twenty-four out of twenty-five as a professional. As soon as he lost, he turned coach, first in the air force, then in the Job Corps. Even with his vast experience, however, steering the angry Foreman proved challenging. When George threatened a counselor, he was nearly expelled from the Job Corps as an irredeemable hoodlum. “I was held responsible for him,” Doc noted. “It was going to be his last opportunity.”15
Foreman’s last chance meant taking the boxing program seriously. Doc put him in charge of the gym and at night schooled him in the rudiments of the sport. George donned his first pair of boxing gloves in December 1966. In his first bout with middleweight Max Briggs, a camp boxing veteran, he was thoroughly embarrassed. His brute strength proved ineffective. Briggs made him look foolish by dancing him silly, peppering him with punches, and bloodying his nose. Worse, this occurred in front of many of the Job Corps mates he had bullied. Deeply ashamed, George skipped the camp’s fight show without explanation, running off to Oakland rather than risk further embarrassment. When he returned, he blamed his disappearance on having boxing shoes too small to box in. Doc bought him a pair of tennis shoes. “After he found out there was somebody interested in him,” Broadus recalled, “he worked real hard.” The coach gave him more than shoes: “I gave him the basic fundamentals. Boxin’ is slippin’ an’ slidin’ an’ blocking those punches. An’, of course, conditioning. It’s 90 percent conditioning.” Even more, Doc taught character. “Somebody, somewhere down the line, gotta steer a guy like George, an’ say, ‘What you gonna do, gonna go this way, or revert back to where you come from?’” Motivated by a desire to make his mother proud of him, Foreman absorbed the lessons and began to devote himself to training.16
On January 26, 1967, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, the young unknown from Houston won his first amateur fight in the Camp Parks Diamond Belt Tournament with a first-round knockout. As he piled up a string of wins, George’s boxing future looked promising since every one of his victories came by way of knockout, a pattern that would continue throughout his amateur and future professional career. Once again, however, he nearly derailed himself. One day he beat up a fellow corpsman outside the ring and the Job Corps wanted to expel him. “I said no,” recalled Doc. “And I said George, if you wanna be a bully an’ throw your chances down the drain, beautiful. And George went back to work.” As Foreman trained and won, though, he realized that boxing helped channel his rage because he no longer needed to prove himself. Savoring his victories, he said, “it was now clear to me that my destiny would not be grim.” The Job Corps and its boxing program taught him that he was “going to be somebody. And that’s all I’d ever fought for.”17
Through his dedication and the boxing victories he amassed, Foreman soon became a “poster boy for the Job Corps.” As he noted, “I’d gone from being a junior high school dropout to a man who now devoured books; from an unemployable teenager to a skilled factory worker; from thug to humanitarian. Well, not quite humanitarian, but as I dedicated myself to the ‘Sweet Science,’ I discovered more compassion for others.” After graduation from the Job Corps in May 1967 he returned to Houston rather than accept Broadus’s offer to box full-time under the management of a collection of investors similar to the Louisville Sponsoring Group that had guided Ali’s career after the Olympics. In Houston he passed his high school equivalency examination easily and hoped to find a job in which he could use his newfound skills. His hopes were not realized. In the first place, his draft status was 1-A and employers were reluctant to hire someone they might soon lose to the armed forces, a situation common to all young men of that era. In the second place, the Job Corps stressed training but did not guarantee employment in the private sector or provide specific job programs sponsored by the federal government. Despite his training, Foreman was subject to the usual problem faced by young black men—discrimination and lack of opportunities. He applied for job openings but was turned down every time, which led him to conclude that racial discrimination was at work. With little to do, Foreman went through a deeply frustrating period, and his deep-seated anger at the world around him returned in force. He hooked up with his old friends and hit the streets once more, looking for marijuana, pills, or anything else they might find. As his motivation waned, he became belligerent again or, in his words, “a monster.” He began picking fights for no reason, was arrested for assaulting two men, and was forced to pay a fine. Things looked bleak.18
Once again, however, Doc Broadus came to his rescue. Doc had remained in contact with George and his mother, so he knew what Foreman was going through. At the urging of George’s distraught mother, Broadus sent him a plane ticket to Oakland, paid for out of his own pocket, and hired him to mop up, wash dishes, and help coach boxers at the Pleasanton center for $465 a month. Doc also began to train him for the 1968 Olympics. It was unclear at first whether Foreman would aim for an Olympic berth in the upcoming games or turn professional immediately. If he turned professional, his coach advised, it would take a good deal of time to earn much money in the ring because of his lack of experience. When George asked him about the gold medal, he said: “I told him it means you the best amateur heavy weight champ in the world. An’ he said, ‘Okay, Doc, we’ll go for the gold medal.’” Even more important, according to Foreman, Doc explained that Muhammad Ali’s gold medal had led to fame and fortune and was likely to do the same for another promising former gold medalist, Joe Frazier. George now had a goal: “Boxing was my best opportunity to buy a decent living for my mother.” One might add that boxing—and winning—had become the center of his identity.19
With a gold medal at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as his goal, Foreman trained harder than ever. He also began to listen to his trainer rather than rely almost exclusively on his formidable strength. Amateur victories began to pile up. By this time, moreover, George had given up smoking, and after beating up a friend in a drunken rage, he quit drinking too. Except for a pair of losses to Clay Hodges, the reigning national Golden Gloves heavyweight champion, Foreman continued to win, including the national Amateur Athletic Union heavyweight crown, and earned a spot on the US Olympic team. In his final test in the Olympic trials at Albuquerque, New Mexico, on September 21, 1968, George won a unanimous decision against Otis Evans and became the US heavyweight representative on the team that would compete in Mexico City. With a record of sixteen victories and four losses after only nineteen months as an amateur, the nineteen-year-old Foreman was the least experienced boxer in American Olympic history, yet one, Broadus told the Oakland Tribune, who could “make the world forget Louis and Clay.” While that remained to be seen, his performance at the Mexico City Olympics transformed his own life profoundly.20
While Foreman looked forward to his moment in the sun at Mexico City, the Olympic Games of 1968 capped the most turbulent year in American sports, and certainly one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. To a large extent, however, Foreman remained, as he put it, “cocooned” in the Olympic Village. He had no knowledge of the violent events that had just transpired as the Mexican army and the Mexico City police massacred more than two hundred students, workers, and administrators, and wounded many more in an attempt to repress antigovernment demonstrations designed to use the Olympic Games to capture the attention of the world regarding the repressive nature of the Mexican government. More than other athletes, the boxers were protected from protests in general by their coach, William Henry “Pappy” Gault, and were largely oblivious to the tense atmosphere as officials worried about even greater disruptions from within the ranks of the athletes. What would black Americans do to turn the international spotlight on American racism and oppression? As tensions mounted in Mexico City, both Muhammad Ali and George Foreman played key roles in the ensuing drama.21
Although he remained banned from boxing and faced a five-year jail sentence, Ali’s outspoken attack on white supremacy and the Vietnam War during 1967 and 1968 had inspired many young black (and some white) athletes to challenge the sports establishment and the traditional view that victories on the field redounded to the benefit of the larger black population in the United States. Black sociologist Harry Edwards, a principal initiator of that revolt, declared that Ali “was the warrior saint in the revolt of the black athlete in America.” The politicization of black athletes, Edwards further noted, was a response to the “disgust and dissatisfaction with the same racist germ” that produced the “Birmingham church bombing” and the “murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers.” Amid the assassinations of 1968, violent antiwar demonstrations, and urban racial rebellions going back to the Harlem riot of 1964 and the Watts riot of 1965, no aspect of American culture went unquestioned. The black athlete, he argued, had a responsibility to aid in his people’s struggles. By standing up and putting his body on the line for a cause, “he is for the first time reacting in a human and masculine fashion to the disparities between the heady artificial world of newspaper clippings, photographers, and screaming spectators, and the real world of degradation, humiliation and horror that confronts the overwhelming majority of Afro-Americans.” In other words, the modern black athlete had to confront the vast gulf between the artificial glory of sports and the fate of most African Americans, and the ways their individual accomplishments were turned into symbols of American racial progress for a Cold War world.22
Created in late 1967 by Edwards, the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) fed off the anger and militancy that had been building through 1967 and 1968 among black athletes in particular and black activists in general. The OPHR’s chief tactic was a boycott of the Olympic Games of 1968. The project had strong roots in the experiences of black athletes at overwhelmingly white San Jose State University in California, such as discrimination in off-campus housing, lack of black coeds to date, and officials’ distaste for interracial liaisons. Edwards, along with sprinters Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Lee Evans conceived and supported the boycott in the face of intense resistance by older black athletes such as Jesse Owens and the Olympic establishment, led by Avery Brundage, head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the US Olympic Committee (USOC). Although ultimately unsuccessful, Edwards’s call for a boycott roiled the world of international sport. The OPHR’s demands were global in their import. The issue that first provoked Edwards was Brundage’s decision to lift the ban on South African and Rhodesian participation in the 1968 games despite blatant evidence that the countries’ sports programs were as racist and as exclusionary as ever. The first demand, consequently, was the reimposition of the ban, which Brundage refused. Equally important, the OPHR demanded the return of Ali’s title. The group considered its removal an unjust, racist act aimed at punishing an outspoken black man. Here was proof that black athletes were tolerated only if they obeyed white officials and kept their mouths shut outside the arena. The USOC refused to do anything about Ali, claiming rightly but with a tin ear that the Olympics had nothing to do with the decisions of professional boxing’s sanctioning bodies. Other demands included Brundage’s resignation as head of the IOC and the hiring of more black coaches. The latter demand emerged from the conflicts between black athletes and white coaches at largely white colleges and in the professional ranks, where black athletes felt that they were merely replaceable bodies for hire, not individuals respected for their mental skill and executive leadership ability.23
Despite months of agitation and a successful boycott of the annual track meet of the New York Athletic Club, an exclusive organization to which Brundage belonged but one that barred blacks and Jews from membership, the Olympic boycott itself failed for a number of reasons. Under increasing pressure, the IOC finally gave in and reimposed the ban on South Africa and Rhodesia. At the same time the US Olympic Committee pledged to hire more black coaches in the future. Many black athletes were relieved because the Olympics occurred only once every four years, and if the boycott were successful, they might never get a chance to compete at the Olympic level again. Still, the boycott’s impact was enormous, even though it never came off. Protestors questioned whether sport provided an equal playing field regardless of race and whether black victories on the field would convince whites to end racial oppression in American society. Despite spectacular physical achievements, the higher echelons of sport and society remained off-limits to black athletes. Equally significant, the protests, and Ali’s outspokenness on matters of race, religion, and war, led many other black athletes to question whether they were merely dumb beasts and whether, given their prominence, they had a special responsibility to speak out on questions of racism, poverty, and injustice. Was the banning of Ali apolitical, athletes might ask, or, as Edwards charged, was it not true that black athletes were prized because they helped the United States win a vicarious war against the Russians, the Cold War rival for prestige in the rapidly decolonizing new nations? Were not black athletes, especially in international competition, symbols of an integrated American society that did not exist? By challenging these hallowed beliefs at a global spectacle, the protestors transformed sports from an escapist playpen into a subject of serious debate. That they raised the issue of racism in sport and society at an international event made their actions even more dangerous for the sports establishment.24
Given his role in sparking the athletic rebellion, Ali verbally supported the boycott movement while Foreman remained removed from the controversial protest. “Giving up a chance at the Olympics and a gold medal is a big sacrifice,” Ali declared when the boycott was first announced. “But anything they do that’s designed to get freedom and equality for their people, I’m with 1,000 percent.” Foreman first heard of the boycott movement when Edwards and some of his supporters came to the New Mexico Olympic training site to recruit athletes to their cause. They made speeches, but because there were no big-name boxing stars, they “passed us by the way a freight train would a hobo,” Foreman recalled. “Not one of us high school dropouts [on the boxing team] were ever asked to be part of what they were doing. They never asked the poor people to join.” Nor did they ask female Olympic athletes, because the radicals were focused on demonstrating their defiant black manhood. Foreman later asserted that the boycott worked best for UCLA basketball star Lew Alcindor and other college athletes who were accustomed to radical issues and protest movements on their campuses. “Whether the students’ anger was righteous, I don’t know,” Foreman recalled. “I know only that their world wasn’t the one I saw.” He put it succinctly: “How could I protest the Establishment when it had created the Job Corps for guys like me?” Besides, Foreman rejected the black nationalist message that only white people were prejudiced. In Houston, he claimed that black teachers, some of his relatives, and members of the black community were prejudiced when they summarily labeled him a failure.25
While Foreman’s class resentment against the boycott’s organizers alienated him from their cause, it is also true that Olympic boxing coach Pappy Gault made sure his team ignored the protests. As the first black coach for the US team, Gault was older, forty-six, a World War II veteran, and, like many of his generation, more conservative in his views. Having fought with the marines at Iwo Jima, he ran the boxing squad as a quasi-military unit. Both he and assistant Ray Rogers, also an ex-marine, were addressed as “Sarge.” Six of the team’s eleven members represented a branch of the armed services. Since nine of the eleven boxers were black, Gault maintained: “My fighters believe in me. They do what I say.” His major goal, in fact, was to make the notoriously individual sport of boxing “into a team sport. I don’t want stars or individualists,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I believe in unity. I think this will show a new side of the US. We are never individuals when we support the US.” Victory surpassed racial protest. His boxers, he bragged, were not “involved in any of this demonstration stuff. . . . We’re proud to be fighting for the United States. This is our country. We’re all brothers aren’t we?”26
Once it was decided that an Olympic boycott was impractical, athletes were left on their own at Mexico City to protest the injustices they felt existed in American sport and in American society. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” played and the American flag rose in victory, the gold- and bronze-medal winners in the two-hundred-meter sprint, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, engaged in a symbolic gesture that shook the Olympic establishment and the millions of American and international fans across the globe. Supported by the white Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, the two men on the medal podium bowed their heads respectfully and raised a fist adorned with a black glove. “My raised hand stood for the power in black America,” Smith later explained in a television interview with Howard Cosell. “Carlos’s raised left hand stood for the unity of black America. Together they formed an arch of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America. The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity.” For many young blacks and whites this symbolic gesture, seen globally, demonstrated tremendous black pride as well as a protest against American racial oppression.27
Not everyone reacted the same way. Their peaceful protest was decried by some as black Nazism, un-American, hate-filled Black Power, and an inappropriate politicization of the Olympics. The two track stars received thousands of hate letters, their families were threatened, and their living quarters vandalized in San Jose. Despite the fact that their protest was nonviolent, because of their introduction of “radical racial politics” into the officially apolitical Olympics, and their presumed disrespect for the American flag, the two young track stars were expelled from the games by the US Olympic Committee under the direct orders of Avery Brundage. Their careers never recovered.28
Under Pappy Gault’s leadership the American boxing team remained apart from the controversy sparked by Smith and Carlos’s raised fists. More immediately, the boxers were focused on winning medals in their events rather than what other Olympic contestants were doing. Foreman, for instance, had a rough set of matches in front of him, with what turned out to be his toughest test in his first elimination bout. His opponent was Lucjan Trela, a Polish left-hander who stood only five foot seven. Unlike most of George’s matches, this bout went to a decision, largely because he had difficulty punching down at his shorter foe. The rest of his bouts went much more easily, and a lot more quickly. He knocked out the Romanian Ion Alexe, another Soviet bloc fighter, as well as Italy’s Giorgio Bambini. After these victories the only one standing in the way of a gold medal was a Lithuanian representing the Soviet Union, the tough and experienced twenty-nine-year-old veteran Ionas Chepulis.29
With only his final match left, Foreman learned of the expulsion of Smith and Carlos and witnessed Carlos’s shattered face as he was leaving the Olympic Village. Despite his distance from the boycott movement, the punishment of the two sprinters seemed unjust. He felt like “not fighting anymore,” and he pondered whether to protest the actions of Olympic officials by forfeiting his gold-medal bout and going home. At this crucial juncture, however, someone—perhaps Doc Broadus—informed him that John Carlos was counting on the young American heavyweight to win a gold medal. The ruse worked. Foreman decided to go through with the bout and in spectacular fashion. Aware that Cold War loyalties often influenced the judges’ decisions, he wanted to knock out the Lithuanian fighter to get the victory. George started out jabbing cautiously in the first round. After numerous left jabs, he threw a straight left that bloodied Chepulis’s nose, all within the first minute of the fight. Unleashing the power that would characterize his entire career, Foreman staggered his opponent with a right cross, and a second blow buckled his knees. Ahead on points, he switched to a body attack in the second round. After a hard body shot again buckled Chepulis’s knees, the referee gave “the Russian,” as the American press referred to him, a standing eight count. One more powerful right and the referee stopped the bout, declaring George a winner by TKO in the second round. In storybook fashion, the desperately poor young black man from the Houston ghetto and the Great Society’s Job Corps had pounded out a gold-medal victory in the heavyweight division, and over a Russian to boot. Foreman’s future looked bright. His victory on that October 26, 1968, transformed him into a Cold War hero.30
If Foreman’s patriotic victory was not enough, what he did next elevated him to iconic stature in the minds of many Americans. Elated by his triumph, he whipped out a small American flag from a pocket of his robe, kissed it, and waved it proudly around the ring. “Then it was,” wrote George Girsch in The Ring, that “George Foreman won his way into the hearts of his countrymen.” At the medal ceremony, moreover, he again waved a miniature American flag, a patriotic gesture that thrilled Americans in the stadium and millions back home watching on television. He described his gesture this way: “It was love of country, but I meant it in a way that was much bigger than ordinary patriotism. It was about identity. An American—that’s who I was. I was waving the flag as much for myself as for my country. I was letting everyone know who I was at the same time saying I was proud to be an American.”31
When asked by reporters why he had kissed the American flag before the final bell as well, he replied, “’Cause it’s my flag.” Foreman’s symbolic gesture was not just seen in the Arena México, where the Olympic boxing contests took place, it was broadcast live and rebroadcast via delay on television stations around the globe. To everyone watching in the United States and across the world, here was a patriotic black man standing up for his flag and his country against enemies without—the Russians—and enemies within: black radicals at a perilous moment in the nation’s history. George’s actions created a sensation, providing a moment of pride and patriotism in the United States for millions of white sports fans dismayed by protests against the Olympics staged by black athletes as well as by the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War that often involved the desecration of the American flag. Looking back from the vantage of 1971, The Ring offered a sense of the impact that George’s gesture had in a cover story on his nascent professional career. Referring to his flag waving, the Ring declared, “This mark of confidence in the United States, in its forces in Viet Nam, in the American way of life, made a deep impression on interested Americans, and others.” As the magazine asserted, “The benefits of this maneuver have stuck to Foreman, and will continue to stick to him as long as he is alive.” In an age when a visible and vocal minority among black and white athletes threatened to follow Ali’s example and refuse to be patriotic role models, Foreman stood out as an unalloyed black American hero. Like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis in the past, he would say little but defend American democracy with his deeds in the arena.32
Foreman’s patriotic gesture did not go unheeded by Ali. Barred from attending the Olympics in person because his passport had been confiscated, the gold medalist at the 1960 Rome Olympics closely followed the televised events taking place in Mexico City. He was not impressed. “Look at that fool jumpin’ around. Who’s he tryin’ to bullshit?” Ali demanded. “He can punch some. Might make some money with him.” Many of Ali’s politically aware fans were equally skeptical. They immediately interpreted Foreman’s flag waving as a calculated response to the protests mounted on the victory stand by sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Whatever his motives then, Foreman asserted in recent interviews with sports columnist Dave Zirin that he would wave three flags today in honor of the Job Corps and all the program did for him. It was no accident that during the Olympics—and his early days as a professional—he proudly wore “George Foreman, The Fighting Corpsman” on the back of his robe.33
Despite Ali’s derision, Foreman’s patriotic display made him a prominent figure in one of the most contentious presidential contests in American history, fast reaching a climax as the Olympics came to a close. As the campaign reached its last weeks, both political parties solicited the support of a gold-medal winner whose exemplary victory and patriotism might sway voters to their cause. The Richard Nixon campaign valued Foreman for his simple patriotism in contrast to those vocal, un-American dissenters like Smith, Carlos, and Ali who disrespected the American flag or refused to defend it while the nation was at war. However, Foreman felt that Nixon’s speech the day after he waved the flag misinterpreted his motives. At a rally at Madison Square Garden, the Republican presidential candidate mentioned “that young man at the Olympics who made us all so proud. He wasn’t afraid to show his patriotism,” just like the voters that Nixon hoped to attract. In fact, though, Nixon’s representatives had been angling for Foreman’s support as soon as he won the heavyweight spot. They wanted to align Nixon with a symbol of success. Even before the boxing team left for Mexico, a Nixon campaign representative told him: “You’re a winner and we think we’ve got us a winner, too. We’d like you to come out to some of our events and campaign for Nixon.”34
While the attention from the Republicans was flattering, Foreman decided instead to support the Democratic Party candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had helped start the Job Corps and was one of its most committed supporters. Foreman believed that if elected, Humphrey would continue this key program in the War on Poverty, whereas Nixon would eliminate it. As a result, immediately after returning from Mexico City, George took to the stump for Humphrey, along with a host of liberal sport and entertainment celebrities. It was in this context that Foreman appeared in Jet waving a small American flag as he campaigned for Humphrey. Over and over Humphrey praised Foreman as a sterling example of the Job Corps. In Peoria, Illinois, where the two campaigned together, for example, Humphrey declared, “I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Nixon last Sunday as he condemned the Job Corps, which gave a chance to 200,000 kids that never had a chance.” On that day, continued Humphrey, “a great American [Foreman] accepted the gold medal for you and for me and for his family and for the glory of this republic.” Humphrey praised Foreman for acknowledging, “I got my chance in the Job Corps.” Wearing his gold medal and waving the flag, George campaigned not for patriotism in the abstract but for a political party and a nation that had provided opportunities for poor young men like him. He was not just a flag waver, he was “George Foreman, The Fighting Corpsman,” defending a key program of the Great Society. At that moment he represented breadwinner liberalism in all its glory against both conservative attempts to eliminate such programs and black nationalists who doubted that white America could do right for its black citizens.35
Soon after the election, the Fighting Corpsman received an invitation to the White House to meet President Johnson. Foreman took the occasion to deliver a plaque to the president “in appreciation for fathering the Job Corps Program which gave young Americans like me hope, dignity, and self-respect.” In exchange, at the end of 1968, Foreman traveled to the headquarters of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, DC, “to receive the Job Corps award of achievement.”36
The significance of his actions and the controversy they generated did not begin to sink in until after Foreman returned to Houston to visit his family and read the thousands of letters of praise and condemnation that greeted him. Despite his support for the Great Society’s Job Corps, which he would continually and actively defend, most white and black Americans saw him as a true patriot, a living rebuke to the antiwar movement and Black Power dissidents who burned and desecrated the American flag in a time of war. To a degree, his own actions set him up for this more conservative role, whether he wanted it or not. When he returned to California, for example, he gave a plaque, similar to the one he gave LBJ, to conservative Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who then declared, “[George] is proof that the American Dream is just as real as it was 192 years ago.”37
Despite his defense of the Job Corps, conservative voices praised the black gold-medal winner for his American patriotism above all else. Delighted by Foreman’s victory over the Russian and his patriotic gesture on national and international television, for example, embattled IOC president Avery Brundage underlined this simple conservative message when he met with Foreman and the US boxing team immediately after his victory “to erase the bad impression left by the Track and Field athletes,” specifically Smith and Carlos. Sports Illustrated hailed Foreman’s symbolism as “a fitting tribute to a surprising US Olympic team.” Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune, a bastion of American national pride, named the 1968 Olympic Games the sports story of the year without mentioning Smith or Carlos, but praising “Foreman’s singing of the Star Spangled Banner and his waving the American flag.” To top it off, the Tribune paired the story with a picture of his patriotic gesture.38
In fact, over the next several years—indeed, for the rest of his life—newspaper and magazine stories about Foreman in and out of the sporting press usually included a picture of him with the flag, not to mention the obligatory praise of his patriotic gesture. To publicize his first bout at Madison Square Garden in June 1969, for example, he was shown giving out flags on Flag Day to passersby in front of the arena, and in a cover story on his professional progress, The Ring published two photos, the top one with George and the flag at the Olympics. As sportswriter Wells Twombly declared, the act of waving the flag made him “a folk hero to the silent majority.” As a result, George Foreman and the American flag were one in the hearts of many Americans, evidenced by the parade held in his honor in Oakland, California, when he returned to the Job Corps Center in Pleasanton, and by the two awards he received from the Freedom Foundation. Moreover, Vince Lombardi, the patriotic coach of the Green Bay Packers, publically called Foreman a good American and told him how proud he had made him at the Olympics.39
While the nascent “silent majority,” many of them white and members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, may have been delighted by George’s patriotism, back in Houston it was clear that younger black people viewed his symbolic gesture with jaundiced eyes. For them, the symbolic protests of Smith and Carlos more accurately expressed how they felt. Proud of his accomplishment, Foreman wore his gold medal all around the Fifth Ward so that his friends and neighbors could share in his victory. Too many people, he soon discovered, did not see his actions as a victory, especially in the many homes where posters of Smith and Carlos with clenched fists in the air decorated the walls. As he noted, “It was pretty clear I didn’t fit in.” When he spoke at schools and community events, he ran into Black Panthers, whose faces said that “I’d betrayed the cause.” Similarly, he met the Reverend Ray Martin, who put on amateur boxing bouts in the Bottom, at a local store that sold dashikis, fast becoming a fashion symbol of black pride in one’s African roots. When Reverend Martin introduced the Olympic champion to the saleswoman, however, she “made some insulting remarks to him about the flag incident, more or less expressing the thinking of the black community at that time.” Even old buddies questioned his flag waving. Wearing his medal, Foreman ran into an old friend who asked with a pained expression, “Man . . . how could you lift up the flag that way when the brothers were doing their thing?” As the words sank in, Foreman felt that his friend was saying what everyone thought: “It hit me like a hammer. It was true; I really didn’t belong.”40
“What a homecoming,” Foreman remembered. “Imagine—the Olympic heavyweight Champion, an outcast.” In an era of black pride and black nationalism some derided him and Doc Broadus as Uncle Toms. What stood out increasingly was that Foreman was a patriot who supported the white establishment over and against the antiestablishment figures of Ali, Smith, and Carlos. Rejection by the black community stuck with the sensitive Foreman for a long time. He had expected praise for his accomplishments, but there were no posters of Foreman on the walls of dormitory rooms and student apartments, only Smith and Carlos in their gloved-fist pose on the podium. In Oakland, California, the original home of the Black Panthers, not far from his Pleasanton base, posters of Smith and Carlos were displayed everywhere. The conflict between the two iconic gestures stood as a symbolic dividing point of the late 1960s and early 1970s. That such a great divide existed among blacks—and many young whites—struck even moderate Republican and civil rights champion Jackie Robinson. Watching the Olympics on television, Robinson viewed the nonviolent symbolic protest by Smith and Carlos as “the greatest demonstration of personal conviction and pride that I’ve really seen.” But then, “you see a guy running around the ring waving a flag and you get sick inside. You know that’s just what happened to me—I go[t] sick when I saw Foreman run out waving a flag.”41
Despite the controversy, the Olympics propelled Foreman toward a professional boxing career and the heavyweight title, just as it did for Ali. At first, though, he was unsure what to do after his Olympic quest was over and the heated presidential election finally ended. In the 1960s a gold medal did not automatically guarantee millions of dollars in endorsements and promotions. He thought of going to junior college in Oakland on a football scholarship, but the lucrative boxing offers that he received after Mexico City were too tempting to ignore. Foreman might have been unsure about his future, but only boxing could provide the type of money he needed to live on, buy his mother a home in a better neighborhood, and help support his family. At Doc Broadus’s invitation, Foreman returned to the Job Corps Center at Pleasanton, where he taught boxing. Broadus had signed him to a management contract for 50 percent of his professional boxing earnings, higher than the usual 30 to 40 percent, but in what would mark a temporary break between the two men, Foreman rejected the contract. He began hunting for a different manager, and with the counsel of Office of Economic Opportunity chief Sargent Shriver, a better deal. In 1969, when newly elected president Richard Nixon made good on his campaign pledge to cut back the Job Corps as a waste of federal funds, the Pleasanton site was eliminated, and the Job Corps’ most conspicuous success story was out of a job. He decided to turn his full attention to professional boxing.42
Foreman eventually signed with Dick Sadler, Doc Broadus’s good friend and the veteran manager of Archie Moore and Sonny Liston, during the last stages of his career. He moved into Sadler’s house in Hayward, California, and started training at a local boys’ club. Doc lived next door, and Moore, a former Sadler fighter and a churchgoing teetotaler, visited to offer advice based on his vast ring experience. Despite winning a gold medal at the Olympics, Foreman had fewer amateur bouts than any other Olympic heavyweight champion, and as a result he lacked basic ring skills. Given Foreman’s relative inexperience, Sadler had a lot of work to do. “George was a diamond in the rough,” Sadler declared, “and I do mean rough. He was what he was, crude, strong, with less amateur experience than anybody who had ever won the gold medal.” Under Sadler’s tutelage, Foreman made his professional debut at Madison Square Garden on June 23, 1969, with a third-round knockout of Don Waldheim, but boxing experts continued to doubt his ability. In 1970, after Foreman outpointed Gregorio Peralta, a ranked heavyweight, The Ring noted Foreman’s possibility as a title contender but urged that he be brought along slowly. But then, he easily whipped tough George Chuvalo, and “within six months, Foreman came charging out of virtually nowhere, into the list of the favored.”43
As the manager of both Archie Moore and Sonny Liston, Sadler knew how to plan a professional career. He picked opponents carefully, varying them by size, weight, and style so Foreman could learn to adapt to all contingencies. Fighting about once a month against well-calibrated opponents, he began to learn the intricacies of the sport, gradually climbing the ranks with an awesome display of brute power. Sadler also kept him off television. Before he fought for the title in 1973, Foreman had only two televised fights, both of which ended very quickly. One reason for his lack of television exposure, according to San Francisco Examiner sports reporter Eddie Muller, was that George “was bad television.” Foreman, Muller noted, was the most uninteresting contender around: “He was still learning. He looked clumsy. He’d just wade in there and dispatch the guy. He also made it look too easy.” Fans refused to pay to see fights that ended in one or two rounds. “People want to see a struggle!” Foreman was just too strong. “He could just touch your shoulder with his glove, and you’d be off balance, ready for the right cross that’d end the fight,” said Muller. Away from TV he could hone skills that needed work. When he fought Gregorio Peralta the first time at Madison Square Garden, he ran out of energy in the seventh round and nearly lost the fight. He also took heavy punches from routine fighters like Ron Stander and Terry Daniels. By his return match with Peralta in May 1971, however, Foreman had improved his defensive skills a good deal, he had developed greater stamina, and he had learned to cut off the ring on his opponent. As a result, he knocked out Peralta in the tenth round.44
Working with Sadler, Foreman also absorbed other boxing lessons. As he trained alongside Liston, who was in the midst of a comeback, the two boxers become close, and the experience led Foreman to identify with the former heavyweight champion. Liston was quiet and introspective while presenting a menacing face to a world that often scorned and disappointed him. As someone who felt equally sensitive to public rejection, Foreman took heed, and as his career progressed, he often appeared in public as an angry, sullen young man. The danger was that, just like Liston, he would be perceived as a thug. He also learned a variety of lessons from other highly competitive black athletes. When he met basketball stars Walt Frazier and his idol, football legend Jim Brown, both men dismissed him as a nonentity. As the heavyweight champion, he took them as his models, giving nothing away to the public, often treating fans as a bothersome nuisance. The new-fledged professional also learned about the sexual folklore of boxing when Joe Louis advised him to abstain from sex for a month before a bout because he believed intercourse weakened a fighter. This fit perfectly with Sadler’s gospel: women were only after money and would disturb a boxer’s concentration. As a result, he became an isolate; as Foreman put it, “boxing was my wife.” Isolation, though, bred anger, which fueled his ferocious aggression in the ring. When Foreman married Adrienne Calhoun in December 1971, Sadler was irate. It turns out his manager had a point. The young boxer’s marital troubles would soon disturb his concentration, but they kept his anger fully stoked.45
With a brutal display of power, Foreman worked his way into contention for the heavyweight title during the early 1970s. By the time he fought champion “Smokin’” Joe Frazier on January 22, 1973, in Kingston, Jamaica, he had ground through thirty-two victories in twenty-nine months and sixteen different cities. As boxing reporter Vic Ziegel put it, this was “a whirlwind pace by current boxing standards.” Frazier, who replaced Ali at the top of the heavyweight ranks after the latter’s conviction, and then beat him when he reentered boxing, thought the fight would be relatively easy. According to legendary trainer Eddie Futch, who went down to Kingston to supervise the last stages of Frazier’s training, what he found was a party atmosphere with no one taking Foreman seriously. After all, Frazier thought, he was the powerful fighter who had ruined Ali’s comeback from exile two years earlier. Despite having won thirty-seven straight bouts, thirty-four by KO, in Frazier’s opinion George had fought “mostly tomato cans,” with only Gregorio Peralta and the veteran George Chuvalo as quality opponents. Frazier, in contrast, had not only beaten the legendary Ali; he had also bested Oscar Bonavena, Eddie Machen, Jimmy Ellis, and Doug Jones. Rated an underdog with 3-to-1 odds against him, Foreman shocked the boxing world by knocking down Frazier six times in two rounds and pulling off what The Ring called “an all-time upset.” Frazier planned to come out early, force the fight, wear down Foreman, and then knock him out. Unfortunately for Frazier, the much bigger Foreman (six foot three versus Frazier’s five eleven and a half) “didn’t follow the script.” Foreman used his big guns, especially his left hooks, body shots, and a couple of uppercuts, to smash through Frazier’s much-vaunted “perpetual motion machine.” Frazier expected to take Foreman’s best and then grind him down, as he did whenever he fought bigger men. Fighting “a near perfect battle,” however, the challenger used his height and five-inch reach advantage to push the champ back, take charge, and hit Frazier with powerful lefts and rights as the determined champion kept coming forward.46
According to referee Arthur Mercante, “Foreman won the world championship with sheer power,” especially the punch that produced the second knockdown in round one, an underhand right to the head. After five knockdowns through the second round, the champ “was a pathetic figure.” He walked, almost stumbled, into a right that “lifted him off the floor and deposited him, leg bent grotesquely, like a bag of flour.” After another knockdown, Mercante finally stopped the fight at 1:35 into the second round. “Frazier down six times? Impossible!” exclaimed Ring. As Mercante put it, “Joe Frazier, supposedly invincible, had turned out to be human, after all.” According to The Ring, the win was no fluke: “George Foreman is one of the good ones. He will be around a long time.”47
As the newly crowned heavyweight champion, Foreman inherited the goodwill he had built up from the 1968 Olympics. The public viewed him favorably as the Fighting Corpsman who had waved the flag in Mexico City and expressed his gratitude for all that his country had done for him. In fact, Foreman won the heavyweight title on the same day that ex-president Johnson died. Harold Sims, former chief of the Office of Economic Opportunity, noted the connection between the two events. “George Foreman would not have the heavyweight championship if Lyndon Johnson had not been President,” Sims declared. After all, Foreman was “discovered in a vehicle created by Lyndon Johnson, the Job Corps Center, which was part of the OEO. The Job Corps financed his training, supplied him a coach, and got him involved in Olympic competition.” Foreman’s victory, said Sims, was “the finest statement of what Lyndon Johnson believed the Great Society was all about.”48
For most Americans, Foreman remained the patriotic flag waver, and as such he found himself cast in an older mode of black heavyweights that predated Ali. The stark symbolic differences that separated the two men remained rooted in the nation’s political divisions that lingered into the early 1970s. As George Girsch put it in The Ring’s biography of the new champ, “A fellow who waves a little American flag after winning the Olympic heavyweight Gold Medal can’t be all bad.” Despite his awesome power, Girsch saw Foreman as a “gentle giant” who “believes in God and the United States of America, not to mention Mom’s apple pie.” An earlier Ring profile noted that there would be “no Black Power gestures for George.” Similarly, Shirley Norman noted, his devastating power was moderated by his out-of-the ring demeanor. In her view, Foreman was “a handsome, hulking, yet humble man whose feelings about his life and his title differ greatly from those of his predecessors.” He “displays none of the arrogance of Ali.” Rather, “He is, instead, in the cast of a Joe Louis . . . soft-spoken . . . unassuming . . . and deeply grateful for the honor of being heavyweight champion of the world.” In sum, Foreman was a true patriot who humbly appreciated what the United States of America had done for him. As he declared, “There’s no place else in the world . . . where a poor black man like me can get to be heavyweight champion of the world.” Not only was Foreman an American success story à la Horatio Alger, he was also a role model for kids—not an antihero like Ali but a genuine American paragon: “I feel that if I can overcome what I did . . . anybody else can.”49
So much did Foreman’s modesty, patriotism, and quiet retreat from the limelight make him seem a throwback to the pre-Ali Joe Louis era that Tim Tyler called him “the Great White Hope” in a Sport magazine special report on the new champion. According to Tyler, “In boxing, the search for a Great White Hope is constant—as much for financial reasons as racial. Now boxing has its man, even if he happens to be black.” Other sportswriters agreed. Wells Twombly, for instance, noted that “there are occasions when George Foreman seems to be a man from another age.” As Tyler noted, ever since the Mexico City Olympics at which he “waved an American flag, while other athletes were waving clenched fists, a lot of people have been calling George Foreman a ‘credit to his country,’” a phrase “hauntingly redolent of the condescending ‘credit to his race’ that was bestowed on [Joe] Louis during the nineteen thirties.” Very few called Ali that, noted Tyler, “except maybe some bearded radicals.”50
According to Tyler, Foreman was most popular among middle-aged whites who hungered for an end to racial disruptions and antiwar turmoil. At an all-white Lions Club meeting in Vacaville, California, for example, a representative for California governor Ronald Reagan thanked the new champion for “raising sportsmanship to its highest ideals.” Urging youngsters to stay in school, Foreman received a plaque for being “a great example for the young people of America.” One guest in particular praised Foreman’s character: “[He] has a clean mind. He doesn’t wanna hurt anyone. He’s a credit to his country.” His rags-to-riches story was compelling, but it also appealed mainly to whites because it validated a social system that had been thrown in doubt during the preceding years. When he addressed black high school students in Berkeley, California, one girl asked him what he would do for black people now that he was champion. Foreman responded that he would eat well. Realizing that “he might be irrelevant” and “old-fashioned,” he added that he would help black people by doing what he does best—boxing—and by being “the best person I could be.” As a result of his remarks, he suffered by comparison to the committed, outspoken athlete Ali. Another student rated Foreman OK, but said, “[I] wished they’d get Ali here. He’s a really good fighter.”51
In his rise to the heavyweight crown, George Foreman’s crushing power convinced many fans and boxing observers that he was invincible, a champion who would reign for as long as he liked. At the same time, Foreman’s devastating knockout upset of Smokin’ Joe Frazier served notice that the heavyweight boxing picture had changed dramatically in the early 1970s. Ali’s exile from boxing for three and a half years made it possible for a new generation of fighters like Frazier, Foreman, Ken Norton, Jimmy Young, Earnie Shavers, Ron Lyle and Jerry Quarry to become credible contenders for the title. Yet once he returned to boxing and his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, Ali’s name, his glamour, and his controversial beliefs overshadowed everyone in the fight game. To be considered the true champion, one had to beat “the People’s Champion.” For the Berkeley high school student, as for millions of fans, Ali was the real champion whose title had been stolen from him unjustly. In their eyes, Foreman—like Frazier before him—was merely an usurper, a tool of the white establishment. For many white fans, though, far more than Frazier even, a patriotic Foreman represented an ideal vision of an America which was open to all. Despite several setbacks, Ali was determined to reclaim “his” crown. George Foreman, the reigning heavyweight champion, was equally determined that his title was no fluke. Fists and flags would meet again on the road to Kinshasa.