George Foreman Biography: The Ten Years He Spent Out of the Ring

The most important thing George Foreman ever did happened in a dressing room in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and nobody filmed it.

March 17, 1977: A Dressing Room in San Juan

Foreman had just lost a twelve-round decision to Jimmy Young at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum. He was 28, still ranked, still expected to work his way back to a title shot.

Instead he collapsed, overheated and spent, and described afterwards what he understood as dying and being brought back. He announced his retirement within days.

He was ordained in 1978. In 1980 he founded the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Houston and pastored it. In 1984 he opened the George Foreman Youth and Community Center in the same city.

For ten years there was no boxing at all. No exhibitions. No comeback rumours. No ceremonial ringside appearances. He shaved his head, put on weight, and worked a pulpit.

Everything the public remembers fondly about George Foreman was built in that decade. Everything it remembered fearfully happened before it.

Before: The Fifth Ward and the Flag

He was born in Marshall, Texas, on January 10, 1949, one of seven children raised by Nancy Ree Nelson, and grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward.

He was not a promising kid. He dropped out at 15 and, by his own repeated account, mugged people for money.

A federal jobs programme got him out. The Job Corps took him at 16, gave him a GED and a trade, and introduced him to a counsellor and boxing coach called Charles “Doc” Broadus, who pushed him into a gym mainly to keep him occupied.

Four years later he won heavyweight gold at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, stopping the Soviet fighter Jonas Čepulis in round two, then circled the ring holding a small American flag and bowing to the crowd.

At an Olympics defined by the raised fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, that gesture made Foreman a political object before he had thrown a professional punch. Half the country praised him for it, half resented him for it, and he spent years insisting he had meant nothing by it.

January 22, 1973: Two Rounds in Kingston

As a professional he was less a boxer than a demolition contractor. He arrived at 37-0 to face the undefeated champion Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica, and put him on the floor six times inside two rounds. Howard Cosell’s call outlived both men.

Ken Norton and José Roman lasted two rounds each.

Then came Kinshasa on October 30, 1974. Muhammad Ali lay on the ropes for seven rounds, absorbed everything Foreman had, and knocked him out in the eighth. The Rumble in the Jungle is the fight everyone knows, and Foreman is the man it was done to.

He was 25. He would not hold a world title again for twenty years.

After: A Comeback Funded by a Youth Centre

The centre ran short of money. That is the entire reason he came back, and he said as much at the time rather than dressing it up later.

In March 1987, aged 38, bald and heavy and ten years out of practice, he fought Steve Zouski in Sacramento to raise funds, then simply carried on. The press treated it as a novelty act, which suited him perfectly, because he had returned as a different public character: warm, funny, self-deprecating about his weight, selling patience where he had once sold menace.

He lost a unanimous decision to Evander Holyfield for the title in April 1991 and won more respect in defeat than he had in most of his victories.

Then came the MGM Grand on November 5, 1994, against Michael Moorer.

Here is the detail that gets left out of the highlight reel. Foreman was losing badly. Two judges had Moorer up 88-83 and the third had him ahead 86-85 when the tenth round began. He was the B-side on the purse too, paid a reported $3 million against Moorer’s $7 million.

He was also wearing the same red trunks he had worn against Ali in Zaire twenty years earlier.

One right hand landed. Moorer did not beat the count. At 45 years and 360 days, Foreman was heavyweight champion of the world again, breaking the record by eight years.

He fought on until a majority-decision loss to Shannon Briggs in November 1997, finishing 76-5 with 68 knockouts.

Why the Second Act Worked, and the First Never Could

My view, and it is a view rather than a fact: the ten silent years were not an interruption in the career. They were the product.

The 1970s Foreman was feared and disliked in roughly equal measure, a champion the public never warmed to even while he was flattening everybody. He could not have sold a kitchen appliance to anyone. The 1990s Foreman could sell one to a hundred million households, and the full accounting of that fortune shows the grill earning him several times what his purses ever did. It is also why he sits so far up our richest boxers ranking despite fighting in an era of comparatively modest money.

The likeability was not a marketing strategy applied to an old fighter. It was ten years of pastoral work showing up on television.

Twelve Children, Five of Them George

He married five times, settling with Mary Joan Martelly in 1985, and had twelve children.

Five sons carry the name George Edward Foreman, separated inside the family by nicknames. His stated reasoning never changed: so they would always have something in common, and so that if one of them went down, the others would know where the name came from.

His daughter Freeda boxed professionally. She died in 2019.

Throughout all of it he remained a working pastor. The ministry was not a retirement hobby bolted on to the fame. It came first, it funded nothing, and it outlasted everything else.

March 21, 2025

George Foreman died in Houston on March 21, 2025, aged 76.

Two heavyweight careers separated by ten silent years is a strange enough life on its own. The years in between are the hinge. The man who walked into that San Juan dressing room in 1977 was 28, feared, and widely disliked. The man who eventually walked back out of it was old enough to be laughed at, was losing on every scorecard, and won the heavyweight championship of the world anyway.