A Puncher’s Chance : Ellis Has an Opportunity Against Foreman Tonight

The breath comes in great billowing clouds from heavyweight Jimmy Ellis’ mouth. His thick legs churn through the frigid air at dawn, and his heavy feet pound the streets around Big Bear.

All around him stand the San Bernardino Mountains, heavy and immovable, some of them treeless at the top.

Ellis will see roughly the same thing tonight when he looks across the ring at Reno-Sparks Convention Center.

This bald mountain is George Foreman.

And unlike the passive and peaceful San Bernardino Mountains, this mountain will be trying to knock Ellis senseless.

Understand, this Jimmy Ellis is not the former heavyweight champion of more than two decades ago, the guy who beat Jerry Quarry and Floyd Patterson but was knocked out by Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali.

The Ellis who will fight Foreman in Reno is thick-muscled, rock-hard and strictly a power-puncher.

“You’d be amazed at how many people think he is the same guy,” Foreman said. “All the time people have been asking me, ‘You’re fighting Jimmy Ellis? How long he’s been back?’ It’s just ridiculous, isn’t it?”

Of course. The original Ellis is 51. He would have no business in a ring with someone such as Foreman, who is 42.

Ellis, 27, is a former standout linebacker at Redondo Beach High and Boise State who was drafted by the Los Angeles Raiders in 1987 and played briefly for them during the strike season. He has boxed 17 times as a professional. So have about 10,000 other big guys.

So why is Ellis fighting Foreman?

Well, Foreman, fighting for the first time since he lost to Evander Holyfield in a three-year quest to regain the heavyweight crown he held briefly nearly two decades ago, has an answer, accompanied by a laugh:

“I guess they got a lot of names and tossed them into a hat and Jimmy Ellis came out.”

Foreman’s manager, Ron Weathers, has a better answer. Not as funny, but better.

“Dan Goossen sold us this fight,” Weathers said of the president of Ten Goose Boxing who will co-promote the bout with Bob Arum. “He pushed Ellis and he sold it. He sent some tapes and we liked what we saw.”

What Weathers and Foreman saw was a 6-foot-3, 230-pound behemoth with a weightlifter’s body and a left hook from hell, a heavy, thudding and almost frightening punch that broke Don Askew’s nose and Dwayne Washington’s right arm.

But Weathers and Foreman were even more impressed with Ellis’ footwork and ring movement, which seemed to duplicate the movement of the earth’s crust.

“This (man) doesn’t move much,” Foreman said. “He comes to fight. I didn’t want some guy that’s going to be running from me for 10 rounds, trying to pitty-pat and then get out of town in one piece. This guy stands and slugs. And I don’t care how big and strong a guy is, if he stands there and punches with me, he’s gone.”

Others turned down the opportunity to slug it out with Foreman. Alex Garcia, a heavyweight from San Fernando, was one.

Although Garcia has never earned more than $2,000 for any of his 28 pro fights, he rejected an offer of $400,000 earlier this year, saying he wasn’t ready for Foreman, but also hinting that he was used to living with own facial features and had no desire to wake up looking like someone else.

So Foreman, Weathers and Arum went looking for someone else. They found Ellis, who was so excited that he almost fell off a roof, specifically one in Boise, Ida., where he was working with a construction crew framing a house.

“I got a call from Dan Goossen with the news at the end of September,” Ellis said. “My reaction? Well, I thought it was such a great opportunity.”

Goossen tells a slightly different story.

“When I told him, he starts screaming into the phone, ‘Right on! Right on!’ ” Goossen said. “I’d say he was a little excited.”

Ellis has a 16-0-1 record with 15 knockouts. Still, a fight against Foreman was hardly expected.

But there was no hesitation. Part of the reason is that Ellis will be paid about $350,000. At his former pay scale, Ellis would have had to fight 300 bouts to make what he will make tonight.

“Jimmy says he doesn’t worry about all this money, that he won’t worry about where to spend it,” Goossen said. “With his previous purses, he never had to worry about where to spend it, either.”

Ellis is insistent that the money was never a consideration.

“It is not the money,” Ellis said. “Believe me. It just isn’t. I would have fought George Foreman for nothing. Honest. Just for the opportunity. Just for the chance.”

A puncher’s chance, boxing people call it. If anyone has such a chance, it is the slab-sided Ellis. And if he sends Foreman down and ends this strange yet remarkable comeback, then Ellis becomes a big name in boxing and much bigger things--and paydays--would be guaranteed.

“This is the big one,” Ellis said. “No one had to tell me how big this fight can be for me.”

Said Goossen: “Jimmy knows what’s there if he beats George Foreman. We’ve never even talked about it. But we all know. If he beats George Foreman, anything he wants in boxing in there for him. Anything.”

So six weeks ago, Ellis and trainer Lonnie Bennett moved to the Big Bear training camp of Larry Goossen, and, in a converted hangar at the Big Bear airport, they began working on a real-life Rocky script.

“The best part about Jimmy is that there is no fear, there can be no intimidation,” said Bennett. “As a football player, he got used to going against guys bigger than him in very violent situations, so George Foreman is not going to intimidate him. And George Foreman can be hurt. We all know that. We saw Evander Holyfield, who is not a big puncher by any stretch of the imagination, hurt George badly.

“This man is a puncher. He can hit as hard as anyone in the world. We know that.”

Some who have taken more than a few of Ellis’ punches in sparring sessions agree.

“I sparred with all of them,” said Purcell Davis of Detroit. “With Tyson and Razor Ruddock and Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes. And Jimmy Ellis can hit harder than any of them. The man is a very, very hard hitter. Against Foreman, he can use that power and his youth. Believe me, Ellis can take that big guy down. He can knock anyone out.”

And Dwain Bonds of Los Angeles, who has sparred with Foreman and Ellis, said Ellis has a 50-50 chance of knocking the former champion out.

“Ellis can hit, no doubt about that,” Bonds said. “But if he stands there and decides to trade punches with George, then (Ellis will) get knocked out. And there’s no doubt about that, either. But if he can get George past the fourth or fifth round, then watch out.”

In Reno this week, Foreman has braved the cold of the mountains just as Ellis has, running and sweating and losing some weight, which was reported to have been about 275 pounds two months ago.

A TV commercial promoting the bout shows Foreman running through the city streets, pounding away mile after mile as people hand him great amounts of food--pizzas, five-foot sub sandwiches, racks of chicken. Foreman eats all of it as he runs and runs.

It is, of course, ridiculous. Foreman doesn’t run that much.

But he does realize that Ellis is not merely another of the opponents he picked during the early stages of his comeback, one of the guys who had no chance of beating Foreman.

“For one thing, this guy ain’t even on a respirator,” Foreman joked.

But for a reported purse of $5 million, Foreman said he would take the risk.

“I’d like the fans to get their money’s worth, but not much more than that,” Foreman said. “I’ve seen this man punch. I saw just one film of him, and there was no need to entertain myself with a lot of those movies. With a man like this, you don’t take any chances. None. Even if I win, this is the kind of guy who might break my jaw. I don’t need that.

“If this man is available in the first round, I will knock him out in the first round. There will be no delays against a guy like this, no games.”