George Foreman Delivering Punch Lines Now : Television: The former heavyweight champ hopes to break into sitcoms with ABC’s pilot series ‘George.’

On the Sunset-Gower lot of Columbia Studios, there’s a metal door inside a sound stage that bears bold, block letters that read “Big George’s House of Pain.” Behind the door lies a full-size canvas boxing ring and an assortment of punching bags.

The training gym was not constructed as a movie or TV set, but as a serious workout arena where one of the newest actors on the lot heads every night to trade hard, heavy blows with 200-pound sparring partners.

George Foreman--the former heavyweight champion of the world, who bitterly retired from boxing in 1977, found salvation as a preacher, opened a youth center in Houston, then staged one of the most improbable comebacks in sports history to fund his goodwill efforts--now hopes to star in his own sitcom for ABC and leave boxing behind.

“Hollywood just popped up all of a sudden and wanted old George to do something,” Foreman said with his trademark, toothy smile.

Foreman, sullen and angry during his early career, has been generating laughter for several years now. At first people laughed at him when the over-the-hill boxer, fat and 40, began fighting again after a 10-year layoff. After all, this was a guy with nine children, four of them boys named George.

But pretty soon people were laughing with him, as he scored consistent knockout punches in the ring and punch lines everywhere else, from press conferences to talk shows to TV commercials.

In “George,” the sitcom pilot that will tape Friday night, he plays a rich, retired heavyweight boxer named George Foster who finds a new “hobby” in befriending a group of unruly, inner-city kids.

For Foreman, a consummate entertainer who has become the clown prince of boxing, a sitcom doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch from what he’s been doing all along. Wherever he goes, a sort of carnival atmosphere seems to follow.

“Yeah, and what we’re trying to do is harness that,” explained Tony Danza, former star of “Who’s the Boss?” and an ex-boxer himself. Danza, the executive producer of “George,” won the confidence of Foreman and signed him to a deal when he was being courted by several producers.

“Hey, this is not Laurence Olivier, but neither was I,” Danza said. “We’re just trying to harness what he is, what people like about him.”

Foreman feels comfortable around Danza because he relates to him as an athlete. “Tony has a lot to do with this, because he’s coaching me along,” Foreman said in an interview Tuesday, taking a break from rehearsals on the Columbia lot. “And this guy used to be a boxer too, so I know he has respect for my position. He knows that I’m green in this, and I’m starting like a baby. They’re going to have to just lead me through.”

Before the interview, Foreman was rehearsing a classroom scene on the set with a group of spirited young actors. He broke up a scuffle between two of them, then turned to the instigator, played by Larry Gilliard Jr., and asked him angrily: “What is it with you?”

“You the man with the folder. You tell me,” Gilliard snapped back, referring to the file records that Foreman was carrying of each student.

The only problem was, the folders had fallen on the ground during the scuffle. That wasn’t in the script. Foreman looked down at them.

“I was the man with the folders,” he said with a straight face. The ad lib got a big laugh from the crew.

The challenge now is to get those same laughs out of a script.

“We have to make sure that he can be as entertaining as he is on his own with somebody else’s lines in his mouth, and on cue,” Danza said.

For the last two weeks, the 43-year-old actor-boxer has been rehearsing during the day and training at night for a Jan. 16 fight with Pierre Coetzer, the first in a $18-million, three-fight deal that Foreman signed with HBO in October.

Despite the money he can still make in boxing, and despite the fact that “George” might never see the light of day if ABC executives don’t like the pilot, acting has already taken priority in Foreman’s life.

“I tell you how crucial this is to me,” he said. “If we had started this show two months ago, I wouldn’t even be boxing today. It’s just that I didn’t have anything else to do in my life. I panicked.”

He began acting punch drunk. “The HBO promoters came in, ‘Hey, will you sign this?’ ‘Sure, I’ll sign! I can’t sit around here anymore with my wife telling me to take out the garbage again.’ ”

Foreman said that if ABC orders “George” as a series, he will cancel the HBO deal. He also said he would like to fight the new heavyweight champion, Riddick Bowe, but only if the offer comes very soon.

“I mean, I’m not even interested anymore (in boxing),” Foreman said. “I like this. I like hanging around here. And in my life, wherever my interests are, that’s where I am today.

“You know, every day I read the script and I work out. It’s like, let’s get through with this workout so I can practice for the reading tomorrow. I would have thought it would be the other way around: Let’s hurry up with the script so I can practice boxing. But it’s not. It’s crisscrossed on me now.”

Even though boxing still offers Foreman tremendous paydays--he earned $5 million in his last fight, against Alex Stewart--that’s not enough for him.

“You do something that you like. When I got back into boxing in 1987, I made $24,000 for the first fight. By the time I paid everybody, I went home with $1,000. My wife said, ‘This is all?’ So the next fight I made $2,000. The next fight, $5,000. But it was like, ‘Where are you going, man?’ ‘To my next fight.’ I had something to do. I had a purpose. The money just happened to be coincidental.”

Foreman’s purpose now is children. The George Foreman Youth and Community Center in Houston includes nearly two acres of pool tables, basketball courts, weightlifting and boxing facilities, even a computer literacy center. Foreman feels that with “George” he can communicate his concerns to the entire nation.

Although there are the requisite old, bald and fat jokes in his pilot, and enough boxing analogies to fill Caesers Palace, the message of “George” is one of hope.

“Everybody is saying that television has a lot to do with the recent collapse of family,” Foreman said. “If that’s so, television can also be the rebuilding of it. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s exactly why.”

In fact, children are what finally transformed Foreman from scowls to howls.

“When I left boxing originally, I had maybe two, three kids,” he said, “and they were little babies. Then all of a sudden eight years go by and there’s nine kids, and some of them are starting middle school.

“I became a guy who had to keep a smile on his face all the time, thinking my kids were watching me. I couldn’t have them all surly and staring people down. That’s the major difference. Now they’re saying, ‘Daddy, you think the world is such a great place. You’re always laughing.’ I say, ‘That’s right.’ No matter what tragedy happens, I’m going to keep them smiling.”