He Hits Hard in Book Too

It’s hard to reconcile everybody’s favorite pugilist, the most popular heavyweight champ since Dempsey, or, at least, Joe Louis, with the glowering, unattractive, people-hating bully in the pages of a new book that has just come on the stands.

But that’s what authors do nowadays. Tear down. Show the warts. Demean the subject. Unmask the hero.

That’s what happened to lovable, hamburger-chomping, malted-milk drinking old George Foreman.

He got the wrong guy to write a book about him.

Trouble is, the author’s name is George Foreman. He’s as hard on old George in the pages of the new biography “By George” as his worst critic.

He tells of a George Foreman growing up in the mean streets of Houston’s Fifth Ward. This George Foreman was a far cry from the universally beloved heavyweight champion of the same name today.

This other George Foreman used to beat people up for the sheer fun of it. Sometimes, he robbed them after he beat them. He was several inches taller and many pounds heavier than his contemporaries, and he used that edge to abuse them.

The George Foreman we all know today is a Santa Claus in boxing trunks, a God-fearing, Bible-preaching friend of man who saves his aggression for the ring. Outside it, he’s the world’s biggest pussycat.

The old George Foreman smoked, drank, chewed and swore. The new one merely eats and smiles.

How he got that way is honestly told in “By George.” George Foreman the author pulls no more punches than George Foreman the fighter.

Winning the championship didn’t do it. When he was coming up in the world--but not yet there--Foreman recounts how he met celebrities such as Jim Brown, the football player, and Walt Frazier, the basketball star. And they gave him the brushoff. Foreman took that to mean stars were supposed to conduct themselves like arrogant royalty. “So that’s how you handle stardom!” Foreman remembers telling himself. “I filed the lesson away for use when necessary.”

Everybody has a watershed moment in life that is a turning point, a crossover from one way of living to the next. St. Paul’s came on the road to Damascus. George Foreman’s came in a prize ring in Africa at 5 o’clock in the morning of Oct. 30, 1974.

In a sense, Muhammad Ali punched all the pretensions, posturing, arrogance out of him. The old miserable antisocial George Foreman got counted out in the eighth round.

Oh, he didn’t give in to his better nature right away. He attempted that tried, true staple of the afflicted--denial. He became morose, moody, marooned. Nobody was any damned good. It was the world’s fault. It was his manager’s perfidy. “The Ali fight had created a line I couldn’t cross, or go around or get past in any way,” he said. “I needed an exorcism to get rid of that devil in me.”

In a very real sense, it might have been the best thing that ever happened to George Foreman. He took stock of himself, and he didn’t like what he was coming up with.

The real George Foreman was a man who wanted to be loved. He didn’t like scaring people. He was a massive man with arms like pythons and a punch like a cobblestone, but he was sensitive to the slightest rejection. Underneath that menacing exterior was the soul of a guy who might answer to the nickname “Cuddles.”

He was raised in grinding poverty in a family so large and active he didn’t realize he had a different father from his brothers and sisters until he was a grown man.

He was different from his street companions too. Like them, he seemed on his way to the penitentiary, drinking and mugging people at random for drinking money but, at bottom, Foreman was a moral man with almost a Puritanical streak in him. For all his size, he was easily embarrassed and he remembers positively that, when he would assault and rob somebody, it never occurred to him that he was committing a crime.

One day, as he was eluding the police, he remembered a scene from a movie in which the pursued thief ran down a stream to conceal his footprints. He lathered himself with mud for the same purpose. “Then I remembered that the guy in the movie was a criminal. I thought ‘Why, I’m a thief!’ ” Foreman recalled the other day as he sat at lunch. The realization shocked him. He was ashamed and gave up his strong-arm career. Outside the ring, at any rate. He gave up drinking when, in the throes of total intoxication, he beat up a friend unmercifully one night. The next day, he chanced upon him. “What’s the matter with your face?” he wanted to know. “Who did that to you?”

“You did,” the friend answered.

Foreman never drank again.

The Job Corps saved Foreman’s career. Or, rather, gave him one. But more important than teaching him how to box was teaching him how and what to read.

The George Foreman who returned to the ring in 1987 was far removed from the thug who chucked it in after a lackadaisical bout in Puerto Rico with Jimmy Young 10 years earlier.

Once again, it was the self-consciousness Foreman could never escape. An ordained minister, he could not bear to dun his congregation for his youth work. “I thought, ‘I know how to get money! I’ll get to be heavyweight champion of the world again!’ ” he said.

The fight mob and the boxing press thought it was a stunt. Overweight, overage and overpaid, Foreman would go through the motions with some Skid Row palookas, then pass the hat, they predicted.

The next thing they knew, Foreman was knocking out Michael Moorer for the heavyweight championship. At 46, he was the oldest heavyweight champion in history.

He became the public’s champion, a Disney movie, a cartoon character, the most lovable champ in history. America’s Teddy Bear. When Foreman gets hit, the whole world winces. When Foreman wins, we all win. He’s the darling of every senior citizen who ever drew a social security check or could predict weather by his limp.

But he can’t escape the power of the printing press and the ruthless author George Foreman, who so tells it like it is you think maybe it should be listed as an “unauthorized” autobiography. George Foreman should sue George Foreman.

Why did he permit him to dredge up his un-pretty past? George Foreman, the subject, laughs. “My wife told me to be sure to get it all down honestly and correctly.

“Anyway, you can’t hide from yourself. I tried that too long.”