‘’But this morning I realized that the greatest piece of us all was Muhammad Ali.’’ ‘’We were like one guy,’’ Foreman said on the morning after Ali’s death. None of it would have happened, Foreman said, without Ali. 5, 1994, in Las Vegas, Foreman, then 45, achieved the boxing goal, scoring a 10th-round stoppage of Michael Moorer at the MGM Grand. And he had an ambition to become the oldest heavyweight champ in history. He had become a hugely successful businessman with a grill to sell. The sullen heavyweight of the 1970s was reborn as a celebrity with quips about cheeseburgers. Physically, he was slower, but his personality was more agile than it had ever been when he was an angry young man. “Just my association with him transformed me,” Foreman said. He preached on street corners and wondered what had happened to him on that night, Halloween’s eve, in Zaire.įoreman finally figured out Ali had changed him. Foreman returned to the ring in 1976 and fought six times, losing the sixth bout to Jimmy Young. The loss, Foreman’s first, shattered his confidence. But the fearless Ali did it anyway, exhausting and taunting Foreman before knocking him out in the eighth round to win the second title in his three lineal championships. It was a risk and perhaps a reason for the Parkinson’s that would show up a decade later. Ali endured punishment from one of the biggest power punchers in history.Īli (right) finishes off Foreman in Zaire. 30, 1974, Ali surprised his corner with the rope-a-dope, a tactic then and an enduring metaphor now. If anything, there was fear for what might happen to Ali in the face of Foreman’s lethal power, which bounced Joe Frazier off the canvas like a soccer ball with six knockdowns within two rounds in a 1973 title fight in Kingston, Jamaica. Foreman was feared, an angry man who used to bully people on the streets of Houston’s Fifth Ward.įew gave Ali any chance at beating Foreman. Foreman was the Mike Tyson of his time before he faced Ali in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. There’s no better example than George Foreman. He embraced change in himself and was transformational because the people he challenged and fought on both sides of the ropes eventually changed too. Ali always changed and – more important perhaps – was never afraid to. How that happened is the overriding theme to what Merchant calls his uniquely American character. Ali did what nobody would have ever predicted when he was at his polarizing best as a heavyweight champion with as many opinions as punches during the divided 1960s. There’s something for everyone in who he was, who he became and who he still is. “An improvisational genius, kind of a Mark Twain with boxing gloves on.” Pacific Time on June 3 at a hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona, he has been called transformational, fearless, humane, controversial, a visionary, cruel, scary, a puncher and a poet Larry Merchant, who was at ringside as a sportswriter for defining Ali fights in New York, Zaire and Manila. In the days since Ali died, age 74, at 9:10 p.m. It’s as if his face is a collage of what people see – or hope to see – in themselves. There’s the young man who rumbled and the old one trapped within Parkinson’s’ terrible silence and everything in between. The world’s collective memory of him is inexhaustible and sometimes imaginative. Muhammad Ali’s legacy is in how people recall that single moment when he whispered in their ear, or threw a playful jab in their face.Īli was a People’s Champ, for sure. They continue to gather in a deep and endless collection of moments in an elevator, or on the street, or at a ballgame.
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