Game Over 
Big
From Houston to Hollywood, everyone wants a piece of heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman. Fortunately, there’s enough of him to go around.
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He dealt with it by trying to sleep with a different woman every night and by walking around his Marshall ranch with a lion on a leash. In 1977, maneuvering for a return fight that Ali was none too eager to grant him, he lost a decision to a clever Philadelphian named Jimmy Young, and after the match, in the throes of heat prostration, thought he was dying and found God. At 28 he walked away from boxing. He got fat and happy (except for a bitter divorce and child-custody battle) and became a street-corner preacher. He stopped hating Ali and realized the man was a friend. If George hadn’t been the greatest, he could look back and know he had stepped high in history’s most gifted peerage of heavyweight fighters. For ten years he seldom even shadowboxed. Then, at 38, after begging for money to keep a Houston youth recreation center open, he started fighting again in places so far from a major airport that TV crews couldn’t find him. Unlike many old fighters who try to make another go of it, he hadn’t abused himself since his teens—aside from overeating—and except for Ali, Young, and a Denver slugger named Ron Lyle, nobody was ever in the ring with him long enough to damage his brain cells much. During his comeback, George fought every six weeks, shed forty pounds, and got some skills back: first the left jab, which, in his prime, opponents likened to being thumped in the face with a telephone pole; then the straight right that comes behind the job; then the left hook that sweeps in after the right. He could shoot the jab out, dip a knee, and follow hard with a left uppercut—a difficult combination, yet critics said he was ponderously slow.
In 24 bouts, George fought and stopped four quasi-contenders; the rest were targets. Boxing insiders were laughing at him, but he was big name, and all at once the public loved him. What a nice and funny guy he had become! Such a pleasant contrast to bad Mike Tyson. Of course, nobody believed the fantasy. But then, to the consternation of Tyson’s only credible rival, Evander Holyfield, Tyson first let himself get knocked out by journeyman Buster Douglas and then was doing time in Indiana on a rape conviction. Prizefighters stay in the business for the prizes, not the joy of getting hammered; for poor Holyfield, George was the only big payday out there. At 42 George put up a splendid fight, but the younger and faster hands prevailed. Public sentiment shifted: Give it up, old man. It’s not funny anymore. You’re going to get hurt. Yet George kept fighting, risking the fate of his historic soul mate, Muhammad Ali. He lost a decision to mediocre Tommy Morrison and took a turn in a short-lived TV sitcom, in which, for religious and marital reasons, he declined to kiss his co-star on the mouth. He claims that one day the actress stormed off in a huff, shouting, “Well, I never!”
Then, last April, chance and market conditions rose up again. The gallant Holyfield—weakened by his fight with George, two epic bouts with Riddick Bowe, and a heart condition—lost a close decision to an undefeated buy little-known Detroit fighter, Michael Moorer. Holyfield retired the next day. There were other able heavies, such as Bowe and Tyson, who is nearing the end of his prison term, that Moorer might choose to hazard down the road. But in the meantime, the new champ desired a big, easy payday. Once more, George was the biggest draw out there, and he was getting older every day. In fact, to force the World Boxing Association to heed Moorer’s wishes and sanction the Las Vegas fight, George and his Beverly Hills lawyer, Henry Holmes, had to go to court in Nevada and win an injunction on the basis of inconsistent rules enforcement and age discrimination. Only in America. George, who had received $5 million for fighting relative nobodies, accepted about $2 million to get on e more title shot.
George’s trainer and strategist for the Moorer fight was a portly man named Charlie Shipes, who owns a small long-haul trucking firm in northeast Jouston. In the late sixties George, Shipes, and Sonny Liston, who was still in the game following his two losses to Ali, were stablemates in Oakland, California. Shipes was a flashy undefeated welterweight, billed by his handlers as the un-crowned champion, until Dallas’ Curtis Cokes, the crowned champ, dismantled him in his one title fight. George’s other guru was Bob Cook, a brown-haired man who in the late seventies was a standout La Porte High School running back. College football didn’t work out for him; he first bulked up as a competitive bodybuilder, then started working out at George’s youth center. They struck up a friendship, and Cook fought eight pro bouts as a middleweight. George now relies on Cook for weight training and nutritional advice. (All that business about hamburgers in both hands is for show; George eats more sensibly than most people.)
Before the fight, the sports media couldn’t get a fix on Moorer’s personality and thus decided the star in his corner was his voluble trainer, Teddly Atlas. But the 26-year-old champ was no soup can. Moorer carried 222 pounds impressively, and after beating Holyfield, his record was 35-0 with 30 knockouts. Moorer is a left-hander and the first one to hold a heavyweight title; that’s because right-handers hat them, and as champions. Seldom give them a shot. It’s like boxing a mirror image: If both men jab at once, their fists collide. It’s awkward, as the punches zoom in from angles right-handers are not used to seeing. After watching tapes of Moorer, Shipes and George came away even more devoted to an old axiom of how to fight southpaws: straight right hand every time he wiggles.
Of course, he had to be close enough to land it. Though analysts scoff at George, inside the ropes he incites real feat. According to Sports Illustrated, Don King once proposed a Foreman bout to Tyson, who replied, “You like him so much, you fight him. No!” Several observers thought they saw that fright in Holyfield. George knew he couldn’t win a decision against Moorer if the young man punched in flurries and danced far away from him. So he feigned a personal animosity toward him, suggested he was a coward, wouldn’t look him in the eye. The message was: Come on in here. Atlas knew what George was doing. At center ring for the referee’s instructions, the trainer ordered his fighter to look at nothing but Geroge’s chest. At the end of the first round, when Moorer took the stool, Atlas told him, “The hardest part of this fight is over. He’s just a guy. Our sparring partners were better. Am I right or wrong?”
Moorer basically fought a one-handed fight. With his right he threw multiple jabs, hooks, uppercuts. His left was little more than a guard against the threat of George’s right. Gaining confidence, he bobbed and weaved and talked to George. “Pop! Pop! Pop!” he said, landing punches. Though George was staggered several times, he knew he couldn’t let himself get knocked down. “They’d just say, ‘Oh no, George is old. Stop it,” he later said, explaining his thinking., But his height and bulk were a problem for Moorer. He held his arms high and vertically, and he deflected punches with his gloves and forearms. Moorer wasn’t eager to burrow inside, so he often found himself looping punches over George’s arms. Though more than half of his blows landed, many glanced harmlessly off the top of George’s head.
George relied on jabs and straight rights—some soft, some hard, but he just kept coming. At the end of the sixth round—a rousing toe-to-toe brawl—Shipes suggested, “Try moving over to the right a little. Get away from that right hand.” He was concerned about the damage to George’s left eye. A round later, Atlas nagged Moorer to keep up the pace. “Remember what I told you about an old car? This is an old car. Let him go slow, he can make it down the road. Make him go faster, he’ll start to break down.”
In George’s view the eighth round was pivotal. He surprised and wobbled Moorer with three quick rights. Moorer gave him a curt nod of acknowledgment. “The only way anybody ever gets a title shot,” George said afterward, “is to convince the other guy, ‘Aw, he’s just in it for the money.’ Then he gets in there and realizes he’s in a fight. But you don’t want to communicate that too soon, ‘cause he’ll change his plans. Way he took that hook, I thought, ‘Ah, now I got him. I questioned his courage. He’s not gonna run.’”
Angelo Dundee, the seventy-something trainer who worked Ali’s corner in Zaire, had joined George’s team a week before the fight. He’s a good luck charm, he has seen it all, and he’s one of the best cut men in the business. After the eighth he asked George, “You all right?” George: “Yeah.” Dundee: “you sure?” But in the ninth George was pooped. Later he said that his cornermen were voicing fears about the scorecards, and after the ninth he snapped at them, told them to shut up. Whatever was discussed, he walked out in the tenth and turned it up. After two left-right combinations, he again crossed Moorer up with a right lead and left hook. Another hook missed so wildly that George almost spun himself in a circle. “Give him all the credit in the world,” sympathized HBO commentator Gil Clancy, “but he’s a forty-five-year-old man in a young man’s game.” Then George landed another jab and right. Stung, Moorer stayed put and dropped his hands slightly. George had been stepping to his right, which is difficult for a right-handed fighter. He did it, as Shipes said, to escape Moorer’s punishment, but he was also looking for an angular lane. The last right hand George should throw in his life—the one he could never land against Ali—sloped downward about two feet. Moorer dropped like a sack of flour, flat on his back, struggling to raise his head, as blood pooled in his mouth.
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