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.
(Page 3 of 4)
Pandemonium. George was on his knees praying. His brother Roy fainted. HBO’s Jim Lampley, who had ridiculed the contest before it began, shrieked, “It happens!” Moorer, who fought artfully and won seven of nine rounds on points, found a likeable public persona as a loser. Seated on his stool with the gloves off, he looked up at the camera, nodded gamely, and raised a thumb. He gave it all he had. George, with sunshades hiding a badly swollen eye, spoke into a microphone. “When you wish upon a star…doesn’t matter who you are…” Ali, who later sent George a congratulatory note with a hand-drawn happy face, no doubt admired the poetry.
Moorer leaned through the shoulders and gibberish and planted a kiss on George’s bald head. Pops.
High in NBC’s office tower in new York, I am parked on a sofa with Mort Sharnik and Terry Sparks, a pleasant young man who travels with George and is sometimes referred to as his bodyguard, though the boss outweighs him by forty pounds. This, in its entirety, is Foreman’s entourage. Sue Leibman, a Saturxay Night Live associate proudcer who ushers guest hosts through the drill each week, hurries out of a meeting with the writers and approaches us. “George’s title,” she says briskly. “He is the…?”
After a second we reply in a chorus, “World heavyweight champion.”
Oliver McCall, a former sparring partner of Mike Tyson’s, actually holds on of the three major sanctioning bodies’ titles, but Leibman doesn’t need to get into that. She nods and hurries back to the writers.
From another office, where George is holed up, comedian Carl Reinter emerges and is instantly crowded by the young staff. Reiner, who seems to have been making a courtesy call, walks off happily, twirling a forefinger. “If George Foreman says you’re a genius, you’re a genius!” It’s seven at night, eleven hours since George started his day with an hour on the hotel’s exercise treadmill. Suddenly Leibman rushes out to Sharnik, this time with a greatly troubled look. The bear in George has finally gotten riled and spoken sharply: He’s still here because they want to take him out to eat?
Ushered down the elevators, we walk to a limo provided by the network. A Christmas sohpper gapes and exclaims, “That’s George Foreman!” George wears a top-coat and short-billed cap pulled down toward his nose. In the car, he stretches out his legs as the lights and street steam of Manhattan glide by. “TV,” George says moodily when Sharnik asks him how it’s going. “They don’t know it’s about eye-sight. About visual. They’ve got all these writers who know they got to be funny, so they think and think and all they can come up with is dirt. It’s just a constant battle. And you know you’re in trouble because not one of ‘em has a gray hair.”
The limo stops in front of a deli, and Sharnik goes inside to get George’s favorite New York supper: a pastrami sandwich on whole wheat with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomatoes. The order frequently draws a laugh or double take; Sharnik sheepishly explains that the guy’s a Southerner. As we move again, the conversation turns to boxing. “How good was Charlie Shipes?” I ask George.
“Best I’ve ever seen,” he replies,k animated for the first time since we left NBC. “He could do everything. Moving left jabbing, moving right jabbing: He was precision. And he wore these red trunks and red headgear; he just looked like a boxer. I used to say, ‘I don’t want to turn pro yet. I want to learn to box like Charlie Shipes.’ Sugar Ray Robinson was like that. Except he had bad habits. Archie Moore was the best at defense.” George raises his arms horizontally and ducks his head behind them. “Like this, but Archie was throwing punches all the time. He never hit hard”—George snaps his fingers loudly—“but they rained on you, Joe Louis: They used to talk about his devastating combinations, but the only punch he threw hard was the last one. That was the hardest thing for me to learn. You don’t have to hit hard just because you’re able to.” He floats a big soft hand toward my face. “That’s how I did it with Michael. Just let him see the jav. If you hit him too hard with the left, he’ll start to worry about the right. And it’ll put him too far back. When the time comes, I won’t be able to reach him.”
He lowers his head and looks at a brightly lit toy store. The building is flnaked by three ledge steps of white rock. “See that?” he says. “One time in Houston, I watched Sony Liston balance on a ledge like that on the ball of one foot. He did a deep knee bend, picked up the other foot, and stretched his leg straight out. Then he held his arms straight out and just stayed there, like a statue.” George smiles at the memory. “Never seen anything like it.”
Before the New York trip, I had gone to Houston to meet Charlie Shipes, whose home and trucking yard is tucked away in the pines off U.S. 59. Charlie’s affable wife, Barbara, told me he was out trying to find a truck part and then let me through the security fence; she advised me to keep an eye on the pit bull that walked along at my calf. The Shipeses live in a mobile home surrounded by several tractor-trailer rigs. The only evidence of Charlie’s lofty position in boxing was a couple of heavy bags under a shed and some photographs on the mantel. Barbara said she had been a friend of one of George’s late cousins, who introduced her to Charlie at George’s church. She said she’d never seen a pro fight. “I hope George’ll quit now,” she told me. “He’s got his health and all those kids still at home.
Just then, Charlie walked through the door in coveralls and a soiled cap. Smoking a cigarette, he reminisced about his own 53-5 record and the time Doc Broadus delivered them a huge youngster from the Job Corps camp in Pleasanton, California. “Sonny was good to George,” he said. “George would bloody his nose, and Sonny wouldn’t unload on him like a lot of fighters will. He was just bringing him along. George got his puncher’s reputation because of the way he took apart Joe Frazier. But, hell, he did it with jabs, hooks, rights, and uppercuts. The man can box.”
We talked about George’s second ring career. The public adulation is no less intense in Houston; George has been saying he’d like to go out with a figt to his hometown: a title fight that fills up the Astrodome. He talks about Tyson, who’ll get out of prison this spring—a fight that promoter Bob Arum says could gross $200 million. “Whatever, George decides to do,” said Shipes, “he’s got my blessing.”
But…Tyson? To me, the thought was terrifying: an angry creature who believes himself wronged and has spent three years in a cage. “Well, year. Tyson’s good,” Shipes said, now on his feet and shadowboxing. “Great hand speed, and he’s kind of a switch-hitter. He’ll step to the left and double hook, high and low, then do the same thing to the right. Ain’t ever seen anything like it. But if a man’s still got his legs under him, and there ain’t no nerve damage, I’ll take the experience. See, George came up with Ali, Frazier, Kenny Norton, Jerry Quarry, George Chuvalo. That’s like going to Harvard. This young crowd now, they just been to junior college.”
The next morning, the Sunday before the New York trip, my wife and I went to George’s Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s west of U.S. 59, south of Intercontinental Airport, in a poor and neatly kept neighborhood that looks forgotten. Just down the street is George’s youth center. Inside, the church is well furnished but spare. George doesn’t evangelize much, even in the neighborhood, for fear of turning his church into a circus. Many of the people who go there are related to each other. George’s nephew Jody Steptoe, who is an assistant pastor, sat on a chair tuning an electric guitar. There were about sixty people, all but four of us black. Steptoe stood up and started playing the guitar. ”Glory, glory, hallelujah,” he sang slowly, “I’m gonna lay my burden down…” A few women were on their feet swaying, two or three with tambourines. “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,” they sang.
My Library
