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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When the music stopped, George walked in, resplendent in a camel blazer. Approaching the pulpit, he kissed a child on the top of her head. George doesn’t write his sermons. He selects a passage of Scripture, reads it in segments, and reflects on whatever comes to mind. This day his txt was Luke, chapter 12. he told stories about how badly he hurt his mother when he was growing up and how he periodically resolved to stop stealing—at least from her. The congregation burst out laughing when he pulled down his lip and mimicked a man with no front teeth. “Wake up from being dead drunk and my best friend says, ‘George, look what you did to me,’ ‘I did not do that!’ ‘Yeah, you did…but it’s okay!”
He read some more Scripture, then recalled a low point in one of his five marriages. “Sometimes they just don’t want you. I mean: you. I went up to my ranch, and all I could think to do was cut grass. Mow and mow and mow. I ran my tractor over a stump. I was trying to fix my mower with a sledgehammer and come way up over the top. Whomp! Hit myself right on the knee.” He danced across the church on one foot. “Thank you, baby Jesus, thank you for all this pain! Take my mind off the mess I have mae of my life.” He limped on as the laughter subsided. “Amazing grace,” he said, shaking his head. “That saved a wretched like me.”
George looked again at the Bible in his hand and read loudly. “Take heed, and beware of covetousness, for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” In the sermon he fashioned the parable of the rich fool into a biting comment on the temper of these times. George knocked out Moorer the Saturday before Election Day. Many comeback candidates invoked his name in their acceptance speeches, but politically George is a fish out of water. He endorsed one candidate: Ann Richards, who was trounced. George is the poster boy of the much-maligned Great Society; he has often said that LBJ saved his life by creating the Job Corps. He once reflected on his lag-waving impulse at the Olympics: “What I did in Mexico City wasn’t no demonstration. I was just happy and proud to be an American. When I looked at America, I saw a compassionate society that didn’t give up on its underclass.”
On this day, he didn’t sound so confident of that fundamental generosity. “I’ll tell you about middle class,” he said. “Their mommas and daddies used to be poor. Now they’ve had a job ten years and have a credit card. Hear ‘em talking at the barbershop. ‘Look at all those people getting rich on welfare. All that stuff they buy.’ Why, there’s people in this country that don’t have fifteen cents.”
“Amen. That’s right,” several people said. George chewed on his lower lip, and he did not look happy. “You don’t have to reform ‘em, he said sarcastically. “Just don’t giv ‘em nothing. Shut up!”
George has nine kids, ages 22 to 3. One son runs the ranch in Marshall, his eldest daughter is in college, and the rest live in a home in the Houston suburb of Kingwood. On Thursday afternoon during his week in New York, in his Saturday Night Live dressing room, he picks up a phone and clals home. He talks to his wife, Joan, who was born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia—yet he makes no mention of glitzy things and famous people. The conversation dwells on antibiotics and the child who’s running a fever.
When an intercom booms George’s name, he goes out in the studio to tape some promotional spots that the producers and network officials will review and air before the show. “Watch Saturday Night Live,” he commands in one, “or I’ll beat you up and eat all your food!” In the studio there is genuine laughter as he tries out various routines. Later, he is joined by the show’s musical guest, the rock group Hole. Hole’s lead singer is Courtney Love, a bleached-blond miniskirted young woman with a tattoo on her shoulder and runs in her hose. She is the aspiring empress of grunge rock and the widow of Kurt Cobain, a Seattle rock star who was depressed and had a heroin problem and dealt with it by putting a shotgun to his head. Courtney’s shtick is Madonna to the max: All week she has been trying to prove that she’s the baddest girl around. She and George shake hands, and the crew positions the band around him. As the camera-men line up the shot, Courtney stands below George. She primps by shoving her breasts upward with the palms of her hands. “Tits,” she keeps saying. ‘Tits.” George keeps his eyes on the cue cards.
In one promo, Courtney and George are supposed to begin by hyping the show and then get into a mild spat. On the first take, Courtney ad-libs. She turns and bangs her fists against his chest and then tries to jump and wrap her legs around his waist. George fends her off, and he leaves the studio laughing, but in his dressing room he plops on the sofa defectedly. Sharnik asks him about the scrips. “So bad they can’t be fixed,” George says with a sigh. “Start trying to change this cut that, it just gets worse. I’m not gonna say anything. I just never shoulda done this. No way. Not in this lifetime.”
Leibman, the associate producer, knocks on the door, comes in, and rests a moment, waiting for the wardrobe man. Once more, talk of boxing revives Geroge’s spirits. He elaborates on his belief that tragedy is interwoven in all feats of athletic greatness. “In boxing we got this saying: ‘I’m gonna put my head on your chest.’ Means I’m gonna take the best you got and come right through all your defenses. The first fight against Muhammad, Joe Frazier did that. To a man as great as Muhammad Ali. After that, Joe was never quite the same. What else did he have to prove?”
I glance at Leibman. Her eyes have grown very wide.
As George tries on sport coats he talks about Tyson, whose imminent return to the sport will be watched as closely as Ali’s was twenty years ago. “Boxing is a matter of who can fill the tent,” says George, unbothered by the circus analogy. “Mike Tyson doesn’t need the title. The title needs Tyson. But what he had, he can’t get back. Because it was all speed. Tyson is not a powerful puncher.” George shadowboxes, demonstrating his point. “Hit you in the ribs, and you say, ‘My, that hurts,’ so you bring down your elbow, and he comes right up to the head. But it takes at least two years in the gym to get that going, and then you got to fight constantly. Title fights don’t get arranged that fast. Tyson is Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses, all the king’s men. Everybody gonna be whipping him.”
George fiddles with his cuffs and looks in the mirror. “But there’s a young one out there. Nobody’s even heard of him yet. One day he’s just gonna loom among us. Be like Tyson, when he first came up. People be standing around saying, ‘You want him?’ ‘No, I don’t want him. You want him?’ I hope it’s somebody like Joe Louis.”
The halls leading into the Saturday Night Live studio are lined with photos of great comedians and great comic moments, and the production is amazing to behold: seven complex activities unfolding at once. But the dress rehearsal is painfully unfunny. The closest thing to humor involving George has him propelled by time capsule to Germany in 1939, where he changes history by knocking out Hitler and becoming World Fuhrer. The producers have flown in ring announcer Michael Buffer to put on a Nazi uniform and do his basso “Let’s get ready to rumble” routine. At George’s request, bit parts in the sketchy are played by fight promoter Bob Arum and Henry Holmes, the lawyer and agent who won the age-discrimination injunction and negotiated his book contract. (“Yeah, but Henry’s stock is down,” George grumbled at one point during the rehearsals. ‘He’s the one who got me into this.”)
The sight gags feature actors and crew members whose eyes are swollen shut. In a demeaning skit, George, cast as TV’s Incredible Hulk, grunts and smashes things until finally he calls the show’s writers out and observes correctly that nobody in the studio audience is laughing. They wrote that! But the joke’s on him. Seated next to me in the audience is a young man named mark Taffet, who works for TVKO, a network that airs boxing matches. During a break, Taffet excitedly tells me the concept of George’s next match, tentatively set for April 22. “We find a real-life Rocky, see. White guy, deserves a shot. We’re looking at two or three prospects now. Michael gave George a chance, so George gives somebody else a chance. The second fight is huge, but this fight…well, this fight is more of a celebration.”
Below us the cast has assembled to close out the show. All keep a wary eye on Courtney Love, who reportedly came of age with a trust fund and now is looking for somebody else to throw her legs around. The victim will be her guitar player; they’ll fall in a heap, her panties bared to all. George isn’t smiling as he waits for the camera light to come on. He towers above the others and has a pensive expression on his face. The champ. Earlier in the week he told one interviewer who pressed him about his plans in the ring and beyond: “Just don’t tell me I’m too old. I’m blue-collar, and I’ve got nine kids. I’ve gotta work till I can’t work anymore.” He told another interviewer that he wanted to shake every hand, sign every autograph. But this is the longest time he has spent in New York since he was a young contender fighting in Madison Square Garden. He’s a grown man now. In his mind he’s already at the airport. It’s time to go home.
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