My View from the Corner

by Angelo Dundee

  But I wish, just wish, Ray would have said something.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Second Coming of George Foreman

  Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.

  If déjàvu is the illusion of having experienced something before when it's actually being experienced for the first time, what do you call it when the future enters and carries you along toward some experience way before it actually happens? Maybe just "Angie's luck," because it had happened before and was about to happen again—just as working with Willie Pastrano had helped me get Muhammad Ali and working with Muhammad had helped me get Sugar Ray Leonard. The "it" in this case was the return to the ring after a ten-year absence by George Foreman just twenty-eight days before the Ray Leonard–Marvin Hagler fight.

  How was I to know then that somewhere down the line, somewhere in the future, George Foreman and I would hook up and become part of boxing history? Forget 20/20 rearview vision, to even think about that happening sometime in the future would have been nothing more than wishful thinking, sort of like looking for a needle in the haystack and finding the farmer's beautiful daughter instead.

  Let me backtrack a little here ...

  I almost lost track of George after Zaire. Almost, but not quite. I had heard rumors, confirmed by his trainer, Dick Sadler, that George had been devastated by his humiliating loss to Ali and had descended into what Dick called "a deep funk." Occasionally I would catch sight of him on TV. His first TV appearance after his loss to Ali was a circus-like exhibition against five of boxing's bowling pins that was something of a public mortification—made all the more so by one of the five trying to plant a big wet kiss on him during the prefight instructions. The next time I saw him was nine months later when he traded punches and knockdowns with heavy-hitting Ron Lyle, finally knocking Lyle out in an if-you-hit-me-again-and-I-find-out-about-it-you're-in-big-trouble donnybrook called by Red Smith "one of the best two-sided fights in recent boxing history." Four more fights, four more KOs in wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am fashion before he showed up one last time to fight the crafty Jimmy Young on St. Patrick's Day in 1977. Losing for only the second time, George claimed after the fight that he had had an apocalyptic experience in which he encountered God and that God had told him he would now be fishing for men's souls rather than fighting for boxers' bodies. And with that George sank from sight to answer "the call."

  For ten long years George turned his massive back on boxing—reading no newspaper columns, watching no TV, and paying no never-mind to the sport. He devoted himself to tending to his parishioners at the First Church of the Lord Jesus Christ and to the Houston youth at the George Foreman Youth and Community Center. In order to support himself, his church, and his youth center, he began to accept outside speaking engagements, including appearances at other churches in the evangelical community. But sitting there listening to other clergymen use his presence to fill their collection plates, George began to think to himself, "I know how to make money."

  And so it was that long past the age when most heavyweight champions have ridden off into the sunset, the thirty-seven-year-old Foreman embarked on a second career. He began "moonlighting" as a boxer to underwrite his church and youth center while continuing to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "there are no second acts in America." But obviously F. Scott Fitzgerald had never met G. Edward Foreman, whose second act was far greater than his first. Beginning with his first comeback fight in March 1987 against Steve Zouski, far from boxing's spotlight in Sacramento, George bowled over twenty-two heavyweight tenpins, working his way backward through the alphabet from Z (as in Zouski) to A (as in Adilson Rodrigues, my fighter). Most of the fighters he met entered the ring looking for the first train going south and were sent packing so quickly that, as one writer put it, "the crowd got refunds on their hot dogs."

  But while George was laying opponent after opponent endwise, and the fans, many of whom had cheered him at the beginning of his career in anticipation, in the middle in acceptance, and now at the end in appreciation, were applauding his efforts, but the press was hardly giving him a ticker-tape parade of praise. Instead of celebrating his achievements, they dismissively derided his efforts as those of an old has-been with the body of a pot roast—the New York Daily News calling him "a fat cartoon character." Sportswriters ridiculed his opponents as nothing more than "bums"; one writer commenting they were "only slightly livelier than Joe Louis's statue."

  Granted, some of those on George's catalog of opponents were about as unknown as the second man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Still it was much the same cannon fodder other heavyweights had met, and stepped over, on their way to the top. The names Bobby Crabtree, Manny Almeida, and Rocky Sekorski also dotted Michael Dokes's résumé. And David Jaco, Steve Zouski, and Max Young could be found on Mike Tyson's hit list. Then there were J. B. Williamson and Dwight Muhammad Qawi, both former light-heavyweight champs, and Bert Cooper, a heavyweight perennial. To call these repeating decimals "bums" when they fought George but "worthies" when they fought others was much like examining a wine bottle but not tasting its contents.

  Knowing that even kinder words than those the press had lavished on George and his comeback had closed many a Broadway show, George decided to beat the sportswriters at their own game. He deflected their scoffs and critiques with good-natured, self-mocking humor. To questions about his age he replied, "I'm going to fight to pass a bill that would force a mandatory retirement age on boxers ... sixty-five." And in response to critics that he only fought fighters on respirators, George said, tongue planted in cheek, "That's a lie ... they've got to be at least eight days off the respirator."

  It got so that those who had wondered whether George and his comeback weren't all a big joke had to wonder whether the joke wasn't on them. George took their jabs and stabs in stride, disarming writers with his mother wit, delivered with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips. Emphasizing his 43-inch waistline and love for food, George would answer questions like "How far do you run every morning?" with "Depends on how far my refrigerator is." Responding to "When do you think that you'll fight for the title?" he laughingly said, "Today, the biggest decisions I'll make aren't related to the heavyweight title, they're whether I visit McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, or Jack in the Box." By displaying the most spontaneous wit since Muhammad, George left every interview and press conference the better for his presence and left the press laughing with him, not at him. But while the press was entertained by George himself, calling him "Captain Cheeseburger," they didn't entertain any realistic thoughts that he would achieve his fistic goal of rewinning the championship, labeling his quest, in food talk, "pie in the sky."

  In order to validate his credentials as a possible title contender, George would now have to face a top-ranked contender, not another "opponent" from the lower precincts of the division. He found one in the person of Adilson Rodrigues—who, not incidentally, was my fighter.

  Just as in the days of my youth back in South Philly when I'd sneak into the movie, coming in halfway through, and after having seen the entire movie, from middle to beginning, then back to middle, get up and say, "This is where I came in," this is the place where I came into the picture with George.

  For George, the Rodrigues fight was the culmination of the long road back, a three-year, twenty-one-fight barnstorming campaign he called "puddle jumping" that had seen him travel the highways and byways of America to such outlying boxing outposts as Anchorage, Orlando, Galveston, Fort Myers, Springfield, Bakersfield, and other places mapmakers would have had trouble finding on the boxing map. He did so at the cost of big purses; his goal was not the money but winning back the heavyweight title. He gave as his reason for taking the long road round: "I had seen others, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, fail in their comeback attempts because they were looking for overnight success. I knew it would take a long period of time to do it right, so I started from
the bottom and worked my way up and that took three years."

  But if George had been fighting those the press labeled as qualifiers for the "tomb of the unknown boxer" thus far in his comeback, he was going to find his first real challenge with my fighter. Rodrigues was a hero in his native Brazil where he was called "Maguila"—as in the cartoon character "Magilla the Gorilla." He had put together a formidable record of 36–3, with 26 KOs. However, it wasn't his knockout prowess I thought that would enable him to beat George, but his boxing ability, having already outboxed and decisioned another big knockout puncher, James "Bone-crusher" Smith. Because George had averaged less than four rounds in his twenty-one comeback fights and had gone past five rounds only four times, our strategy was to force him to use his aging legs in order to extend him into the later rounds where it would be Rodrigues's fight.

  Early on in his comeback George had learned the importance of the press saying, "I'm only a product of the media. They made me. I'd be eating hard corn bread and red beans today if it hadn't been for the media deciding to write about me. They made the people so curious they started filling arenas." Now, with the press converging on Las Vegas for George's fight against Rodrigues—as part of a doubleheader with Mike Tyson sharing the bill in his first appearance since losing his title—their presence provided the preacher man with a bully pulpit.

  Crowding around the man they viewed as having taken Ali's place as boxing's resident philosopher, the press wore their pencils down to the nubs recording George's every note and quote. Channeling his "inner Ali" the man they now referred to as "Big" George first patted his stomach, calling it his "investment." Then, mixing humor with a little self-deprecation, he told them to "stop calling people old ... old is 102. I'm here to show people that being over forty isn't a death sentence." His strategy for the fight? "To try to hit Rodrigues before he can duck." Then he added one quote that had me scratching what hair I had left, saying, "Now Rodrigues has hooked up with Angelo Dundee. Dundee has always been successful against guys of my nature who are punchers. That's enough to know right there." What the hell did he mean by that? George might have known then, but I wouldn't know until after the fight.

  Come fight night I needed some help in the corner, so I called upon my son, Jimmy, who had accompanied me to Vegas, to help bring the stool in, carry the buckets, that sort of stuff. As we stood there, awaiting George's arrival in the ring, which took ten minutes or so, George "icing" Rodrigues by deliberately coming in late, I turned to Jimmy and told him that from what I had seen on TV George was "in bad shape" and that this wouldn't be a tough fight. Or something like that. Suddenly there was Big George, up in the ring, scrunched over under his hooded white terry-cloth robe and skipping around. Jimmy and I were leaning on the ropes looking out at the Caesars Palace crowd when George came over to our corner and gave me a forearm shiver right in the chest. Straightening up to his full 6' 3'' size, he greeted me with, "Hi, Angelo, how are you?" Suffering a sudden seizure of agita, I gasped to Jimmy, "Oh my God, we're in trouble!" I wished I could be anywhere else in the world but in that Caesars Palace ring with George at that moment.

  However, my fears seemed unfounded, at least for the first 2:40 or so of the first round. For there was Rodrigues, moving in and out—although the padding under the canvas had softened in the hot Vegas sun, making it harder for him to backpedal—tattooing George with jabs, some of them belly punches. All George was doing was moving constantly forward, his few jabs so slow they looked like they had tin cans tied to them. Then, in the closing seconds of the first round, he threw a jab that came out of nowhere and landed with all the force of a two-by-four being shoved through a wall, bloodying Rodrigues's nose. Back in the corner Rodrigues said, "That hurt." Unlike Paddy Flood who, when told by his fighter Bobby Cassidy that his eye ached, candidly said, "Yeah, I see ... and the ache is getting purple," I tried to gloss over Rodrigues's anxious comment with a "No, it didn't." But I knew then that the outcome was written in stone. And about two minutes later George confirmed my worst fears by staggering Rodrigues with a left-right combination and following that up with a vicious wait-here-until-the-stretcher-comes left hook—BAM! BAM! BAM!—sending Rodrigues down and out at 2:39 of the second round.

  I was now sold on George. What I didn't know then was that George was sold on me, too. I would find that out later that night when, at the airport waiting for the red-eye back to Miami, George plopped down in a seat next to me and said, "Angie, I've always admired you, the way you take care of fighters." Then he told me he remembered how, back in Zaire, when he had Ali cornered in the sixth round and was thinking "I finally got him," I had shouted up to Muhammad, "Don't play with that sucker!" and Ali had covered up quickly, ending any chance George had of winning. George went on to add that he also respected the way I protected my fighters. When Ali fought Larry Holmes, when everybody else was, in his words, "deciding to let this tough man keep getting a beating," George remembered my pushing Bundini away and saying, "I'm boss here and I say it's over." Now George said to me, "I've always wanted you to work with me ... will you?" What else could I do but answer, "Yes." And so the chain of events that had begun with my being in Muhammad's corner in Zaire had come full circle.

  The George Foreman I knew was the 1974 version, the George Foreman of Zaire. That George Foreman was hardly a Prince Charming, having wrapped himself in the cloak of his first role model, Sonny Liston. Small wonder then that, like Liston, he was, by turns, sullen, distant, and rude; someone who, in his own words, "would offend anybody."

  However, when I arrived at his training camp to help prepare him for his fight with Evander Holyfield, what to my wondering eyes should I find but an all-new George Foreman, no longer the 1974 model. In effect he had reinvented the George wheel, turning from a Sonny Liston growl-alike into a nice, round-faced, warm, cuddly teddy bear. Replacing his early guardedness with openness, he was garrulous, amusing, almost touchy-feely. Maybe a little of Muhammad Ali had rubbed off on him. But most probably it was those ten years away from the ring, ten years that enabled him to come to grips with himself and be who he wanted to be, just plain ol" George—not the person others wanted him to be. If so, his ten years away had been one helluva career move.

  If ten years had brought about a change in the internal George Foreman, it had wrought a change in the external one as well. Now he looked as big as the proverbial barn, almost as if each added year had also added to his middle, like rings around a tree. From the somewhat lithe 220 pounds he had weighed in Zaire, he had ballooned up to 315 during his retirement, coming back down to between 267 for his first comeback fight against Steve Zouski to a "svelte," for him, 235 pounds against Dwight Qawi. Obviously uninterested in fashioning the type of designer body that fans had come to expect in their heavyweights during his absence—bodies like those of Mike Weaver and Ken Norton—the well-upholstered Foreman was comfortable fighting somewhere in the 250- to 260-pound range.

  When sportswriters would make jokes that he looked like a parade standing still and press him on whether he was satisfied with his weight, George would parry the interviewer in kind. He would resort to shtick, joking that he had gone on a cheeseburger diet, that he was the prodigal son of boxing looking for the fatted calf, that his training camp was right next to the local ice-cream store. He added several other one-liners that sounded as if they had come right out of a Milton Berle joke book. Then, without missing a beat, he would answer, "Satisfied? No, I'm not satisfied. I want to be BIGGER! I'm a lion, not a pussycat. I don't see why I have to lose weight just so I can fight like a kitty cat." And that would answer that. Sort of.

  But if the boxing press saw a body of great acreage, one that looked pulpy with a kind of aging massiveness, then they didn't know what that body contained. For this George Foreman was nothing like the first George Foreman, the "new" Foreman having little in common with the "old" model. This George Foreman's style also bore little or no resemblance to the style of the "old" George Foreman. The George Foreman of Zair
e would spend his time winding up and flailing away, much like an axe man trying to fell a tree, almost as if the draft of a punch might give his opponent pneumonia if he missed. Instead, this second coming was of a man who had matured, who had acquired the patience of age, the savvy of an old pro, and the wisdom of thoughtful exploration. Not only that, but George had developed a jab that could break tall buildings in a single shot, one that landed with all the force of a wrecking ball. Someone once asked me who was better, the young George Foreman or the older one, and after giving it some thought I told him that George was "smarter" the second time around and would have handled Zaire better; he wouldn't have been tricked by that rope-a-dope stuff nor Ali's psyche job.

  Sure, this new version of George Foreman was s-l-o-w-e-r. But while speed is the first thing a fighter loses with age, George never had any in the first place, his movements were always – 10 on the Richter scale. What George had was overwhelming power, many considering him the greatest hitter since axe-wielding Lizzie Borden took out two in one night up in Fall River, Massachusetts. And power is the last thing a boxer loses. For references just ask George's 23 KO comeback victims who had felt it.

  Watching George train was a revelation. Unlike almost every other fighter in boxing history, George did little of his training in the gym. It was almost as if he was allergic to it. Instead he cut logs or ran along behind a slow-moving pickup truck equipped with a heavy bag dangling from the rear throwing punches as he plodded along—first all lefts and then all rights. It was a rare exhibition of a man programming himself to move constantly forward throwing punches. No turning, no moving sideways, just chugging forward. Me? I was trailing along behind him, riding in a car, watching. Whatever worked for George, worked for me. Hey, I try to blend as best I can with my fighters. And with twenty-four wins and twenty-three knockouts in his comeback—counting two more KOs after Rodrigues, Ken Lakusta and Terry Anderson—who was I to argue with George and his training habits?