Photo by Scogin Mayo
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King of the Grill
By Frank Gannon, September-October 2003
How George Foreman, once the meanest man alive, met God in the shower, settled down with his 10 kids, and struck it rich selling cookware. And you’ll never believe what he’s up to next…
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The Reverend George Foreman, 54, of Houston, Texas, is preaching in his tiny Baptist church. He is delivering the entire Epistle of Saint Paul to the Colossians, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his giant moon face with a handkerchief that seems dainty in his massive hand. The church is easy to miss, a little metal building in a rundown part of town, surrounded by old homes, pawn shops, and vacant lots. The Lone Oak Indoor Pistol Range is a block away. Most of the windows are barred.
"We gotta live in the moment!" the reverend preaches, looking more like a high-priced attorney than a simple preacher in his black designer suit and silk tie. "We gotta love people while they are alive—not at their funerals."
It isn't hard to get a parking place at George Foreman's church. About 70 people are attending the service in a partially filled room wider than it is deep. If he wanted, Foreman could sell his church like he sells Meineke mufflers. But the little church, with its little congregation, is exactly what big George wants.
"The people who are here want to be here," he says. George Foreman wants sincerity, so rather than hire musicians, he sings the hymns himself, playing an old gospel song on an electric guitar. About a third of the crowd joins in. Foreman sings loudest in a deep, bluesy voice: "Oh what a friend we have in Jesus!"
George takes up the basket for collection. After the service—earlier he dusted the seats—he stands in the parking lot, shaking hands with every member of the congregation. "Thanks for coming," he smiles to an elderly woman. When he is finished, he will eat a quick breakfast, change out of his suit, hop into his shiny 12-cylinder BMW, and head to the youth center that bears his name. I watch all this and I wonder: Is it possible for anyone, even George Foreman, to be this damned nice? Long before George Foreman became a muscular Mister Rogers and America's friendliest millionaire, he was, well… a beast. I encountered Foreman for the first time about 30 years ago. I was in college, dating a girl whose father had some connection in Vegas and didn't think it a stretch to fly his daughter and her hippie boyfriend to see a fight. George was a contender then. A surly, scary, mean, almost savage contender. He growled rather than spoke. Everything in his body language said, Stay the hell away from me. I remember watching him train, watching this huge man punish the bag, thinking that he was the scariest human I had ever seen.
 
Today, George Foreman is about as scary as one of the Teletubbies. But in a very real sense, this George Foreman isn't that George Foreman. That George Foreman died a long time ago. People even talk about "them" as if they were different entities. Sportswriters ask, "Would George I be able to defeat George II in a boxing match?" When he was inducted earlier this year into the Boxing Hall of Fame, he was asked which picture he preferred: the scowling bad man or the chubby grandfather? George laughed and said he didn't care.
To understand George Foreman, you have to understand what happened—or what he says happened—on March 17, 1977. On that evening in Puerto Rico, Foreman, who was a leading contender for the heavyweight title, lost by unanimous decision to Jimmy Young, who was a light-hitting fringe contender from Philadelphia. This was a major upset, a fight Foreman was supposed to win easily. The fight, however, was a minor event in George's life. What came after the fight was a life-changing event.
William James, in his famous book Varieties of Religious Experience, describes events like the one Foreman experienced that night as a "discharging lesion of the occipital cortex." Cynical boxing writers had less-kind words for it, like "stunt" and "excuse." A few medical experts attributed Foreman's experience to dehydration coupled with exhaustion. Gil Clancy, Foreman's trainer at the time, said that George had suffered "heat prostration."
In Foreman's version, he at first plunged into despair. He thought that he literally had died. Then he felt a giant hand carrying him out of the emptiness around him. He became several different people. Then he felt that his head and his hands had begun to bleed. He began yelling, "Jesus Christ is coming alive in me!"
Foreman ran to the shower. His alarmed handlers tried to stop him. He started to shout.
"Hallelujah, I'm clean! Hallelujah, I've been born again!"
He left the shower and kissed everyone in the room, telling them he loved them. He said he heard the voice of God.
Whatever it was that happened, the sullen, scary, bitter George Foreman was dead. The loveable George Foreman was born.
He quit boxing. Because Foreman was 28 and at his physical peak—the leading contender in a position to make large dollars—his retirement seemed bizarre. The smart money said he was going through a phase: In a year or two, the old Foreman would return and make his millions knocking young men unconscious. But the new evangelical Foreman abandoned his former life completely. He dedicated himself to God and the new George.
"I was trying to compensate for 28 years of silence and anger," he says.
Bert Sugar, boxing historian and a longtime Foreman friend, calls it "one of the great turnarounds in history in terms of persona and likeability. A Harvard Business School thesis could be written on how he did it. He went out like a roaring lion, and he came back a pussycat."
George Foreman has become such a cuddly pussycat that a new generation knows little of his heavyweight-champion Rumble in the Jungle past. My 16-year-old son's reaction is typical.
ME: Hey, I'm going to do a profile on George Foreman.
MY SON: You mean the grill guy?
The Grill. No other words are needed. The grill is now more ubiquitous than even the Joe DiMaggio-pitched Mister Coffee was in the 1970s. At wedding receptions, under Christmas trees, in department stores and kitchens, the grill is a permanent part of the American landscape. How many? The numbers vary according to the source, but the consensus guesstimate is about 40 million.
That giant number is very comforting to George Foreman, who gets a large part of the action. He was introduced to the grill in the mid-1990s by one of his advisers. Foreman, who had successful endorsement deals with Doritos and KFC, was looking for a product of his own. He tried the grill, he liked the grill. The rest is infomercial history. A few years ago, tired of paying Foreman for every unit sold, the Salton Corporation, the grill's manufacturer, elected to "buy" George's name for $137.5 million. The grill dollars, combined with Foreman's other endorsement deals and his HBO salary for boxing commentary, make George a very wealthy man and a rarity in the cruel world of boxing: a multimillionaire ex-boxer whose fight money forms a tiny percentage of his wealth.
No ex-boxer has ever been a mega-successful commercial spokesperson. It's a vicious sport with unsavory connections (would you feel comfortable buying a product from anyone connected with Don King?). The Mike Tyson Pepsi commercial was a major fiasco; Sugar Ray Leonard, Larry Holmes, and even Muhammad Ali ("I don't want you livin' with row-chiss") have all largely been advertising failures. Yet in 2002, only two sports celebrities—Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan—made more money in endorsements than George Foreman.
"That all comes from people genuinely liking you," he smiles. That smile is his greatest asset. Over a couple of days, I watch George Foreman interact with all types of people, from lawyers to day laborers. I never see a look from anyone that hints at anything but, "I really like this guy."
"There's such a warmth to George," a lady at church tells me. "You can't help but smile when you see him."
George Foreman is well aware of his natural warmth and its market value. But the secret to his success isn't just his likeability or his morality. It's that sincerity he likes to talk about. In the late 1990s, as the grill was first starting to grow in popularity, George appeared on the QVC Network. Suddenly, the phones lit up. Callers just couldn't get through, so every available QVC staffer grabbed a phone to take orders. Later, Leon Dreimann, Salton's CEO, reviewed the tape to see what happened. While QVC hosts were busily plugging the product, George eyed some burgers they had just finished cooking. Spontaneously—and very hungrily—he grabbed a roll, grabbed a burger, and started munching. Clearly, he was a man who didn't just sell a product. He used it.
Sincerity.
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