No way did I expect to knock Joe Frazier down that many times. Foreman said several mistakes were made in his preparations for Ali, not the least of which was his disinclination to study film of his fellow all-time great, or any other prospective opponent for that matter.
Because we were all so overconfident I would knock him out in two or three rounds. But Ali … man, he could take anything you gave him. You might be able to beat on him for 15 rounds, but he was nearly impossible to knock out. Nobody knocked Muhammad out, not even Joe Frazier. Anticipating another knockout victory as a matter of course proved to be a fateful miscalculation.
Same deal in the third round, the fourth round. You got him! Even in the Joe Frazier fight, the first couple of minutes, I was out-boxing him. I could box better than a lot of people thought. But there were times when I got caught up in my own hype. After the third round with Muhammad, they should have had me trying to out-jab him, outwork him, all those things. If I had only stepped away from him and made him come to me, I could have lured him into a knockout punch rather than try to beat him into a knockout punch.
That hardly prepared him to swap haymakers with tough guy Lyle, an ex-con who arrived at the Caesars Palace Sports Pavilion convinced he could land the takeout shot against Foreman before Big George could scrape off any accumulated ring rust.
Lyle — whose record at that time was , with 22 KOs — came ever-so close to making his vision reality. He staggered Foreman with a big right late in the first round, announcing to the 4, on-site spectators and an ABC Wide World of Sports audience that he had ample firepower of his own. The two-way action was ratcheted way up in the fourth round, in which Foreman went down twice and Lyle once.
Lyle pitched forward onto his face, where he was counted out by referee Charley Roth at the mark. Joe Louis was knocked down in his career, and he got up. I figured if he could get up, so could I. In the boxing ring he was known as "Big George.
Foreman has helped sell millions of George Foreman Grills, which were first introduced in and are still on the market today. But there's much more to Foreman's life. Sports historian and professor Andrew R. Smith documents Foreman's path from childhood to boxing to being a pitchman in his new biography, " No Way but to Fight: George Foreman and the Business of Boxing. Smith's is the first biography of Foreman, and he says that was part of the reason he wanted to write it.
Foreman became the celebrity spokesperson for the Foreman Grill — a product he didn't invent, but helped market — just as his boxing career was coming to an end. Before all that, though, Smith says it was Foreman's childhood in Houston that helped shape him.
That was not new in that part of Houston [then], and it certainly hasn't been remedied even as we're now into the s.
Smith says the Fifth Ward was growing as black sharecroppers moved from rural Texas into Houston during World War II, as more defense and shipping jobs became available. But the city was still overtly racially segregated then.
Foreman's first instance of fame was during the Olympics in Mexico City. Just sit back and ponder the two boxing careers of the great George Foreman. Born to a hard knock life in Houston, Foreman went from being a tough kid to an Olympic star. It was the biggest one sided beating since Dempsey thrashed Willard way back in the day, and people took notice. It was hard not to notice now that a towering man with thunderous power in each gloved fist held the heavyweight championship of the world.
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