With Kayode Fasua
Here is my fathomed story of a wry joke between an owl and a bat; both flying, living things with incomparable traits. While the owl is a bird of queer body features (notably large frightening eyes) and strange attitudinal heist, the bat shares the two worlds of the maker’s creation, enviously donning the combined toga of a bird and a rat. For this same bat, however, it simply tops up its reputation by flapping wings that take the shape of human hands.
At a chance meet while swirling in what ought to be diametrically opposed flights, the bat one day poked the owl and asked, “why do you fly alone and are often quiet, when you should be preying in team, to gain bountiful harvest?” Bemused, the owl replied, “I fly alone and keep muted often so my intention, dimension and hiding place are not known to my numerous meats like insects, spiders, earthworms, snails, crabs, some fish, reptiles, and small mammals; whereas, you make so much noise and hunt in band, ending up with mosquitoes as dinner.”
This may be apt in looking at the cocktail of controversies, of how boxing fans rate who, between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman, is the greatest.
Lowering the flag of arguments, be informed that world boxing legend and later, brand promoter extraordinaire, George Edward Foreman, took the final bow from mortal earth on March 21, 2025. He was aged 76.
Comparably, Foreman, the battery-built pugilist of the heavyweight championship category, was classed in rivalry against the rave of the boxing game -Muhammad Ali, who began to shake the game of the wrists as early as the 1960s, when he drubbed highly feared Tony Liston twice, to festoon his waist as heavyweight champion of the world.
Unlike Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) who was vociferous and notorious for his showy exteriorisation in the media -amid countless photo ops and threats of paper-tiger annihilation, Foreman was always taciturn, reserved and often time shy in his bullish countenance, waiting for his result to speak for him in the aftermath of every boxing encounter. In classics, therefore, Ali can go for a bat and Foreman, an owl.
In life, rivalry is the lubricant for progression in whichever trade or vocation you can fathom. While Ali in the mid sixties and for upwards of the knock on the 70s in the last Century gained high popularity for humbling the World Champion -the Almighty Liston, Foreman looked on and was often to be caught looking straight ahead in deep contemplation. He was cock sure that someday, he would break the Ali record and leap-walk therein.
However surreal, the golden opportunity came his way in 1973, at Kingston, Jamaica where before a capacity crowd, Foreman metaphorically shaved the lion’s beard, by reducing world heavyweight champion, Joe Frazier, to a pitiable sight. I recall through the visual recapitulation of the bout via YouTube, how an exasperated commentator on the fight shrieked midway into the first round, “Down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier!’
The venue of the fight in Jamaica virtually went a bomb, when a few minutes later, through a preponderance of hard jabs from merciless Foreman, Frazier crashed on the canvass in the fashion of a rabbit slapped by a mother gorilla. This again elicited the annoyance of a disappointed commentator who screamed, “Frazier does not know where he is, he does not know where he is!”
With victory achieved over Frazier in a rematch that took place after the Jamaican tango, George Foreman thus levelled up with Muhammed Ali, whose Liston two-time demolition record was now effectively matched, thus arousing the mischief in matchmakers who felt it was time Ali and Foreman met, to know the overall boss. That feeling apparently set the tone for the 1974 epic fight between both in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo), in what has forever been known as the “Rumble in the Jungle”.
In that bout, Foreman lost to Ali in the eighth round alright, but the victory seemed secured through “a padded knockout count”. The child, they say, knows the name of its mother yet chooses to call her ‘mummy’. Foreman was, at Round 8, hit by Ali on the head with cross-counter jabs, landing him on the canvass. But a critical watch of that part of the bout can hardly disprove the fact that the knockout count was hurried, so much that before Foreman could regain his feat, Ali had been declared winner.
However, another school of thought speaks in favour of the Rumble-in-jungle fight’s referee, averring that Ali’s razzmatazz of ‘disco dance vibes’ inside ring, culminating in fast-racing, heavy landing jabs had practically blinded Foreman that the boxing umpire had to save him from sudden blindness, through a racy knockout count. They fail to confirm, however, if the medical team was invited to rate Foreman’s state of health. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since boxing was all he lived for to eke out a living in the challenging times of his era, Foreman was never the boxer to be cowed by defeat, as he was lion-hearted and a fearless goal-getter, throwing hard punches on opponents with reckless abandon. The strength, courage, passion and optimism were all in him, to fantasise victory into reality, while in the ring.
Born on January 10, 1949 in Marshall, Texas, U.S, Foreman grew up learning to box in a U.S. Job Corps camp in Oregon. At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, he gained instant recognition after winning the gold medal in the heavyweight boxing competition. The 6-foot 3-inch (1.9-metre), 218-pound (98.9-kg) heaweight first captured the professional heavyweight belt by knocking out Frazier.
Remarkably, he won all 40 of his professional bouts, including a sequence of 24 consecutive knockouts, suffering only four losses in his entire boxing career. At a time in 1977, however, notably after his defeat by Ali, Foreman was seen dotting the hood, as he became an evangelist.
But as in the case of a repented drunkard who resumed his alcohol booze after renting a house in a beer-parlour environment, Foreman returned to boxing in 1987 at age 39, and wondrously, he became a world heavyweight champion later at age 45, thus becoming the first boxer to achieve the feat. The senior boxer defeated Michael Moorer in 10 rounds at Las Vegas, Nevada, on November 5, 1994, to reclaim the exalted title.
Beyond boxing too, Foreman, towards the evening of life had great success as a television spokesperson for a number of products, including an eponymous home grill that was introduced in 1995. This, recollectors say, earned him more money (and arguably more fame) than his boxing career.
A father of 12 children, including five sons, all of whom he named George, Foreman said with magisterial finality that “I named all my sons George so they would always have something in common.”
But the stuff of George the father, in the world of boxing, is arguably uncommon.
Goodnight, great, gritty Champ.