I remember it well 1986 or thereabouts. No he was derided as a fat old man coming back for a few quid. In a sport with many bad endings it looked another . He was 36 is I think. Crazy thing Is that wouldnt be seen as old now but it was back then , probably like someone coming back now early 40's. Credit him for making it work. It was a good couple of years and a string of low profile wins for him to be taken seriously.
My thought was that it demonstrated how the overall quality of fighters of that era had degenerated from earlier eras.
I remember when he got his shot at Holyfield. It was hyped. Back then to order PPV you could either phone in or go to the cable office, which you had to do if you didn’t have the right equipment or wanted to be sure your order was taken properly. So I went down and basically everybody in line seemed to be there to get to get the fight. If you ordered the fight they also would give you a pin button, about as big around as the bottom of a Coke can, with a head shot of whichever fighter you were rooting for and a saying. They gave Holy buttons to younger folks and Foreman ones to older people. All the people working the counter at the cable place were wearing them. The Foreman ones said “You can do it George.” I forget what the Evander ones said. They gave me Holy but I asked if I could have George instead. The lady told me I was supposed to be for Holyfield but I told her I was a Foreman fan so she gave me that one. I wish I still had it.
Wait. It makes me old if I remember his comeback? At the time, people treated it like a circus act. I remember the Zouski fight and Bobby Crabtree, who I actually followed. Cooney and Rodrigues finally gave him some sort of legitimacy but there were still more naysayers than not. Cooper didn't really achieve this because it looked like a quit job but George was shallacking him. The Holy fight was the real moment for him because no one thought he could go the distance against a top flight opponent. And then the Stewart mess put him down a rung or two. Personally, I love watching old Foreman fight. His slow love taps bust up and discombobulate strong, able heavies in a way I have never seen in 40 years of following the sport. And he was so controlled and efficient.
At first it was a sideshow. No one expected him to progress far or persist for long. It was just a small side story, a curiosity. But after he'd racked up 15 wins or so, it was clear this could lead somewhere. Why not regard him as a contender ? The heavyweight division wasn't exactly stacked with busy or impressive fighters at the time. There was Tyson, and Holyfield coming along, and Ruddock, Douglas, Carl Williams managed a few decent wins around 1987-'89 ..... but most the 'contenders' were not managing to put in much activity, and often looked poor. But there was Foreman, a big, strong, hard hitting guy with a real presence, beating up some fairly awful competition for the most part, but at least he was making an effort to get in the ring often and his story started to capture the public's imagination.
I was a kid growing up in the 80s and it was actually confusing (for me). With minimal coverage, I was mixed up on if he was actually fighting for real and if it was the same George Foreman from way back in the 70s. The Cooney fight was the first time I remember realizing he was actually a fighter for real. He became a big celebrity nice-guy and his popularity was the last touch in getting him fights as you made the $$ if you fought George. I remember him in commercials everywhere before seeing him fight.
When he started against Zouski, it was seen as a sad and curious event with little publicity. As the wins started piling up and Foreman started slimming down, the sadness left and it became more curious as people wanted to see how far he could go and also they were surprised at how comfortable Foreman was in front of the camera. There were quite a few screeching pinheads that mirrored Larry Merchant's snarky arrogance and dismissed it too fast. I think he got some credibility when he bludgeoned Bert Cooper. Then he dumped Adilson Rodriguez at Don King's lap and smart folks figured out he had plenty left.
Part of what baffled people was he started his comeback out of the limelight and didn’t go for the quick-cash-in payday. Almost every top fighter who retired for a long period and came back either wanted one tuneup and a contender/title fight or to skip the tuneup and go straight after the top. Big George patented a new and entirely different approach — one that probably only works for heavyweights since the speed factor in the lighter weights can be impossible to overcome for an aging fighter. He started almost as a notice, like maybe where he would have if he’d have been an up-and-coming prospect who had 10-15 fights, and wanted a longer apprenticeship. That was probably largely out of necessity at first as he needed to get himself back into some kind of fighting shape (I think he hovered over 300 pounds and maybe 350 during his long preaching layoff) before he decided to take on the first minor tests. He fought himself back into shape (better stamina than he ever had in his original incarnation in large part due to learning to relax) and learned the limitations of his older body. He worked with Archie Moore to shore up his defense ... in his younger days his offense was his defense. He actually improved with age. It was a wonder to behold.
I always thought he was legit. In retrospect he was only 38 or so when he came back, and he was always a big puncher so why wouldn't that have been possible. At the time older fighters were more rare than today, and at heavyweight many guys in their 40s can still fight because of the pace of the fights and size. You cannot have a guy in his 40s fight at Welterweight. Not normally. For some reason an old fighters are aroundmore than they used to, maybe because the fighters are not as high quality as they were before and they use the opportunity. I am not sure. As for George,Foreman had power and he was wiping out guys which not many guys wiped out. He was a little smarter in his comeback and he knew how to use his size and experience. I feared for Tyson. I thought Foreman had a good chance to beat Tyson with his size and power and style. A boxer and a guy like Lewis might have been trouble for George. Set him up with the jab and land the long right but Tyson. If Mike does not land punches early George could start to walk him down and overpower him and stop him. The style was great for George. To make a long post short. I thought he was legit. I am never too thrilled about comebacks and old guys coming back. I like younger guys to be able to excite boxing.
I followed both careers of Foreman. In his early career he had a lot of fights, but most of them ended quickly by the 2nd round. He was a fearsome fighter in his first championship reign - already an ATG in the sense that only a handful of greats could have beaten him. But one thing that he hadn't developed properly - stamina - would be his Achilles heel. When he came back after a 10 year absence from the ring, he really wasn't taken seriously by hardly anyone. It was generally thought that he was fighting to raise money for his church which was commendable. He fought often and kept winning. Then he stopped Qawi, who although was past his best had been a fearsome champion and still had a respectable name. The Adilson Rodriguez fight was an impressive win. People started taking notice. I only heard it mentioned once but always remembered that during George's first career he had not taken that much punishment, which is what really shortens a fighter's career years. Around this time Sugar Ray Leonard said that if he took off some more weight and gained a little more speed George Foreman could be a real factor in the heavyweight division. The Cooney fight was an impressive victory and showed that old George still carried plenty of power. During his second career he fought his way back into condition and learned how to pace himself and used his big jab to great effect. When he fought Holyfield, most felt that he had little chance of winning, but people were rooting for him like crazy. When the fight reached the eighth round, the crowd gave him a rousing ovation for having lasted longer than he had against Ali when he lost the title all those years ago. Holyfield won comfortably but it went the distance, George was dangerous all throughout, and he won a moral victory. George would drop a decision to the hard-hitting Tommy Morrison but Morrison won by out-speeding Foreman, not out-punching him. In fact, the technique for defeating old George was to outspeed him. And George capped it all with his come from behind one short punch KO of champion Moorer. He did this 20 years after losing the title - a remarkable achievement by any standard. Foreman's second career may not have always been spectacular or studded with victories over big names, but he got the job done, and successfully!
This was the era before PEDs so 38 years old (and retired for a decade) really did seem old. Ali and Joe Louis were both pretty much done by this age. I saw pics of his first fight against Steve Zouski (March '87) and he was 260+ and looked rather overweight and flabby. In late '87 he got an ESPN fight with Rocky Sekorski and showed up at about 240 and really impressed commentator Al Bernstein with his well educated and bludgeoning jab. He stopped Rocky in 3 and made a believer out of Bernstein because Rocky was a tough journeyman type who usually went the distance. As a matter of fact, after this fight, Rocky went 12 rounds with comebacking Michael Dokes who was much younger and closer to prime than Foreman was. Looking back, this was an early comeback fight that showed George should probably not be dismissed so quickly. The fight with Rodrigues was interesting because both George and Evander stopped him in 2 rounds but George seemed to dominate and bully Rodrigues more than Holyfield could. People who knew boxing could look at these types of fights and figure out way before the general public that in fact George was for real.
Nailed it I remember the pictures of the Zouski fight, he seemed to be just blubber, and to be 37 and not to have fought for 10 years, it was a joke. If Ali could not defy age, how was the bloke who was merely a pillar of the Ali legacy going to do anything?
1987 was certainly not the era before PEDs. The 80's actually were the golden era for them, at least when it came to Olympic sports.
It was no different than now just that we never had this here internet machine ! I was young the young people thought it was fantastic but I remember all the older fans saying he was mad Just like they have been over the Tyson return and the aborted Benn return last year it was no different
