74 year old George Foreman hitting the heavy bag

I like NoNeck, but I always wondered if he lost money betting against George...

 

You look at the Frazier fight, and the Moorer fight twenty years later, and you ask yourself why this guy wasn't the GOAT!

 

Lol. An easier path for some. I just knew it.

 

Laughed out loud at this.

 

Yes, considering his key achievements, Foreman is, in a way, a case study on how precarious the road to 'greatness' can be - how intertwined the success of that journey is with those who travel with you on that road and the critical events that occur along the same.

 

We've established that this isn't 74 yo Foreman actually hitting the heavy bag.

The clip gave me cause to revisit the old 70s footage of young Foreman hitting the heavy bag. I then had a look at available footage of old, second coming Foreman hitting the heavy bag.

I'm not sure what the majority feel on this is either way but based on the heavy bag eye test at least - I think that young Foreman punched somewhat harder, an opinion that might run with pop. opinion or against it, I'm not sure. I think there are also sufficient examples from his fights in the 1970s to argue for his punching that much harder.

I've never thought young Foreman was necessarily slow...or fast either. But old George was significantly slower. I mean, really slow. Now speed wasn't the primary component to the equation of young Foreman's power - but to punch as slow as he did in his second career arguably took some steam from his prime power of punch, (added weight to his frame notwithstanding).

People often muse over the optimal combination of young Foreman and old Foreman. I think the proportional balance of that equation is somewhat uneven. I think young Foreman had everything in place BUT mindset (not to underate or minimize the importance of that attribute), I guess my point is that the right mindset was an achievable attribute for young Foreman in all possibility. However, for the old Foreman, there were positive features of the young Foreman that were impossible to recapture.