Rest In Peace Champ - Tribute to KOD Inspiration George Foreman
Mar 26, 2025
I was very saddened at the weekend to hear of the death of George Foreman.
George is a massive inspiration to me and I regularly use his example within Knock Out Depression programmes. He is someone I reached out to at one time when I was struggling, and he replied within a couple of hours. His portrait was one of the very first that I painted when I started painting just over a year ago.
Over the last week I have been working on a new resource that includes a section on George. I’d like to share what I’ve written about him below in tribute to the tremendous impact he had on me.
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Big George Foreman is one of the most well-loved fighters in the history of the sport, but it wasn’t always that way.
In his first reign as heavyweight champion in the early 1970s, Foreman was an intimidating presence, a surly, brooding, brute of a man. That changed following the loss of his title to Muhammad Ali, and a subsequent religious experience in 1977 when he collapsed and, as he tells it, was born again in his dressing room following defeat to Jimmy Young.
He walked away from boxing, becoming a Christian minister and founding his own youth centre. When the centre was at risk of closure, Big George decided to raise money the only way he knew how: boxing. He came back to the ring in 1987 a very different fighter to the man he left as. He was bald, out of shape, and significantly heavier than he had been. He was also a nice guy. He joked about his love of cheeseburgers, about his new tactic of belly-bumping his opponents, and of not wanting to hurt anybody, just put them to sleep for a little while.
The new George achieved more than anybody, except George himself, could have expected. In the unlikeliest of outcomes, he became heavyweight champion of the world again in 1994, 20 years after he lost it. At 45 years of age this made him the oldest heavyweight champion in history.
Despite this incredible achievement, most people today know George not for boxing, but for his Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. It also earned him many more millions than the millions he earned from boxing. It wasn’t the surly, brooding George that created this opportunity; no, it was the new George. Not the George that people feared, but the George that people loved.
Foreman wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth; he grew up in grinding poverty in Houston, with few apparent opportunities for his future. But Foreman’s faith, his determination, and his ability to adapt and change, took him to heights that most of us couldn’t even dream of.
Sometimes life calls upon us to change. Depression is often a sign to us that something in our life needs to change. That we need to change. Change is scary, and it can seem impossible. But one thing that’s certain in life, is things change. And we can change too.
RIP Champ, thanks for everything.
