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In the land where anything is possible, America has made it possible for scores of sports stars to find second careers in business. NBA legend Michael Jordan is worth $2 billion thanks to Nike. Tony Hawk now hawks his own brand of skateboards. And before his fall from grace, football great O.J. Simpson made Hertz Rent-A-Car a household name.
But few stories in the sports-to-branding pantheon are as colorful, and unlikely, as that of George Foreman, who died Friday at the age of 76.
Though he was initially a reluctant advocate for the Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine that would bear his name, Foreman showed himself as gifted a marketer as he was a fighter. His mixture of broad-shouldered authority and fatherly charm made him one of the most successful pitchmen of the 20th century.
Born in Marshall, Texas, to a family of seven children, Foreman endured a difficult boyhood. (“As a child, I was sometimes so hungry,” he once said, “I used to dream that one day I’d get locked in a grocery store.”) Amid an adolescence as a “juvenile delinquent” (again, his words), Foreman saw a TV spot for Job Corps and began training as a bricklayer. An instructor turned him on to boxing.
Foreman won gold in the 1968 Olympics, but it was two other events in the ring that would make him a legend. In the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” match in Zaire, Foreman knocked out Muhammad Ali to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Twenty years later, at the age of 45, he sent Michael Moorer to the canvas to become the oldest boxer to hold the heavyweight title.
