The legend of a hard blow on the night of October 30, 1974. A punch of the largest boxing, Muhammad Ali, knocked him into the eighth round to put an end to one of the most iconic episodes of the sport of fists, The Rumble in the Jungle (The fight in the jungle). The fight played in Zaire (today Democratic Republic of the Congo) half a century ago between two heavyweight titans has lost his second protagonist on Friday. Foreman died at age 76 at a Houston hospital (Texas), as his family has confirmed in a publication on social networks. Family members have not communicated the cause of death.
“Our hearts are destroyed. With great pain, we announce the death of our beloved George Foreman, who left at peace on March 21, 2025 surrounded by his loved ones,” reads the note of the Olympic gold winner in Mexico 68 and twice world champion in the highest weighing category. Years later, Foreman reinvented himself as a successful businessman by lending his last name to portable grills. It was a round business that made him earn about 100 million dollars by the end of the nineties.
Foreman counted only five losses in a career that expanded for about 30 years, from 1969 to 1997, when he last boxed with 48 years (and lost against Shannon Briggs, 22 years younger than him). He had 76 wins, 68 by knockout in a race in which he shared the ring with other legends of the category such as Joe Frazier, Chuck Wepner, the Argentine Goyo Peralta and Evander Holyfield, among several more.
Like many of the boxing legends, Foreman’s origins are in poverty. He was a problem boy born in the northeast of Texas who left school at age 15. At that time he thought his future could be in sport. He thought first of American football, because one of his great idols was Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns corridor. But he found boxing in a vocational government program dedicated to young people. “I tried just to show my friends that I was not afraid,” Foreman said.
But it was really Foreman who inspired fear with his 1.90 meters high and about 100 kilos of muscle. Although he had jobs like carpenter and mason, he began to show more talent within the ring as amateur. He fought only 25 occasions in the category. He took only a year and a half since his first battle conquer gold in Mexico against Lithuanian Jonas čepulis, who then represented the Soviet Union.
Foreman threw čepulis with a knockout in the second assault. That was one of his signatures during his professional career. It is the same round in which he sent Joe Frazier to the canvas in 1973 in a fight in Jamaica, where he conquered his first heavyweight title, already Ken Norton, a year later, in a show organized in Caracas, Venezuela, where he retained the crown.
Those appointments served as a preparation for the great battle in Kinshasa. Muhammad Ali was then 32 years old and was measured in front of the young and successful figure to overthrow. Foreman arrived in Africa with 24 years and a reach on the glue of almost four centimeters less than his opponent. Both began to prepare the battle several months in advance, which raised expectations at levels little seen before in the sport.
The fight was scheduled for September 24. But a cut in the eye of Foreman during a training forced to postpone it by the end of October. The setback served to feed the epic of the fight. “Ako Bo Mai Ye,” Ali learned in Lingala, one of the Congolese dialects, which means “I’m going to kill him.”
Ali had been back in the boxing for four years, after his repudiation to the Vietnam War left him without a license to compete. In 14 fights he had only lost once in front of Frazer. That was his opportunity to defeat the new great promise. Some 60,000 people followed the fight at the stadium and the promoters said that another 1,000 million saw her on television worldwide.
Eight rounds later and a right to a staggering foreman put an end to months of expectation. Big George, the Great George, was stripped of the title by one of the greats of American sport. That battle left one of Ali’s great images for history, who looked haughtily at a disoriented foreman while Judge Zack Clayton told ten.
The fight was digested throughout American society and turned into one of the great pop moments of the seventies. Norman Mailer wrote a book about her. Leon Gast made it an Oscar winning documentary in 1997, When We Were Kings (When we were kings).
Foreman had to be recovered from the defeat, but he did. It took 15 months to fight again and returned to the path of triumph when Ron Lyle faced. He won five fights until he stumbled against Jimmy Young by technical decision in March 1977.
