He’s Not Going In Hungry

Jim Jeffries couldn’t do it.

After a five-year layoff, during which time he never even laced on a glove, he climbed in the ring, fat and soft, to do battle for the heavyweight title with the sleek, polished, jeering Jack Johnson, who tormented him for 15 rounds before mercifully dispatching him with almost contemptuous ease.

It was a terrible mistake for Jeffries, who had been a national idol and synonym for invincibility, a retired undefeated heavyweight champ. He became--and remained for the rest of his life--that symbol of mockery and futility, the Great White Hope.

Jack Johnson, his successor, couldn’t do it either. He fled the country in the van of political persecution, spent a year at the race tracks of Paris, eating bonbons and quaffing champagne, then lay in the sun after the 26th round at Havana in 1915 while they counted him out under the standing giant, Jess Willard.

Dempsey couldn’t do it. He laid off for three years after the Firpo fight and Gene Tunney was able to cuff him around, puff his eyes and cut his lips in 10 runaway rounds at Philadelphia.

The great Benny Leonard couldn’t do it. Broke, out of shape, he tried a return after seven years away in 1932 but got knocked out by the younger, faster Jimmy McLarnin in six at New York.

They gave a new phrase to sport: “They Never Come Back.” It became part of the language, words to live by, like, “Quit while you’re ahead,” and, “Never buck the house odds.”

But good advice never deterred anyone. The aging process is a swindle. Golfers at 49 think they can hit the ball as far and straight as they could at 29. Mark Spitz wants to get back in a pool with kids who are swimming two seconds faster than he did at their age. Lyle Alzado wants to chase one more quarterback, no matter how much his back hurts doing it.

But no one ever laid off for 10 years and came walking into the gym, 100 pounds overweight, not having thrown a punch in fun or in anger since the Carter Administration, and announced that, at 40-plus, he was coming back for the heavyweight title he’d lost 17 years before. George Foreman thought up that little refinement.

Jeffries’ was a one-shot deal. He was fighting for--God help him--white supremacy and other foolishness. He couldn’t have seriously deluded himself. He must have wished a million times he’d stayed on his Burbank farm and left his reputation intact.

And when George Foreman hit the comeback trail, it was widely believed he was on it for a quick buck, a kind of complicated contribution to his Christian ministry in Houston, passing the collection plate, as it were. No one even begrudged him his chance to pick up some of that money laying around out there for palookas who couldn’t have gone a round with him in his prime.

He hand-picked his competition and joked that he vetoed anybody he hadn’t found in an iron lung. Most of them were as corpulent and clumsy as George and a match for him--except for one thing: George could still punch.

That’s another aphorism of the fight game: “The punch is the last to go.” It rhymes with “The legs are the first to go,” in pugilistic cliche.

Foreman, in his prime, was a devastating puncher. That was his trouble. In his first 40 fights, only two of them went 10 rounds. Most of them didn’t go two. No fewer than 30 of them went two rounds or less.

George once fought five guys the same night and knocked all five of them out. He knocked Joe Frazier up in the ring lights in Unionville, Long Island. He knocked Ken Norton through the ropes in two in Venezuela.

But he was made to order for Muhammad Ali. Ali made his living on big slow guys who were intent on two-round knockouts. Ali just let them chase themselves out till they were rubber-legged and glazed-eyed and as ready to topple in a heap as a channel swimmer staggering ashore after 20 hours in the tide.

Like the Johnson fight for Jeffries, the Ali fight for Foreman cost him more than the championship. It cost him his reputation, a place in history. Self-doubt is the most insidious of enemies. It has lost more wars than rusted equipment.

George admits now that he wandered around in a haze of depression after his loss to Ali. His self-esteem cracked, his money small solace, he turned to God first--and food second. He had found his calling. A Roman collar--and a napkin. All he had lost was a fight--not his appetite. Nothing was wrong that an order of French fries couldn’t fix.

The George Foreman of today is a jovial, avuncular sort of character who bears little resemblance to the glum, menacing pug of yesteryear. He has become the cover boy for junk food. All he is and ever hopes to be, he says, he owes to that highest art of American cuisine--the all-purpose hamburger with everything. If it weren’t for it, George says, he might now be a derelict.

Instead, he’s a contender. Incredibly, at 43, he’s going to get another shot at the heavyweight championship of the world, a title he won 18 years ago--and lost 17 years ago.

History would tell us that he will end up on the floor, broken and bleeding--like Jeffries in 1910, Johnson in 1915, Dempsey in the rain at Philadelphia, Leonard on the ropes at the Garden.

All the champ, Evander Holyfield, has to do, it says here, is to outrun George for a few rounds till the ketchup starts leaking out of George’s pores, then step in and swat the portly, panting quadragenarian down for a 10-count. In George’s condition, he might not be able to get back up in 10 seconds if he tripped over his shoelaces.

But Evander Holyfield is as confrontational as a hungry leopard. He wouldn’t move out of the way of a glacier. He’s as easy to hit as 23 in blackjack.

George’s strategy is simple. He lost in Zaire because he was hungry, he says. He weighed a svelte 220. It was all those damn salads and lean meats. He doesn’t propose to make that same mistake again. He’ll come in at 250 or 255. He may bring a hamburger into the ring with him.

The people who say lean is mean have got it all wrong, in Foreman’s view. Fat is back. He’s not only going to strike a blow for gerontology but for obesity.

He may set the dieting business back 100 years. But he’s not going to make the same mistake Jeffries and Johnson and Dempsey did. He’s not going into the ring hungry. He’s going in burping.