George Foreman and Las Vegas certainly had their moments together.
The two-time heavyweight champion died Friday at the age of 76. Much of the history that defined his boxing career intertwined with classic moments played out in Southern Nevada.
Yes, one around the same time folks started making dinner on those famous George Foreman Grills.
That was in 1994, when a 45-year-old Foreman regained the title by knocking out Michael Moorer at the MGM Grand Garden. It was the night Foreman became the oldest man to win the heavyweight championship.
In all, Foreman fought 10 times in Las Vegas.
‘It happened!’
Jim Lampley, the veteran broadcaster who called the Foreman-Moorer fight, including the famous line, “It happened! It happened!” when Foreman won, reflected Saturday on the fighter’s life.
“He always understood narratives and theatricality,” Lampley said. “Maybe not able to talk about it overtly but just instinctively in his mind and heart. He knew how to be a story and tell a story. He was able to re-establish different narratives throughout his career that helped him remain relevant and meaningful as a public figure.
“Over time, what I came to appreciate was that he was a genius. A legitimate, walking, innate, gifted genius. When I said that to people, they would ask, ‘What’s your evidence for that?’ I would say, ‘Look at the bank account.’ That’s all you really need to know. Look at the amount of money he got the world to give him for essentially being the best him he could be.”
Lampley pointed to a period of time during the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier era — when, he said, new heroes needed to emerge in the heavyweight division — that Foreman was massive in that regard. That as Frazier was a foil for Ali, so too became Foreman.
“I think about boxing all the time,” Foreman told the Review-Journal in 2020. “… Nothing would have been possible without my boxing career. I had a good life. My parents passed on, but they enjoyed my boxing and all I accomplished in boxing. I sit back and reminisce and think about it, and if it had not been for boxing, none of it would have been possible. Nothing. Not even the grills. Nothing. It took George Foreman the boxer to do all that.”
Foreman said his greatest achievement was not winning the world championship twice, but rather his 1968 Olympic gold medal. That the memory of standing on the medal stand and hearing the national anthem still brought him chills.
He said his most memorable moment in Las Vegas came in 1976 at Caesars Palace, a fifth-round knockout of Ron Lyle. Both fighters were knocked down multiple times before Foreman ended things.
It was named Fight of the Year by Ring Magazine.
“It looks like they converted a tennis court or something like that in the back of Caesars Palace,” Foreman told the Review-Journal. “… I thought it was a tuneup fight for me. And there I am, so embarrassed getting knocked down, over and over in a boxing match. Caesars Palace. There’s Bill Cosby. Sammy Davis Jr. Frank Sinatra. All these guys are around. I’ll never forget that at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. That was my biggest day. I had some big fights. But that was a big day. Celebrities. And getting up off the canvas. I was so happy to win.”
He first became champion in his 20s by beating Frazier in 1973, a belt he lost to Ali a year later in the famed “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire.
Some 20 years later, Foreman was at the MGM Grand dropping Moorer, nearly two decades his junior. Foreman would finish his career 76-5 with 68 knockouts.
Predicting Moorer fight
“When he first emerged into the heavyweight picture, he was surly and almost disquieting with his off-putting presence,” Lampley said. “And then he recognized what he wanted to be and became that person. It was a form of self-reconstruction and personality molding the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen from anybody else in my life.”
Lampley, who also called many fights with Foreman alongside him as a color commentator, remembers the Moorer fight well — the title of the broadcaster’s upcoming autobiography is “It Happened!” — and what Foreman told him beforehand.
That in the weeks leading up to the moment, Foreman often looked at Lampley with a blank expression and said that Moorer would come at him late in the fight and stand in front of him and there would be a knockout.
Which is exactly what happened.
“It’s definitely my No. 1 call,” Lampley said. “His ability to understand and examine human nature — and it was acquired, not natural. He had to think about it over time and make judgments on what he really thought. There was an unobserved, or too often unobserved, element of genius in his character that I marveled at.”
Contact Ed Graney at egraney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @edgraney on X.
