Boxing: The preacher and salesman who still wants to box

In When We Were Kings, the brilliant documentary about the 1974 world heavyweight championship fight immortalised as the "Rumble in the Jungle", Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, heavyweights in the business of description, recalled the phenomenon that was the 25-year-old George Foreman.

"Of all the people I've seen hitting the heavy bag, including Sonny Liston, none ever hit it like Foreman," said Mailer, adding that for all the arrogance of Muhammad Ali, the challenger, there was, for the first time, fear in Ali's eyes. "He had to know that he had not done nearly as well against two fighters, [Joe] Frazier and [Ken] Norton, whom Foreman had demolished."

"I saw him destroy Frazier," Plimpton recalled. "I had never seen destruction like that."

"Foreman," said Mailer, "was awesome." It is an over-used word, but Mailer probably does not toss it around lightly.

Anyway, these are the observations playing over and over in my mind as I sit in a London hotel suite waiting for Foreman, who is now both a preacher at the Church of The Lord Jesus Christ in his native Houston, Texas, and a salesman, having lent his famous name to the Big George Lean Mean Fat Grilling Machine, a piece of apparatus he has come to Europe to promote. And still, heaven help us, a boxer, nursing a plan to make a comeback in just over a year's time, when he will be 55.

He enters, with a taciturn associate – can it really be a minder? – who sits in the corner. Foreman is vast, with a kind, round, almost cherubic face. His handshake, for which I have braced myself, is gentle. I think back to another line of Mailer's in When We Were Kings. "The word murderous does not quite apply," he said of the 1974 version of Foreman. It is hard to imagine the 2002 version so much as hurting a fly.

And yet his comeback plans seem to be semi-serious. Besides, we know that he is capable of outlandish feats, for he was 45 when he won back the world heavyweight title, albeit from an unimpressive Michael Moorer. "Sure, the fight was fixed," Foreman said afterwards, "I fixed it with a right hand."

So how do his family – his wife and 10 children, five daughters, and five sons, the boys all called George Edward Foreman on the basis, he says, that when he succumbs to amnesia, as ex-boxers do, he will have a decent chance of remembering their names – feel about a comeback?

"A couple of years ago, he tells me, "when David Tua was the No 1 contender, I said to my wife: 'I could beat that guy with one hand.' I said: 'Baby, I can do it'. And she said: 'Isn't that the way you should leave the sport, feeling and saying that you can do it?' Then she said that she didn't want to talk about it no more, so I had to sheepishly back down, but I figured that in a couple of years she'd be so tired of me hanging round the house, taking out the garbage and fussing, that she'd say: 'I don't care what you do, old man, go.'"

His wife, I dare to venture, sounds like a wise woman. Surely he doesn't believe he could beat Lennox Lewis? "Well, if you can visualise Lewis using his finesse and superior boxing ability to beat me, that tells you that I'm the No 1 contender. But, no, he'd be too smart for me. That left jab would be in my face, he'd have me swollen up."

Foreman pauses. It is the pause of a comedian, or a preacher, about to deliver his knock-out line. "So I would have to be certain he's retired before I make a comeback; my momma didn't raise no fool."

I laugh, and ask Foreman where he thinks Lewis figures in the top five greatest heavyweights in boxing history. And where, for that matter, he places himself? He obliges by making it sound like the first time he has ever heard such a devastatingly original question.

"You've got to rate John L Sullivan, the first heavyweight champion of the world, and you cannot leave out the great Joe Louis, champion for a decade or more. Rocky Marciano never lost a fight, and Jack Dempsey, just the words Jack Dempsey mean strength. Muhammad is a greater man than he ever was a boxer, but the bravest man I ever got in the ring with.

"Now you could stick Lennox Lewis in there anywhere you want. He is one of the best fighters of all time. He had a plan to beat Tyson, and he executed it perfectly. You could put him at one, at two, at three, and you would get no arguments from me.

"What I had was brute strength. And when I came back in '87, I just used boxing for the publicity. So there is no way you can rate a man like that, like me, as one of the best of all time. When I turned professional, Dick Sadler [his coach] showed me how to get out there as quick as I could and knock guys out, because I didn't have any experience. When I fought Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title [in 1973], all but maybe three of my 37 fights were knock-outs. And then I knocked him out, too.

"I'd be in trouble sometimes, the fight would look like it was going the other way, then I'd hit the guy and he'd be on the canvas. Brute strength, that's all it was.

"Did you hear the story about the greatest archer in the world? He was travelling the countryside, and saw a bulls-eye, and perfectly in the middle of it was an arrow. He measured it, he had never seen anything that direct. He was the greatest of all time, but he'd never seen that kind of marksmanship. Finally he met the guy, and said: 'Tell me, how did you get to be that accurate?' The guy said: 'It's easy, I shoot the arrow first, then I paint the bullseye".

Foreman lets rip a huge chuckle. I laugh. Even his taciturn corner man smiles. "My career is like that," he continues. "I got those knock-outs, now I go back and tell how they happened. The truth is, I don't know how they happened."

His modesty is becoming, yet disingenuous. Foreman was a more skillful fighter than he lets on, although his self-confidence was so bruised on that unforgettable night in Zaire that I wonder whether it ever fully returned.

Certainly, the "Rumble in the Jungle" was a pivotal experience in his life. "After that knock-out," said Norman Mailer in When We Were Kings, "he [Foreman] went for two years through the deepest depression, and he almost didn't come out of it. To see the way in which he reconstructed his personality until you'd be hard pushed to find anyone in American life more affable..." Mailer's sentence, unusually, petered out; such was his admiration, he was lost for words.

Foreman remembers the aftermath of the fight slightly differently. "I was devastated. I'd wake at night jumping up, thinking I was still in the fight trying to beat the count. I had to live with that man standing over me screaming: 'I told you never to doubt me, I'm the greatest!'.

"And I tried to smear his defeat. For years I said this happened in Africa, that happened in Africa. I even said I was doped. But he defeated me fair and square. And later, I tried to make up for what I had said. He became like my brother. I love him. I want to protect and take care of him." A huge smile. "Although when he sees me he worries because I try to convert him all the time."

Foreman tells me that Ali, on days when he gets proper rest and medication, is lucid and well. None the less, it must have crossed his mind that perhaps his own punches contributed to the tragic physical decline of this man he loves. The smile fades.

"Yeah, well, you can't throw that out the door. I remember beating him up pretty good about the third round, and when the bell rang he looked round and said: 'I made it'. He came back out and said: I've weathered the storm, you can't do that to me again', and he was right. He used his rope-a-dope strategy and it worked. I got tired. But the mistake he made was, because he weathered the storm with me, he started to let everyone beat up on him, figuring they couldn't hit him like that all night. So I don't think I did damage to him, but because he defeated me that way, I think that's what did the damage."

Foreman endorses Mailer's recollection that he was depressed for two years following the Ali defeat. What sorted him out, he says, was his bout with Ron Lyle in 1976. "It was the toughest fight I ever had. He had me on the canvas, I'd get up, and he hit me down again. He hit me so hard that my teeth went through my bottom lip. And I thought: 'What excuses this time? What am I going to tell the media this time?'

"I decided then that I would die before I let him beat me, so I kept getting up and next thing I knew, Ron Lyle was the one down."

That, says Foreman, was the moment he won back his self-respect as a boxer. But there was an earlier, more significant moment in his life when he found self-respect as a human-being. As a teenager, in Houston, he had been a holy terror, mugging people with impunity.

"And we drank. We drank all weekend, cheap wine called Thunderbird, then we'd prowl the streets looking for prey. One night, two friends and I had just robbed a guy, when the police stopped and started chasing us. I was the biggest and slowest, and they started closing on me, so I hid under a house, but I figured they would come back with big dogs.

"That's when my education by way of TV shows came to me. When criminals are pursued by dogs, they go into water to hide the scent. The nearest thing to water down there was a burst sewer pipe, so I covered myself head to toe with slop, and suddenly, for the first time, I realised that I was a thief. You'd be surprised how much ignorance there is in poverty. I had never thought of myself as a thief. Stealing money, to me, was like picking grapes. But I got a little knowledge under that house. I realised my momma hadn't raised a boy to be chased by hound dogs. And I never stole again."

As with so many before and since, boxing helped to accelerate Foreman's flight from a life of crime. He had his first organised fight in 1967; in 1968 he won Olympic gold. Yet it is possible, I say, to be a boxer and still be bad. Mike Tyson springs to mind.

"Yeah, Tyson's a different creature. When I was under that house, I hated being a criminal. But Tyson, he thinks: 'I've seen the good guys, I've seen the bad guys: I choose to be a bad guy.' At a certain point in his life he wanted nothing other than to be a bad guy. But I think maybe Lewis has whupped him into a change of heart. That could be the best thing that ever happened to him."

Which brings us, finally, to the reason he is spilling out of an armchair in a London hotel room: the Lean Mean Fat Grilling Machine, over 40 million of which have been sold in the United States. Could that be the best thing that ever happened to him, or the worst? After all, whole generations now know him only as "the grill man". They have no idea that he ever so much as stepped into a ring. Could his commercial success, ultimately, obliterate his reputation as a champion boxer?

"I've adjusted to that," he says. "And the grill is nothing I'm ashamed of. When I was a boxer people would come up to me and say: 'George, I like you but I lost my money on you.' I never run into people who tell me anything negative about the grill."