I hate boxing. The idea of watching two people pulverise each other for the viewing pleasure of rabid crowds screaming and egging them on, all the while (not so) secretly hoping that one might die a grisly death fills me with revulsion and horror.
Add to that the complicated history of slavery and boxing, and I am even less inclined to consider boxing a legitimate sport. Historically, boxing sometimes allowed formerly enslaved men to escape their servitude, but their lives afterwards—in a world where Black men were still not recognised as human—meant that subjecting themselves to the spectacle of fights was the only way to survive. Muhammad Ali put it best: “Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.” (The same is true of class: the wealthy—or at least the ones who can afford the tickets—watch as the poor beat each other to pulp).
The paradox is that boxing has given us some of the world’s most charismatic people, including Ali, who died in 2016, and George Foreman, who died this past week. Ali was 76 at the time of his death, Foreman 74. Both died too young, in a time when we hope and expect that people might age into their 90s before dying (although that is all now much complicated by the ongoing pandemic). The long-term effects of boxing-induced brain injuries are established: scientists have pointed out that repeated traumatic head injuries effectively at least accelerated the Parkinson’s that eventually claimed Ali, while his family has denied this (although they also speculated about it some years prior to his death).
Growing up, I knew Ali through the kind of cultural deification that keeps legends alive. The famous photograph of him in triumph over Sonny Liston was taken in 1965, before I was even born, but it was everywhere, and Ali was in the air, often literally: I can recall the sound of “Black Superman” from my childhood. By the time I was just past my first decade, Ali was an icon, revered for his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. Decades later, I moved to Hyde Park, Chicago, and found myself walking past his old home (he left in the 1970s), and I would hear and read accounts by people who spoke with hushed reverence of running into him when they were children, of him talking to them, actually talking, or waving, or just walking by. I remain awestruck by the fact that the Muhammad Ali once walked the paths I traverse.
That Ali was a boxer was both a critical and integral part of his god-like stature, and I absorbed his story as one does the life of a deity, the way ordinary Greeks might have been expected to know all about Zeus, without ever understanding much about his sport other than the fact that he was, for many, simply The Greatest. I came upon George Foreman quite differently, with only a hazy understanding of his boxing career (and even that was because of the “Rumble in the Jungle” match in Zaire.) My first encounter with him was through the household item that literally made him a household name, the George Foreman Grill.
Introduced in 1994, the Grill promised to revolutionise home grilling. Until then, you had to buy some elaborate apparatus that required a large enough backyard and scary-looking canisters or one of those circular Weber grills onto which you heaped coals that provided enough heat for, oh, maybe two burgers, before you had to replenish them and start all over again with the lighter fluid and the briquettes. The Foreman promised to simulate that kind of grilling, but from the convenience of a kitchen counter, with sear marks and a unique tilt that allowed excess fat to drip down into a rectangular tray. This was a time when we were exhorted to move away from all fats, and it was sometimes hard to find regular anything. This was also the period when I, a lover of fatty food, took to preemptively insisting that my coffee drinks be made with full-fat milk, and the baristas would ask, with some weariness, “You mean whole?”
From the start, the Foreman Grill was an unashamedly corny enterprise, sold through the kind of TV infomercials that were regularly spoofed on Saturday Night Live—and they sold like the hot cakes you could make in them. The ads, which you can still find online, featured George Foreman himself, dressed in a blue shirt and tie, and an apron. He was sweet and deeply enthusiastic, hyping the wonders of the appliance that bore his name, adding a boxing-related flourish by calling it the “Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine.” I was, at the time, getting my doctorate in English, and nearly everyone I knew was an incipient or full-on foodie—a Foreman would have been the height of unironic kitsch, so I kept my curiosity to myself. After graduate school, I got one, some years after they launched, and after he had sold his share in the business, wondering if it would live up to all the hype.
To my everlasting surprise, it did. I don’t recall ever making anything more exciting than variations of grilled cheese, but I was always pleased at the sear and the crust and the fact that, yes, actually, the tilted design worked the way it was supposed to. Over the years, my Foreman and I parted ways during one of the moves from one place to another. Finally, I landed in Hyde Park, where I once again have my own kitchen. It is much smaller than the previous ones, but I wanted a Foreman again and this time I found one made specifically for people with limited counter space. It was much cheaper, not just because it was smaller but because it was on sale, for less than $20. Again, I was taken with how well it worked.
But I also discovered why it cost so little.
This is very definitely the no-frills version of the Foreman grill. It is elemental, in a literal sense, almost as if a caveman with no knowledge of electricity had been handed parts to put together, and done so successfully. There is a light that is supposed to do something when it reaches the peak temperature, but I’m never quite sure if it’s to go on or off to indicate that it’s ready: some days, it goes on right away, some days, it goes as I plug it in and then goes off, some days, it stays off. I rely instead on a clicking sound to know that it is hot enough, and I have learnt, the hard way, not to touch the lid with my bare hands: I use a silicone glove or tongs instead. If I had a child or a pet, I would have returned it, but since I’m a single adult, I just make sure to hover around the Grill while it does its job—which it does very well—keeping an eye on the cord in case it goes up in flames, and on the case in case it melts. The sandwiches are always delicious, and my favourite is a grilled cheese with an orange and ginger fruit spread and pepper jack cheese. I have yet to experiment with anything else, but I do mean to. Like the Weber grill, the Foreman is apt to languish in a corner of a cupboard until summoned for the occasional sandwich or burger.
I think of George Foreman fondly every time I use my Grill (to be upgraded when I acquire more counter space). I can recall how widely mocked he was for those infomercials, and that no one really believed it would work. But by 1999, he and his partners were able to sell their share in the business for nearly $140 million. In an interview with A.A.R.P. magazine, he claimed to have made “much more” than $200 million: “There were months I was being paid $8 million per month.”
To praise someone for having made millions seems counter to the left politics I hold seriously, but then I’ve long said I want to be rich: after all, I live in the United States, and “rich” here barely gets you adequate healthcare; a twisted knee, or any one of the multiple injuries suffered by an average boxer without television deals and product placements, can drive you into bankruptcy, homelessness, and worse. “Rich” is just barely making it. A million is meaningless, chump change that will disappear with one moderate accident.
Foreman and Ali, who both died rich, went on to become lifelong friends. In 1996, a film about their famous match won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and the two men walked on to the stage to thunderous applause from an audience on its feet. Ali had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1984, at the young age of 42, and here he can be seen holding it together, with Foreman walking protectively behind him. Ali’s daughter Hana has spoken of listening to a 1979 hour-long conversation between the two men that her father had taped and given her, where Foreman begs Ali to not do any more boxing exhibitions (Ali did two more anyway).
It is true that these were two men exploited by a brutal system that can only conceive of Black people as extractive labour in some form or the other, and yet writing that also erases who they were and everything they achieved, along with the complicated histories that are painted as either resistance or supplication. Ali’s famous words about the Viet Cong may not actually have been uttered by him, and it is possible that his politics around the war originated, at first, from a desire to not be drafted. But what matters is where he landed, as someone willing to take on a nation that was hell bent then, as it is now, on making sure that men like him stayed quiet and compliant. Once installed in the role of defiant man speaking truth to power, he never wavered. Foreman, in contrast, was painted as the opposite, for waving an American flag at the end of a bout that won him an Olympic medal in 1968, unaware that two other Black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos had just raised their fists in the Black Power salute, (standing with them was the white Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, who played a supportive part in the act of defiance). But as Bryan Armen Graham points out in a moving and nuanced piece, “the burden placed on Black athletes to symbolize a collective experience is often impossibly heavy,” and there is “the impossibility of being apolitical in a body already politicized by history.”
History passes through some bodies more than others, and leaves its marks differently—it is easy to mistake Foreman’s smiling visage and his perennial hustle as somehow less than Ali, unworthy of consideration. In 2016, he cheerfully announced he was going to vote for Donald Trump, and then took the opportunity to announce his next venture, shoes designed to get people walking: “I’m always selling something. I learnt to sell to ensure I’d never starve.”
Even in all that, we can see both the hustle and the truth—the Black man’s story of himself as someone born into poverty, whose life went through several ebbs flows before finally landing at some point of security. But the story is no less true because of it being presented in a very particular way. The same might be said about Ali, who never seemed to lose his sense of the trickery of it all, speaking cannily and politically at the same time, understanding the demands of being Muhammad Ali. If Foreman ever cared about the mockery to which he was frequently subjected—for becoming fat, for disappearing, for reappearing, for selling an appliance through an infomercial, for always selling something—he never showed it, and carried on sunnily, amassing enough to ensure he would never starve.
The hustle is always on, the rumbles disappear into the night, but the histories remain.
I rarely write about sports, and this is only my second essay on the subject: see also On Pelé.
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