Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Biographies of heavyweight boxing champions have the potential to attract both a general and an academic readership. Andrew R. M. Smith's accessible prose and narrative pace achieve this difficult balance, and his study of George Foreman provides important perspective in a market saturated by studies of Muhammad Ali. Foreman emerges from this biography as a complex individual who has astutely modeled his persona over the last [End Page 358] fifty years to be at times foreboding and inviting, secretive and outgoing. Few performers, in any medium, have so successfully navigated popular culture in so many forms over so many decades.

Foreman consciously steered his image away from political and racial activism, and in Smith's telling, this was both a strategic choice and a personal preference. During the fraught 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the eighteen-year-old heavyweight gold medalist waved an America flag in the ring a few weeks after the Black Power protest by sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their gloved fists in the air. Foreman's career also diverged markedly and purposefully from his fellow Texan, Jack Johnson, whose troubled years as heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915 have yielded several biographies, biopics, a jazz album, and a posthumous presidential pardon. While politics and sport have continued to inflect each other, Foreman focused on boxing, evangelism, fatherhood, and selling consumer products.

Smith traces Foreman from his infamous years as a high school dropout and street tough to his enrollment in the Jobs Corps, part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. This program took Foreman from his impoverished home in Houston's Fifth Ward to remedial education and job training in rural Oregon. Smith provides a compelling snapshot of the context in which thousands of African American Texans migrated from rural to urban areas in the South and Southwest after World War II: "This was not a romance. It was the reality of share-croppers trying to escape poverty in postwar America, sometimes only to discover another form of it in a different environment" (15). Though the narrative moves quickly in chronological fashion, there are important insights into Foreman's peripatetic life in boxing and beyond. For example, Foreman is first attracted to prizefighting when, as a youth, he visits a prison and admires the bearing and physique of a convict known simply as "the boxer."

At one early peak of his notoriety in the early to mid-1970s, Foreman cast himself as the patriotic alternative to Muhammad Ali. He sought to highlight the theatrical dissonance between himself, as the Christian "Fighting Corpsman" who waved the American flag, and Ali, the dissident Black Muslim. Unusual for a champion boxer, Foreman served as his own manager for most of his career, and, because of this choice, he was able to avoid much of the notorious corruption that contributed to eroding the popularity of boxing within U.S. culture.

Smith traces Foreman's career as a Christian evangelist in the interlude between his championships (and after a post-defeat locker room conversion in Puerto Rico), before his unlikely return to the ring and brief recapture of the heavyweight title. Foreman then produced yet another public persona, this time as the garrulous pitchman for the George Foreman Grill—an astute venture into celebrity endorsement that yielded far greater wealth than did his career in the ring. [End Page 359]

Like George Foreman, Smith steers away from the more contentious ground of political and racial conflict of the late 1960s and 1970s. This choice is both rewarding and frustrating for the reader. However, it does provide necessary complexity and nuance to a period dominated by polarizing cultural icons.