In 1987, following an unprecedented 10-year absence from the ring, former heavyweight champion George Foreman returned to professional boxing with one goal: to recapture the title he had lost 14 years earlier to Muhammad Ali.

Despite Foreman’s newfound easygoing manner and upbeat attitude, George-bashing quickly became the No. 1 pastime among sportswriters.

Chiding him as too old, too fat and too slow to keep up with the new generation of boxers, most pundits took umbrage at the bald, grinning, chunky Foreman’s reemergence on the boxing scene. And what of his pledge to once again wear the champion’s belt? With not-so-thinly veiled references to Foreman’s increasing girth most analysts’ only response was “fat chance.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to Foreman’s assured humiliation. He started winning. Then he kept on winning. By 1991 Foreman had won 24 straight bouts, 23 of them by knockout. Even after losing a tough 12-round decision in a 1991 championship bout with Evander Holyfield, Foreman persevered to gain another shot at the title. In 1994, at the long-over-the-hill age of 45, George Foreman knocked out then-titleholder Michael Moorer to become, once again, heavyweight champion of the world.

Today, some of the same experts who once decried Foreman’s return laud him as a hero for the fortysomething set – a man who defied the odds, the aging process and all the fitness experts, eating his way up a mountain of cheeseburgers to find redemption and championship winnings at the top.

That image certainly meshes with Foreman’s public persona, his self-deprecating humor and jokes about his opponents. But behind all the bluster and self-promotion lies the true George Foreman, a man whose relaxed style belies a life spent battling demons, pushing himself to the edge and overcoming obstacles through renewal.

Foreman’s story began in the ghetto of Houston’s notorious Fifth Ward, also known as the Bloody Fifth. There he grew up the fifth of seven children being raised by a single mother, often on as little as $26 a week. As a teenager, Foreman fit the profile of a typical inner city tough, with few marketable skills and even fewer prospects.

Dropping out of school in the 10th grade, young George was soon drinking excessively, mugging pedestrians and brawling with anyone who looked at him sideways. According to brother Roy, George’s size was so intimidating that he never even bothered to carry a weapon. Foreman’s heroes reflected this violent, dead-end lifestyle.

“I thought a hero was a guy who came back from prison,” Foreman told Esquire magazine, “with a scar down his face, maybe killed a guy once. Can you imagine my goal was to have a scar down my cheek?” Foreman even took to wearing a Band-Aid on his cheek until the day when he could uncover a real scar of his own.

Perhaps his life of crime could have gone on forever except for one fateful day after a mugging, Foreman sought refuge from the police and their pursuit dogs in the mud beneath a house. He remained in the cold and dark down in the mud for hours listening to the dogs barking and imagining himself cowering thus for the rest of his life. At that moment something snapped in Foreman. He saw a life going nowhere, a life of hiding and fear. This experience, he says, forced him to realize that he had become a common criminal. If he didn’t change his life for the better, he realized, he would soon be in prison or dead.

Foreman’s saving grace came in the Job Corps, a program created under President Lyndon Johnson to help young people develop job skills.

There he met Doc Broadus, who took George’s natural talent for pummeling people and honed it into a true boxing proficiency. By 1968 Foreman had risen through the amateur ranks to win the right to represent the United States at heavyweight in the Mexico City Olympics. He then shocked the entire boxing world by besting all en route to winning the gold medal.

Foreman’s stunning victory was overshadowed by politics. While sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos held their fists aloft in the black power symbol as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, Foreman instead celebrated his victory by waving a small American flag at the crowd. He says the gesture was taken to mean something he had never intended.

“When I was jumping up and down, waving that little American flag,” he said, “they thought I was rejecting the climate there. I wasn’t. For the first time, I had an identity. I belonged to a country.”

Upon turning professional, Foreman used his rage, propensity for brawling and devastating knockout punch to plow through opponents. By 1973 he gained a title shot, against Smokin’ Joe Frazier in Jamaica. In just two rounds Frazier was out cold, lifted off his feet and onto the mat by a punishing Foreman uppercut. Despite the fight’s quick result, and contrary to appearances, Foreman says that entering the ring he was terrified of Frazier.

“I’d seen him fight Buster Mathis like a Pac Man,” Foreman said. “I’d seen him stay on Ali’s chest like a conqueror. Boxers see things like that. Man, I just wanted to get out of there alive. Going into the ring, my knees shook like I was in an earthquake. I couldn’t stop them. I threw all that sick fear at Frazier.”

Foreman’s title was short-lived, however. The following year, Ali bounced around the ring with his so-called rope-a-dope strategy, avoided Foreman’s powerful punches and eventually put Foreman to the canvas in the eighth round. The loss sent Foreman into a downward spiral of anger, brooding and paranoia that bottomed out after a tough loss to Jimmy Young in Puerto Rico.

In the locker room after the fight, Foreman faced at once the most terrifying and emancipating experience of his life. He claims he saw blood oozing out of his forehead, hands and feet and that, as he puts it, “Jesus came alive in me. I literally died. All I saw was hopelessness under my feet, over my head total darkness. There was the smell of death. It still makes me nervous to think about it.”

That fight and his subsequent conversion experience occurred in 1977. Immediately following that night Foreman decided to dedicate his life to God. He returned to Houston, first as a lay street preacher, then later as an ordained nondenominational minister.

Recalling his troubled youth, Foreman used his substantial influence, name recognition and financial wherewithal to develop the George Foreman Youth and Community Center as a magnet for Houston’s troubled kids. Ironically, it was just this newfound dedication to the community and its kids that drove Foreman back to boxing. Realizing that he could make more money for the center in the ring than by doing hundreds of personal appearances, Foreman agreed to once again strap on the gloves and stage the unlikeliest comeback in boxing history.

Unlike other returning champions, however, Foreman set his own agenda and pace.

“I knew it would take fights over a long period of time to do it right,” Foreman told The New York Times. “I’d seen others like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fail in their comebacks because they were looking for overnight success. I treated myself like a young man, a prospect.”

He called this process “puddle-hopping” – fighting light competition in such far-flung boxing meccas as Sacramento, Orlando and Anchorage, all the while building to a title shot against then-champ Mike Tyson. While the sportswriters denigrated Foreman’s competitors as palookas, he ignored the naysayers and continued ballyhooing his barnstorming tour, fighting about once every six weeks. Most important, palookas or not, Foreman kept delivering knockout punches. It seems he was fighting for a greater cause that gave his punch extra power.

He also developed an ingenious method for handling the critics. Rather than trying to combat their slurs on his weight, age and opponents, Foreman started cracking jokes at his own expense. To criticism of the caliber of his opponents Foreman would reply, “There are some who claim I don’t fight a guy unless he’s on a respirator. That’s a lie. He has to be at least eight days off the respirator.”

On his age and weight Foreman was equally candid. “I should be carrying a cane,” he quipped. “My training camp is Baskin Robbins. But if Tyson wins, it’s only Lamborghinis and big houses for himself. Means nothing. If I win, every man over 40 can grab his Geritol and have a toast.”

Not only did George win over the critics with this new attitude, he also began winning over fans in droves. With each knockout he became a more omnipresent advocate for the middle-aged. With a Bible in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other he would declare, “Forty is no death sentence. Age is only a problem if you make it one.”

Rather than taking criticism to heart, George embraced it. If people wanted to poke fun at a man who named his sons George Jr., George III, George IV and George V, that was fine with George Sr. Foreman took advantage of the publicity, appearing with all four sons in a TV commercial for Doritos.

Taken together, the barnstorming, bluster and humor all served one unifying purpose: to bring public attention back to George Foreman. Understanding that the only bad publicity is no publicity, Foreman did whatever he felt was necessary to make a spectacle of himself.

“When I was a little boy,” he explains in his autobiography By George (Villard Books, hardcover, $23), “street cleaners came by the house. Nobody paid attention. But let that fire truck come by. They all rushed out, chased it in pajamas, women with hair rollers. Well, I’m a fire truck. I’m happening. You’re all going to be chasing me because you know there’s a fire ahead of me somewhere.”

But Foreman knew the fire truck would have to do more than swap jokes with the media and spout positive aphorisms to regain the title. Contrary to the Burger King/Baskin Robbins public persona, Foreman dropped from his prereturn weight of 315 pounds to a more svelte 250 on a diet of fruits, vegetables, pasta, chicken and only the occasional treat.

“If I’ve been training for five straight weeks, and I’m starting to get grouchy, I’ll go for the ice cream,” he says. “Or if I feel like eating five cheeseburgers, I’ll eat five cheeseburgers. I live by my cravings. Whenever I crave something, I know I should have that. But I use it as a training technique – as a reward.”

Compared to Evander Holyfield’s carefully sculpted physique, aesthetically speaking, Foreman’s body-in-the-round style still gives weight trainers shivers. Even today he tips the scales at well over his preretirement 217-pound mark. Not a problem, he tells anyone who will listen.

“What you have to do to get those designer bodies will get you killed,” he argues in By George. “You’ve got to have a body built for boxing, built for fighting and surviving, and I’ve got that body. There’s safety in being bigger. I’m a bigger man and other guys have to get out of my way. You ever notice how the guys you see lying flat on their back and knocked out – the guys you have to pump back to life – all have ripples down their stomach? Boxing is physical fitness, not beauty. And I’m the most physically fit guy on the scene.”

Foreman may be right. What he lacks in muscle tone he more than compensates for in endurance. His self-constructed workout regimen is the stuff of legends. For 21/2 hours, Foreman will run behind a pickup truck loaded with a heavy punching bag. While running he intermittently weaves, jabs, punches and ducks, simulating action in the ring. Ten miles down the road he fits himself into a harness and drags the truck back for half a mile. His gym workouts are similarly intense. For an hour solid he will throw lefts at a punching bag then, at the sound of a timer, switch to throwing rights for another hour. With no rest in between, Foreman frequently spars with a variety of opponents, often for as many as 25 rounds. Add some serious weight training, wood chopping and jumping rope until the wee hours into the mix and in a nutshell you’ve got the George Foreman workout program.

Only when he talks about his training does Foreman mention the concessions he has made to age. Rather than admit deficiencies, however, the ever-upbeat George says he merely redoubles his efforts.

“I’ve had to train twice as hard as I did when I was young,” he allows. “I don’t have all the so-called youth to depend on, so now I depend on skill and conditioning. I knew coming back that if I got knocked down in the ring, the referees in their kindness and compassion would say, ‘Stop!’ So my legs need to be much stronger than they were when I was young. That’s why no one knocks me down.”

Even if the redoubtable George had failed in his quest to regain the championship, by any other yardstick he has become an unqualified success. No longer the distant, angry thug the fans loved to hate, Foreman has been reborn in every way. Instead of taking out his pent-up aggression and rage on anyone who dared get in his way, the new George Foreman says he is full of love for everyone. And the public loves him back.

Since his triumphant return to the spotlight, Foreman has starred in the eponymous situation comedy George, announced fights at ringside for HBO, written a bestselling autobiography and endorsed more products than anyone this side of Bill Cosby. Along the way Foreman has developed his own theory about what it takes to succeed in sales, and why people find him so convincing.

“I learned something early in life,” he told The Washington Post. “If you sell, you’ll never starve. In any other profession, you can find yourself out on the street, saying, ‘They don’t want me anymore.’ But if you learn the art of selling, you will never go hungry.”

“In time,” he says in his autobiography, “I think I became the best salesman around, not because I’m a better actor, but because I’m not. What I do is fall in love with every product I sell. If I can’t fall in love with it I don’t sell it.” Foreman also says that people know when you make claims you don’t personally believe. Honesty, says Foreman, sells. “Nobody seems to doubt that the George Foreman they see on the screen is the real George Foreman. Everyone thinks they know me. They do,” says the man who has broken myth after myth in a legendary boxing career.

Looking ahead, no one, perhaps including George himself, knows exactly what the future will hold for George Foreman. Since winning the title he has fought one defense, winning a 12-round decision over Germany’s Axel Schultz. But rather than fight Schultz again, Foreman has agreed to give up the title, possibly to set up a rematch with Michael Moorer. And of course, hanging over every boxing decision Foreman makes is the omnipresent question of retirement. When asked about hanging up the gloves again he usually replies with the quintessential George Foreman humor: “The usual retirement age is 65,” he says, “but I’m not going beyond 63. I thought about 65, but that’s just too long. I’d say 63.”