George Foreman says his mother would have loved to see him become a preacher.
The two-time world heavyweight champion, 75, is an ordained minister and despite his brilliant career in the ring, he says his late mother, Nancy, who died aged 78 in 1998, would have respected his church work far more than his boxing.
“If you don’t have hope you have nothing. It’s really as simple as that … or having the faith in God and trusting myself to do good things and be a pure person, is ultimately the type of salvation I’ve been looking for,” he told the latest edition of Sorted magazine.
“My mother would have approved of [my ministry work] in a way she never did my boxing. It’s funny – I spent so many years and tried as hard as I could to stop her coming at me with all those words and sayings her generation would use when being preach.
“You know, all that, ‘Oh Lord’, ‘Oh, God,’ and all that prayer stuff. Yet now I look at myself and I am doing exactly the same! Perhaps she was right all along.”
George, who has made millions from his range of grills, added losing to Muhammad Ali in their 1974 Rumble in the Jungle clash in Zaire still haunts him.
“That was the most shattering moment of my life. I’d lost the thing I cherished most – my title – and it felt like such a long way back. You don’t know how many times I fought that fight in my dreams and woke up in the night thinking, ‘I’m going to win’. And I didn’t. I lost. And it killed me,” he said.
George now preaches at The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in his hometown of Houston, Texas.
“I make sure I get all my kinds in, and local kids, and people I want to help and guide. We do services, Sunday School – we outreach wherever we can. It’s a wonderful thing,” he said about his congregations.
“To them all, I am George Foreman the preacher, not George Foreman the heavyweight champion of the world! That’s who I am now,” he added.
