Quote:
Originally Posted by Déjà Bru
According to the obit that I read, that's exactly how he won the heavyweight championship in 1994 at age 45.
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The bout is out there to watch… basically Foreman was slow and plodding but covered up decently well and against Moore he had a thing going where he’d land a jab that was more for camouflage purposes than it was for punching power on its own. Then the right came in, behind it, while the jab was still in your face, obscuring your vision. He set up that little trap several times and that last time Moorer just absolutely fell for it, didn’t see the 2 until he was on the floor. It’s kind of too bad in many ways because now Moorer will always be remembered for that punch where just the fight before Teddy Atlas gave him maybe the most iconic between-rounds pep talk in boxing history (“You’re blowing it! You’re blowing it and you’re gonna cry tomorrow. You’re gonna cry tomorrow because this guy is just gonna lose to the next guy”).
Anyway, Foreman was an interesting guy. Boxing is a sport people get into the way other people join the Army: to escape rather than because of natural abilities. Foreman, like many - I’d say most top boxers - was rough around the edges but had he come up in practically any other era his first run would have been as a pretty longtime heavyweight champion. He did have incredible punching power in his first run - see the Frazier fight - but he was absolutely taken apart by Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle, like that was an all-time master class in ring psychology. He left the sport after that for 15 years and while I don’t think there was like a night-and-day switch flipped with his personality - he was neither as big of a jerk as he was portrayed in the 70s nor quite the affable character portrayed in the 90s - he was definitely more appreciative of what he’d done and where he was when he came back.