George Foreman Biography

George Foreman was a boxing champion and, later in life, an entrepreneur known for selling an electric grill on TV.

A gold medalist in the 1968 Olympics, Foreman was young, lean and angry when he beat Joe Frazier for the world heavyweight boxing championship in 1973.

The next year he lost the title to Muhammad Ali in an epic bout in Zaire called the “Rumble in the Jungle.”

Foreman dropped from the public eye for years and devoted himself to his religious ministry, but in the 1990s he returned to the ring transformed into a rotund, jovial fighter who somehow beat Michael Moorer in 1994 to regain the heavyweight crown at age 45.

His subsequent self-mocking commercials for hamburgers and mufflers made him even more famous. Foreman retired again after a 1997 loss to Shannon Briggs, but his fame was intact: he made millions as a TV pitchman for a low-fat cooking gadget called the George Foreman Grill.