CRAWFORD | Talking life, Louisville and his new biopic with legendary champ George Foreman

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The answer is yes. For any aspiring sports reporters, that's what you tell them if you're ever asked: Do you want to interview a heavyweight champion of the world.

I'm long since over the sport of boxing, I'm sad to report. I struggle with the notion of being part of its promotion. I've seen the damage it can cause, and no amount of entertainment is worth that.

And yet some of the most fascinating people in all of sports have been boxers. I don't need to invoke the name of Muhammad Ali. One of the more intriguing afternoons I have spent in this profession was in the Presidential Suite in The Galt House, where Mike Tyson (flanked by his pigeons) was talking about life and boxing before a fight in Louisville.

So when the call came, "Would you like to interview George Foreman via Zoom?" as part of a press junket for the upcoming movie: "Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World," the answer was a resounding, "yes."

It's about time that Foreman's life came to the big screen. It's a life that a new generation needs to know about, and that my generation needs to remember.

Fairly quickly into the Foreman biopic, Foreman's mother, played by Sonja Sohn (Kima Greggs, The Wire), breaks a hamburger into four pieces to split among her children for dinner. Yes, childhood poverty is an old trope. It's also a reality. It certainly was for Foreman, who wandered around angrily until he went into the Job Corps, a government program designed to give young people vocational training.

He went to learn carpentry and bricklaying. He did, but he also met Charles "Doc" Broadus (played in the film by Forest Whitaker), who introduced him to boxing, and trained him to become a champion.

I wondered how Foreman felt, watching his life unfold on the big screen. He said he approached the project with some nervousness. It doesn't pull many punches. There's a scene in which Foreman visits his first ex-wife and apologizes for his treatment of her. The struggles and failures are on full display.

"It's not easy, because you go through life trying to be a celebrity to hide everything in your life," he said. "Big fence, gates around your house, tinted glass when you get in your car, dark glasses. No one wants to reveal that much about their life. When I saw it in the movie, for a moment I was tense and afraid, especially watching it with my family. But then, after all, in the end of the day, it became a thrill. ... I tried to hide my life. But then because of the movie and the script, I opened up a lot and I think it's for the best. All of us can see where it looks like there is no hope, there's a lot of hope. All you've got to do is open your eyes a little wider. There's hope."

The hope of George Foreman is this: At the top of his game, Olympic gold medalist, heavyweight champion of the world, he got lost in the trappings of fame and wealth. He was humbled in a loss to Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle. He went into a massive depression. After a subsequent fight, he suffered a near death experience and when he came to, he said he had seen Jesus, and determined that he would spend the rest of his life preaching.

He did stop fighting for a decade, serving as a minister and working with youth in Houston. But he nearly went bankrupt. The film depicts the lights being turned out in his youth center for failure to pay an electric bill.

So he did what he knew how to do. He got back into the ring. Overweight, he had to lose 75 pounds. Even so, he wasn't the same figure he had been.

"The last time they saw me, I looked like Superman," Foreman, played by Khris Davis, said before his return to the ring. (Davis had to gain 50 pounds to depict the older Foreman.)

"Now you look like the Michelin Man," Whitaker's character answers back.

Foreman fought and beat a succession of lesser opponents until he got a championship shot at Evander Holifield. That fight brought him back to great wealth, but he was badly beaten. His wife, Mary Joan, had told him of a vision that he would become heavyweight champion again, so he pressed on, and at age 45, knocked out 26-year-old Michael Moorer to regain the championship in one of the great comebacks in the history of sport.

Today, as many people know him for his business success, perhaps, as his boxing. Say "George Foreman," and many are likely to bring up the George Foreman Grill (only a footnote in the movie). That certainly was the case for the actor who played him. Not long ago, Foreman wrapped up a stint on the show, "The Masked Singer."

From a kid who seemed to be headed nowhere to fantastic achievements in sports and the ministry, and business, I asked foreman what accounted for the success he found in such varied fields.

"I've got to be honest," he said. "It's people in my life. That first trainer that Forest Whitaker played in the movie, he never gave up on me. He always said, 'Come on, George, you can do it.' I didn't want to be a boxer. He wanted me to be a boxer. And then later on in life, when I made my comeback, my wife having visions. She had enough vision to drop me off 17 miles from home and said, 'I'll see you when you get there.' And it's because of what people but the people believed in me. That's what did it."

I told Foreman that because I'm from Louisville, I couldn't let him go without a question about Ali.

"Phooey, phooey, phooey!" he said playfully, before I could even finish the question.

"Louisville, Kentucky," Foreman said. "That was a time when I was in the ring with Muhammad Ali. I tried to get that name out of my mind. What a storm that had come out of that that state of Muhammed Ali. I was devastated when I lost the title. But later on when I found religion and found my peace, I started to make contact with him. He became my most beloved friend of all time. What friends we became."

The two men talked weekly, sometimes daily, late into Ali's life. In other interviews, Foreman credited Ali with his decision to return to boxing.

Regardless, Foreman's life stands as a testament to two things that are most important today: hope and work.

George Tillman Jr., the film's director, said one of the gifts in filming was the 6-week break that the crew took between shooting the scenes in Foreman's early life and success and his second and subsequent chapters. They took the break to allow Khris Davis, who plays Foreman, the chance to gain weight to play "Big George."

Tillman also said he came away with a new appreciation for the man.

"Losing the heavyweight championship, and then losing your money -- these are some events in scripts that people will just make up just for a plot purposes," Tillman said. "But this is all real. So I have much respect that he stayed focused and he stayed on his honesty and his thoughts of what he wanted himself to be."

Foreman is still a minister, still works with youth in Houston, Texas. I noted the difficult days Louisville has seen recently, and asked him what his message is for youth today.

"The most important thing, something I didn't have as a young boy, I didn't have hope," Foreman said. "But we have a lot of hope now. When we wake up in the morning, don't be afraid to hope for the best. And the best is just around the corner from us. Don't give up hope."

If any sports life brings power to those words, it's the life of Foreman. "Big George Foreman" opens in theaters nationwide on April 28.

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