Boxing Gives Him Fat Chance

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. —  You can do lots of things at the age of 40 or 42. You can play golf. You can play cards. You can jog, dance, ride a horse, even drive a race car. You can sail a ship, fly a plane. You can even swim a channel, hunt a lion, date a chorus girl.

But can you climb into the ring with a 28-year-old bull of a man who happens to be the heavyweight champion of the world?

Even if you can, should you?

Tennis can be played over the age of 40. So can baseball.

But somebody isn’t trying to kill you. That’s what boxing boils down to. The intent is basically homicidal.

The Pollyannas tell us age is all in the mind. It isn’t. It’s there, too, but it’s all in the legs, the eyesight, the heart, lungs and liver. The memory.

Is George Foreman deluding himself--or is he just deluding us? Does he know that he can’t give 15 years of age and about 50 pounds of blubber to a guy whose eyesight is 20/20, pulse rate 40 and blood pressure about that of a sleeping kitten, and have some chance of surviving the bell for the fifth round?

The Rev. George Foreman is a remarkable specimen. Part-preacher, part-pug, he has become the darling of the press corps assembled here for his title fight tonight against heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield. You’d think he were covering the fight instead of starring in it. Holyfield is just The Opponent. He holds the title but not the interest. Even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

The week before a big fight, your average pug is as unavailable to the media as Greta Garbo. Usually you can’t even get them to hold still for a news conference. Mike Tyson always puts his head in his hands and goes to sleep at his.

George Foreman acts as if he is running for office. They don’t have to bring the media to him, he comes to the media. Most pugs go about their workouts grimly. Foreman slaps his sparring partners around, then holds court for the assembled spectators. “How many people here over 40? How many want to live to be over 40? I’m proof our world is in good shape. I got nine children, but I’m here having the time of my life. I’m smelling the roses, hearing the music, not to mention eating the food.”

In the pressroom, George fills every notebook. Reporters come at him in relays with pencils, microphones, cameras, cassettes. He outlasts them all. When they leave, he holds up his hands in mock protest. When he leaves, he turns to one: “You’re the only one who won’t leave. I got to go before you do,” he says. He seems genuinely regretful. He is a combination of the Jolly Green Giant and a department store Santa Claus.

George is expansive, cooperative. He deflects hostile questions with a smile and a joke. Does his weight--257 pounds--bother him? he is asked. George smiles and says: “I wanted to weigh as much as Primo Carnera--265. He weighed the most of any heavyweight champion who ever lived. I wanted to weigh more. I thought, ‘Shoot! I’m just a shadow!’ ”

He smiles, he laughs. He fills his glass by the quartful from an ever-present bottle of imported water. You would think he was getting ready for a cruise, not a fight. Fighters are supposed to lock themselves in a room and get mad at the world 48 hours before a bout.

Foreman acts more as if he were going to a prom. Is he apprehensive at all? Does he have any fear before a fight? George laughs. “I respect a man, I don’t fear him,” he says. “My first fight, it was against an experienced opponent, and he made me look bad. I didn’t want to fight any more, so I said I lost my shoes. But I wasn’t in fear of my opponent, I was in fear of humiliation. The most fear I ever had was trying to preach on a street corner in Shreveport(, La.). I got stage fright. The sound of my own voice scared me.”

It doesn’t anymore. “I know,” agrees George, “when you’re preachin’ and you get ready to have a service, you have to go out and round up the congregation. Otherwise, you’re not preachin’ if no one’s listening. You got to learn to talk in this life. Or else the world (will) go right by you and not know you’re there. Dog don’t bark, he don’t eat. You get older, you get wiser. You’re the heavyweight champ, you don’t learn nothin’. Who’s gonna admonish you? Teach you? Always tell you how wonderful you are? Don’t do a man no good. You got to get about to living. I was the champion of the world, and in about six months I got my first divorce, my friends start suing me. I got the championship of the world, but all I won was trouble.”

The fight mob calls it “a puncher’s chance.” English translation: No chance at all. Not the way to bet. A guy with a lottery ticket has a puncher’s chance.

It’s all George Foreman has. At least in the minds of the experts. It means he can’t win the decision. It means you’re outclassed. It really means you’re bucking into a pat hand, house odds, playing on short money and trying to fill a straight in the middle on the last card.

That’s not easy to do after 40, either. The punch may be the last to go, but after 40, it’s looking for the door.