Foreman builds new vision

This is Southill. One of those places. Less a postcard, more a news prop - Police question two men from the Southill area of the city following a disturbance in the Southill area of the city when a man was stabbed last night in the Southill area, etc, etc.

Home to 5,500 people, Southill rises up, grey roof upon grey roof, in that corner of Limerick where the streets are worried with speed ramps and broken glass and the walls are bruised with graffiti. They dropped a thousand houses here just over a quarter of a century ago and then walked away and left them to fend for themselves.

The Celtic Tiger is a fantastic rumour here. Outside it's Limerick, a city half-full of delicate people whose sensibilities have been scalded by Frank McCourt's lyrical depiction of their city's scabby past. What an impression to be giving! For them Southill is less a postcard, more a news prop. Leave it to fester.

"It's not such a bad place," says Gerry Rigney, the local sergeant, "but what badness is in it keeps the rest of the people down."

The Fifth Ward in Houston had badness in it and in the early '60s the badness was called George Foreman. If Foreman didn't carry a weapon it was because he was the weapon - his body, his size, his menace, his dark alienation from society was all he needed to carry through a career as a hoodlum.

This is Southill school. No shards of wealth have pierced Southill's heart. It shows here. Yet it has a heart and that shows, too. Foreman, a bald, barrel of a man wearing a waistcoat and a sunrise of a smile, is in the yard of St Kieran's Boys National School.

Kevin Haugh, the principal, looks a little like Kevin Kline, the actor, and his lean frame moves among the boys, marshalling them to order. "Boys, boys, boys," says Haugh loudly, but today it's a losing battle.

Miriam Dawson's Southside Marching Band are out in their red and black uniforms. Ten years or so she has had the band now. One rule. A pound-a-week subs and you are in. Miriam has listened to so many tuneless beginners, watched so many rhythm-less hoofers that she has earned her place in heaven already.

"When I look at you young people," says Foreman, "I think of myself. All we wanted to be was big tough thugs, big tough drug addicts. We wanted our first scar. I remember just like it was yesterday, my dear mother crying, worrying about what would become of me . . ."

As a preacher he is no pulpit thumper, no fire and brimstone merchant, no verbal tap dancer. He preaches like he boxed. Big and slow and direct. Only the act is filled with love. Foreman has a softness about him, an old-world courtliness which, when placed beside his glowering self of yesteryear, makes its own homily.

The kids have painted a mural of Big George on the wall of their school. It shows him at the peak of his power, looking chiselled and tough in front of an American flag.

"Don't none of you go writing on that now," he says, as he regards this picture of the man he used to be. "That's special."

He speaks in the yard until it begins to rain and then he moves upstairs to speak some more. On the way he grabs hold of the bars on a dividing gate - his Mike Tyson impersonation.

Upstairs he receives a hurley and a sliotar and more presentations, his great head shaking slowly with the warmth of the place, his lovely brown eyes watery. He plants a tree for peace. He is slow to leave.

This is Southill Boxing club. The next stop on a visit too lingering to be whistle-stop. This is Tony de Loughery's club, hewn out of love and aching need. Unpromising outside. Graffiti all over. Inside the suggestion of sweat is everywhere. It's spacious, but not lavish.

The big man climbs into the ring again. Father Joe Young speaks first. He talks about the emotion of this day, the day he dreamed of for a long time. Dreamed of and talked of until they were all convinced he was mad enough to be taken off to the big house.

"Tony de Loughery taught me a few things here. He taught me that boxing is about humility and it is about character. George Foreman is about those things, too, and having him here today, a man who has made the journey he has made, is proof that dreams can come true."

And George speaks again, elaborating his own story.

"We were poor," he says, "we were so poor we couldn't afford the second O in poor. We were POR. That's what we were."

The one-liner hook draws them in. He delivers the haymakers now.

"Stop fighting in the streets. Keep yourself clean, stay away from drugs. I'm 50-years-old today and I still believe I can do it all again if I want to, because I can dream. You can't dream if you are on drugs . . .

"I can see the future right here. If only you believe you can do anything that you want. Don't waste any time of your life. You can be the best of anything that you want to be. I am proof of that. Put away negativity. I made my dear mother proud of me in the end. I hope there is something you can get out of my life."

He is proof of it, walking proof of what a role model can offer. Heading into his late teens, he saw a TV ad with Johnny Unitas, the old Baltimore Colts quarterback, urging kids to join Lyndon Johnson's Job Corps initiative. He signed on next day and went to Grant's Pass, Oregon, and then on to California. In both places he continued to beat up what wouldn't move out of his way until he met his own Father Joe Young, a man called Doc Broadus, who told him he was big enough and more than ugly enough to box.

"He was with me when I won the Olympic gold medal in 1968, he was with me when I beat Joe Frazier in 1973. Unfortunately he was also with me when I got whupped by Ali, but he was with me, behind me all the way, he believed in me the way I believe in you."

This is Southill Church.

The choir is singing about friendship, the kids are bringing up gifts, Father Joe Young is about his altar. Big George is sitting to the left.

Is it about sport at all, this story? It surely is, it surely is. The principals, the teacher, the priest, the policeman all have a love of sport and a belief in its redemptive qualities. And they have a friendship in common, too, a friendship with the great American sportswriter George Kimball, who has brought his children one by one to this church to be baptised and whose visits are such a part of the lore of this place that you hear mention of him as if he were a native.

Through Kimball, they came to know Gerry Cooney, who took Father Joe in a limo to Atlantic City the night he fought Foreman, who in turn took time out to be with Kimball after the bout, which leads in the end to George being here today and Father Joe riding in a limo for the second time in his life.

Foreman knows that sport can redeem, too. He built his own youth and community centre in 1984 at 2202 Lone Oak in the Aldine section of north-east Houston. Today it is tooled out with a gym, a weights room, a basketball court, and pool tables. Foreman is a preacher and a born-again Christian, but the ethos of his centre is kid-orientated.

"The kids that come to my place, they have to be the best that they can, to know that they can be the best that they can. They can be the best boxers they can be, the best singers, the best writers. It don't matter what, but somebody has got to tell them to value themselves, to make themselves proud and to make their mothers proud.

"One day I made up my mind that I would do something with my life. One of the last conversations I had with her, she was saying stop fighting on the street. Just believe, just believe in yourself. Lift yourself up and you can do anything in the world. Make a promise today all you kids, promise that you'll make your mother proud, that you'll make her face shine."

And a couple of hundred mothers look at their crop-haired sons and bright-eyed daughters and there is space in the day for dreaming.

Father Joe is talking. He has a soccer club going in the parish and he has high hopes for it. One of his millenium projects is to get an academy going.

"It's about education and self-esteem as much as soccer," he says. "To get the academy going would be to get some courses that would keep them learning and it would bring a bit of pride and a bit of unity to the area. That's what we need. Big George being here has inspired me to go and knock down the doors."

Back, way back, Foreman was inspired by the strange dark presence of Sonny Liston. Foreman sparred with Liston at home in Houston early in his career, was his training partner in the late '60s. More than that, though, his silent, balefully-seething face was sculpted as a homage to Liston's badness.

In December, 1969, he shared a bill with Liston in the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas. Foreman did his business in two minutes, dispatching a tomato can. Liston, in the second-last fight of his career, lost to a tough nut called Leotis Martin. Foreman had watched Liston's chronic dissipation in training and, driving home that night with Liston, listening to him unreel the tortuous excuses, he vowed he wouldn't finish like that.

He didn't.

Yet his life seemed to be a thing of dark places and wrong turns. He waved the American flag in the ring in Mexico 1968 when black power salutes were the vogue. White America blessed him for it, but his radiant badness soon lost him that goodwill. He went to Zaire in 1974 and lost the support of the native population within a week. He lost his first wife Adrienne after he hit her.

It is difficult to describe today the sense of menace which he once radiated. Norman Mailer wrote at the time that he looked like a man who could kill 50 men with his bare hands and only stop then because he was tired. Frazier was literally lifted off his feet by the force of the blows which knocked him out within two rounds in Kingston in 1973, allowing Foreman to become world champion. Ken Norton, fighting Foreman 14 months later, froze with fear before feeling the cool canvas on his cheek in the second and final round.

After Ali beat him in the ring in 1974, Foreman found life as an ordinary Joe Schmoe harder than almost anything he had encountered.

"One day you're the toughest guy in the world," he said this week, "then you're the dope that got roped. Everything that you think about yourself is gone. You lose much more than a belt. The belt is the smallest thing that you lose."

1975 was a dead year. Later on he began trying to prove things again. Made a comeback in January 1976, a helter-skelter belter with Ron Lyle.

It all led to Jesus.

Five bouts after Lyle, he was fighting the respected heavyweight Jimmy Young in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He lost in 12 and collapsed afterwards, dehydrated and convinced he was dying.

Those around him are convinced it was the lack of fluids and the beating, but Foreman is happy that he saw God. With a click of the divine fingers, he was a changed man. He began telling people in Houston about his experience and didn't stop telling them. He didn't box for another nine years until he re-emerged in his happy, king-of-the-cheeseburgers incarnation.

He cleared his life of clutter, cutting down on possessions, retaining a house in the perfectly-named Humble, Texas, and a ranch in Marshall, Texas. He banished TV (although he has since had his own sitcom and is an omnipresent face in US advertising) from his life, so he could get time to think and talk.

He had a little time to think and a little time to talk in Southill. His eyes welled up and he cried. He spoke about his mother who passed away in December and he looked into the faces of seven-year-olds and six-year-olds and told them to be like him, to dream and not to stop.

This is private. Yet some moments and deeds deserve trespass.

Later, much later, in a quiet hotel in Adare, Foreman sits with Fr Joe Young, JP McManus, Eamonn Coughlan, and some guests. The Southill people are at a neighbouring table and the talk wafting over the plates is about sport and little else.

When dinner ends, Fr Joe Young is keen to pay his nightly visit to his hospitalised mother. At the end of a draining day, when Foreman has spoken so frequently and so emotionally of his own mother, it seems like the perfect end.

"I'm going, George," says Joe. "I'm going, too," says George, "but come to my room first."

Upstairs in the room, Foreman has all the gifts of the day packed and gone for shipping, except for a prayer which Fr Joe has given him. The prayer is on the bed.

"I want to right three cheques," says George, "but I want to write them with my wife's pen."

The big man, as emotional now as Fr Joe Young, moves about for the pen and then writes three times.

$20,000 for the band. $20,000 for the boxing club. $20,000 for the football club.

"Let's pray for each other, Joe, and let's stay in touch," said George, and threw the arms which have done so much damage and so much good around Fr Joe Young.

It was two days later, up visiting his mother again, that Father Joe saw the day and its ending from a distance. The tears came flooding. "I knew he was a big man and he could knock me down, but to knock me down with such emotion, ah stop."

And there is a catch in his voice again.