Not just a hamburger cooker

Requiem for a Heavyweight -- redux

How my world has changed…

Exactly when did The Champ become a low-priced kitchen appliance?

George Foreman died last week. Some of us remember him as two-time world heavyweight champ. The guy who did a KO on Joe Frazier, who stood toe-to-toe with Muhammed Ali and made Zaire’s jungle rumble in their 1974 title bout, and who, at 45 years and 299 days in 1994, came back to win the title a second time.

That’s who some of us remember. The boxer whose punches could turn strong men to hamburger; not the face on the box the hamburger grill came in.

Some of us remember when the heavyweight champ was about the most famous man in the world. When the world held its breath as the contenders stepped into the ring. When boxing and baseball ruled the sports pages.

Ours was a different country then.

Some of my earliest memories echo with the sounds of the ring. Me, Dad, and a big bowl of popcorn, settled on the sofa for the Friday Night Fights – eager to watch grown men have at it on a snowy, black and white screen. America was a nation long enamored of the “sweet science,” the spectacle of two superbly fit athletes battering each other into brain damage in pursuit of glory and the big payday. It was a brawling sport that reflected the ethos of a brawling country.

And make no mistake, there was a deep-rooted ethos to brawling, to violence in that America.

For an American boy, learning to fight was as much part of growing up as learning to tie your shoes. Backyard dust-ups, playground scraps, bus stop shoving matches – that’s how growing boys were expected to resolve minor and not-so-minor differences. “Put ‘em up!” was the legitimate and expected response to affront and insult, real or imagined, and “takin’ it like a man,” could earn more respect than coming out the victor.

For generations, that physicality was carried through adolescence into adulthood. In a world where a man’s physical strength was often the measure of his value on the job and status in the community, many barroom disagreements were either settled in the street out front or in the alley out back. So long as it was a fair fight, it was nobody else’s business.

The fair fight…that was the American way. The rules were spelled out in every frame of filmed fisticuffs old-time Hollywood produced. Pick on somebody your own size. No hitting below the belt. Keep it clean. When it’s over, it’s over…

Boxing, with its ring, ref, and rules was the paradigm for a fair fight.

But it seems, over the last fifty years, America has lost its taste for the fair fight.

Some folks will claim we’ve lost our tolerance for personal violence. Boys who fight on the playground are branded bullies and medicated to control their aggressive impulses. Boxing’s bloodied face and battered brains have become more than our social sensibilities can bear. Life is safer, saner, better than that now. Or so they say.

I don’t buy it. Look around…there’s plenty of fight, just damn little fair.

Kids may not punch each other on the playground…they bring AR15s to school instead. The boxing ring has been replaced by the cage match, the Marquis of Queensbury by anything goes. One man, one vote gives way to Elon Musk’s $270 million “campaign contribution.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, sitting behind Jack Kennedy’s desk.

Imagine him writing “Profiles in Courage.”

Yeah, we could use some “great” again

Great as in Jack Johnson. Joe Louis. Muhammed Ali. George Foreman. Real champs who fought real fights … fair fights in the ring, not so fair in real life. Heroes to the country I grew up in, a far different country from the one I live in now.