Don’t confuse cuddly pitch man George with 1970s George. By his own account, Foreman was a ghetto-raised mugger and all-around cruel dude as a younger man. His idol was Jim Brown, a notorious wife-beater. His sparring partner was Sonny Liston, another mean guy who famously hung out with thugs and mobsters. The allegations are plenty believable.
50 year old allegations.
His idol was Jim Brown, a notorious wife-beater. His sparring partner was Sonny Liston, another mean guy who famously hung out with thugs and mobsters.
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So he’s guilty because people he associated with were guilty. That is not logical.
Don’t confuse cuddly pitch man George with 1970s George. By his own account, Foreman was a ghetto-raised mugger and all-around cruel dude as a younger man. His idol was Jim Brown, a notorious wife-beater. His sparring partner was Sonny Liston, another mean guy who famously hung out with thugs and mobsters. The allegations are plenty believable.
Idolizing a man has nothing to do with how he acted in Private. MANY people idolized him. Liston was a boxer, ALL boxers hang out with thugs(boxers) and mobsters. Cassius Clay hung out with Bundini Brown, the Black Muslims, and Calypso Louie. The Nation of Islam was very likely to have killed Malcolm X . In the boxing world, organized crime is thickly represented.
60-year-old allegations are inherently not credible. We cannot have a society where somebody can be accused of something that long after the fact, making them unable to defend themselves, and give those accusations any credibility.
I would quibble on one point - Foreman was Sonny Liston's sparring partner. Their careers were on different trajectories but at the time when Foreman was sparring with Liston, Liston was still a main-event fighter while Foreman had not yet broken into that level. Foreman admitted that Liston roughed him up a lot in those sparring sessions.
Which changed with his crisis conversion in In March 1977,
minutes after he was pummeled into defeat by the heavyweight Jimmy Young, and it came in the most frightening way. “In the dressing room, I was walking back and forth to cool off,” he told The Houston Chronicle. “Then in a split second, I was fighting for my life.” Foreman’s mind filled with battling thoughts: preening pride versus death and panic. “I kept thinking, You believe in God; why are you afraid to die?” Foreman said. “But I really didn’t believe.”
Foreman bargained, offering to devote his boxing prize money to charity. “I don’t want your money,” Foreman heard a voice say. “I want you.” Instantly he found himself cast into the bleakest darkness he had experienced. “It was the saddest, most horrible place I had ever seen,” he said. Then a “giant hand” plucked him into consciousness. Foreman found himself on a locker room table, surrounded by friends and staff members. He felt as if he were physically filled with the presence of a dying Christ. He felt his forehead bleed, punctured by a crown of thorns; his wrists, he believed, had been pierced by nails of the cross. “I knew that Jesus Christ was coming alive in me,” Foreman said. “I ran into the shower and turned on the water and — hallelujah! — I was born again. I kissed everybody in the dressing room and told them I loved them. - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/sports/the-conversion-of-george-foreman-packing-a-wallop-in-the-pulpit.html VideoAs for the 45 year old accusation,
“They are falsely claiming that I sexually abused them over 45 years ago in the 1970s. I adamantly and categorically deny these allegations.”
that would be sometime in 1977, and if after his manifest conversion, casts more doubt on accusations many decades of silence. If true, then the denial is the actual issue that impugns his character.
You are probably right on this. But these women waited 50 years? Maybe because they are family relations.