George Foreman, truck boxing champion, died at 76 years old

George Foreman, World Boxing Champion of heavy goods vehicles and Olympic gold medalist who later became an entrepreneur known for his interior grids, died on Friday at 76.

“Our hearts are broken”, a Foreman Read Instagram page.

“With deep sadness, we announce the death of our beloved George Edward Foreman Sr. who left peacefully on March 21, 2025 surrounded by relatives,” he read.

A cause of death has not been provided.

Foreman, known as “Big George”, won an Olympic gold medal in boxing at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City at the age of 19.

He won the world heavyweight championship five years later in a superb Knockout by Joe Frazier in two laps in 1973, but he lost it against Muhammad Ali the following year in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle”.

But the foreman has not finished. At the age of 45, Foreman recovered the title of heavy goods vehicles when he beat Michael Moore – a return that made him the oldest boxer to win the championship.

He became a preacher in 1978 and was also known as an entrepreneur. He has become a familiar name for the “George Foreman Grill” – officially called George Foreman Lean Mean Griling Machine.

More than 100 million have been sold worldwide, according to the Foreman website, and it has become an element of television programs promoting the device in an apron.

“A devout preacher, a devoted husband, a loving father and a proud grandfather, he lived a life marked by an unshakable faith, a humility and a goal,” the statement announcing his death on Friday.

Humility and goal were not always character traits for which the foreman was known.

He described himself on his website as going “from the thug to the boxer”. He was born in Marshall, Texas on January 10, 1949, but grew up in the fifth district of Houston, where his website said that he had intimidated other children and “became attacker and brawler”.

Foreman has credited the Job Corps program, launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson, with the mentoring that led him from crime to a boxing career.

“I was literally saved from the gutter. I was hiding from the police,” foreman told NBC News in an interview in 2023. “The next thing you know, I’m in the job of the job body, obtaining three meals in a day. They built me ​​in what I became.”

Foreman withdrew from boxing in 1977 and became a Christian born again. He said in his biography on his website that he had had religious experience in a cloakroom after losing in a decision against Jimmy Young on March 17, 1977 in Porto Rico.

He was ordered Minister the following year, founded the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in 1980 and, in 1984, founded the Youth and Community Center George Foreman for non-profit in Houston.

Foreman returned to boxing in 1987, a decade after his retirement.

He told NBC News in 2023, the same year a biopic about him had been released, that he had won the heavyweight title a second time because he learned to fight without anger.

“I started working with children to make sure they stay on the right road,” he said, learning them never throwing a angry punch. I learned it so much, I started to believe it. I went back to boxing, I became world champion, but I never had an ounce of anger in my life. ”