Private Dancer
8:08 Tue Jun 7
Re: Ali in hospital (RiP)
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Interesting piece from Foreman...he trousered $137.5 mil for putting his name on that grill...FMOB.
'Muhammad Ali didn’t cash in on his name until age 64'
Ali caught on to business late, George Foreman says.
Amid the outpouring of remembrances for boxer Muhammad Ali over the past few days since his death on Friday at 74, another boxer has appeared frequently: George Foreman. The two men were close friends. And while many people might first associate Foreman with his eponymous grill and other products he’s plugged, he says it’s Ali who had the bigger business brand. It simply took the legend a long time to decide to use it.
The two men were never supposed to be friends after Ali knocked Foreman out in Zaire in 1974, the fight known as the “Rumble in the Jungle.” But in 1976, Ali called Foreman on the phone, which had never happened before.
“I don’t know how he got my number,” said Foreman “He called and complimented me for about 20 minutes, so I knew something was up. And he said, ‘George, could you do me a favor? They want to make me fight Ken Norton to defend my title. Please fight Ken Norton for me. I can’t beat him. He’s afraid of you, but I can’t beat him.’” Ali had fought Norton twice already, both times in 1973, and lost the first, won the second.
Ali did end up fighting Norton for a third time on Sept. 28, 1976, and won by unanimous decision. While Foreman had fought Norton once and beaten him, he did not fight him again. But he did return to boxing in 1987, at Ali’s encouragement.
After that phone call, “We cemented our relationship,” Foreman says. “He quoted the Bible to me, we talked monthly, visited one another. On the phone, we’d say, ‘Love you.’ ‘Love you too.’” (Later, when Ali became so ill he couldn’t hold the phone, his daughter would call Foreman on FaceTime and hold up the phone so Foreman could greet Ali. “All the times and changes we lived through,” Foreman remarks with amazement. “We learned FaceTime!”)
When Foreman returned to boxing in the 1980s, he cozied up to Madison Avenue and became an advertising attraction, hawking brands from Nike to Doritos to McDonald’s. He made himself into a brand and still appears in advertisements today.
“I learned that you gotta brand yourself, because I don’t care if you make a billion dollars in sports, it won’t be enough. You need to keep earning,” he says. “Muhammad didn’t think that way.”
Ali, in contrast to Foreman, branded himself only for the sake of boxing, in Foreman’s assessment. “He loved boxing, he wanted to be the greatest, and he dedicated himself to publicity so that people would know that he was the greatest,” he says.
Of course, Ali reached a point where he didn’t need to generate his own publicity. He was the most recognized athlete on the planet. But even Ali, eventually, hit financial straits. “He was strapped for money,” Foreman says, “and his friends started to understand that Muhammad was a great brand, not just a great fighter. He was a brand and his intellectual property could be more valuable than George Foreman’s—if they wanted it to be.”
It still took all the way until 2006, when Ali was 64, to truly cash in on his recognizability. He sold 80% of his name and likeness rights to CKX (CKX) for $50 million. (The corporation also owns the rights to Elvis Presley’s name.) That’s less than half of the $137.5 million Foreman got from a company called Salton in 2000 to put his name on the grill. But it was still a windfall for Ali, who had done nearly no advertising or endorsements prior, and thus, strange as it may be to think, hadn’t proven his marketability in a commercial sense.
“So he caught on to it late,” Foreman says, “but he caught on.”
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Eggbert Nobacon
9:51 Mon Jun 6
Re: Ali in hospital (RiP)
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was he not a white hating racist Muslim? You know like the ones everyone moans about all the time?
he divorced his first wife very fast after she refused to dress like a Muslima: "I even divorced a woman… just because she wouldn't wear dresses long enough"
"You're my enemy. My enemy is the white people!")
Ku Klux Klan members may admire Muhammad Ali for speaking out ("Cu Clux Clay speech") against interracial relationships on a KKK rally ("It was a hell of a scene, all those white hoods, the bonfire, and me on the platform talking")
“There are many white people who mean right and in their hearts wanna do right,” he said. “If 10,000 snakes were coming down that aisle now, and I had a door that I could shut, and in that 10,000, 1,000 meant right, 1,000 rattlesnakes didn’t want to bite me, I knew they were good… Should I let all these rattlesnakes come down, hoping that that thousand get together and form a shield? Or should I just close the door and stay safe?”
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