Heavyweight legend George Foreman has urged former WBC heavyweight champ Deontay Wilder to come and work with him. Foreman, who spoke with The Athletic, said he doesn’t want to become Wilder’s full-time trainer, or even a part of his entourage, but that he wants to help Wilder attain the physical strength he needs to become champion again.
Foreman, who had a quite old fashioned training style, especially as an “old” man in his amazing ring comeback of the ’80s and ’90s (George would, among other things, strap himself to a small truck, weighing around 4,500 pounds, and then pull if for ten straight miles!), says Wilder needs to “go back and get to the earth.”
What does he mean? The two-time king explained when speaking with The Athletic:
“He (Wilder) just didn’t have the strength to do what he wanted to do,” Foreman said of the Tyson Fury fight and defeat. “It’d be fine, just a couple weeks with him. I don’t want to be in his training camp. I just want to pass something on to him so he can become champ again. I believe he has an excellent trainer who took him all the way to the title. He doesn’t need a lot of boxing stuff, but he needs to go back and get to the earth. What I mean by that, if you can visualize a horse plowing – one of those big strapping horses pulling logs through the forest. That’s getting back to the earth. And boxing was built around that. In the first place, it was man against man. Hard-working men working the earth. Who was the strongest? Who was the best?”
Foreman chopped wood, literally put cows on his shoulders and carried them to improve his strength and he also lifted weights in the gym when he was fighting. But Big George says a fighter who has relied on weights and personal trainers will be failed “if you go up against a man who has the earth thing with him.” Foreman says he can show Wilder how to add this physical strength to his body and that “no-one will ever again be able to take his legs.”
It’s a fascinating proposition, but will Wilder take Foreman up on it? Certainly something was wrong with Wilder in the Fury rematch, his legs looking weak as early as round-two. Foreman had amazing physical strength and with it endurance. Of course, Foreman is a fighter in his very own category and maybe Wilder will never be able to attain such sheer strength. But it would be worth a try, surely? Let’s see if Wilder takes Foreman up on his offer.
Hey, Wilder could do a lot worse. “I can take [Wilder] back with me to where I was, take him back to the boxer he ought to be,” Foreman said. “I know I can take him there.”
