George Foreman took the idea of self-improvement to nearly absurd extremes. He was not so much interested in transforming himself as he was in outright reinvention. Born poor and raised hungry—he remembered nursing tiny bites of a shared hamburger as a child, beginning a lifelong food fetish—he died famously wealthy and well-fed, perhaps best known as the grinning pitchman for a kitchen appliance that actually cooked those hamburgers.
But that was the least ironic of his many conversions. In between, he was a novice roughneck who somehow won an Olympic gold medal, a fearsome pugilist-turned-preacher, a high school dropout who became a centimillionaire entrepreneur. And, of course, the undisciplined wild man who became a heavyweight champion. Twice.
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