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 The Reverend George Foreman once saw Christianity as a weakness.

The late boxer was adamant that the entire timeline from Genesis to Revelation and everything in between was complete “nonsense.”

That was until his second biggest defeat brought him face-to-face with Christ.

“Yeah, I believed in God,” he noted in his 2007 autobiography.

“I just didn’t believe in religion.”

Knowing God’s Reality, But Not Knowing Him

“I knew that somebody made the sun, moon, and stars, but I hated going to church, hearing all those pitiful old songs people sang, and using words like “thee” and “thou.” I didn’t believe in all that.”

His conversion in 1977 began in a dressing room after a twelve-round loss to Jimmy Young.

Questioning the judges’ ruling in a windowless room, Foreman said he struggled to cool down.

With his sweat competing against an incompetent air conditioner, Foreman’s mindset quickly shifted from fury about the defeat to a fear of dying.

“I had heard about boxers dying after big fights. Was I next?” he thought to himself.

Foreman then recalled entering into a conversation and wondering if God was talking to him.

During this back-and-forth, Foreman said he increasingly felt like he “was staring death in the face.”

“By now, I was crying. I decided I wanted to make a deal with God. My mind was racing, hurriedly trying to figure out what I could do on my part.”

“What does a mere human being own that he can use to barter with God?” he asked.

“I’m still George Foreman, I thought. I can still box. I can give money to charities.”

George Foreman’s Descent into Death

Then, the voice thundered, “I don’t want your money. I want YOU!”

At this point, Foreman said he knew this wasn’t a human voice, because no human would turn down a generous handout.

“I felt sure that my life was about to end,” he recounted, while noting that his real regret would be never saying goodbye to his mother.

“At that moment, my legs buckled, and I collapsed, pitching forward toward the floor.”

Foreman said he “could feel himself falling and yelling to the others in the room.”

He then remembers being “instantly transported into a deep, dark void.”

“If there’s a place called ‘nowhere’, this was it. I was suspended in emptiness, with nothing over my head or under my feet.”

“I lost my perception of direction, and didn’t know which way was up and which was down. This was a place of total isolation, cut off from everything and everyone.”

Likening the experience to being dropped into the Atlantic Ocean with nothing to grab onto, Foreman said, “I knew I was dead, and this wasn’t heaven. I was terrified, knowing I had no way out.”

“Total darkness surrounded me.”

“I was aware of other people in this terrible place, but I was unable to contact them.”

Recalling the smell, stating that he remembered it vividly, he explained that “the place reeked with the putrid smell of death.”

It was an “awful, foul stench, difficult to describe.”

“Everything that I ever worked for — my money, cars, and houses — meant nothing to me anymore. What good were they to me here?”

“I truly thought that this was the end of my life,” Foreman reflected, “and I saw — too late — that I had missed what life was meant to be about.”

“I was furious that I had fallen for the devil’s lies and deceptions.”

After stating that he still believed in God, despite the desperation, Foreman said: “What seemed to be like a gigantic hand reached down and snatched me out of the terrifying place.”

Crediting God for letting him out, Foreman returned to his body, which was now lying on the floor.

Conscious again, his coach and brothers, who were working to revive him, moved him to a table.

Although feeling at peace with God and himself, he still felt himself being thrown from one world to another in what he said was like a “virtual reality tour.”

Here, the boxer asserted, “I knew it had been God’s hand that rescued me out of that dark place.”

Vision of Jesus Crucified

At this moment, Foreman stated that he “saw something that nearly caused my heart to stop, not in fear, but in amazement.”

“I said, ‘Dr West, please move your hands, because the thorns on his head are making him bleed.’”

“I reached up and touched my forehead. When I did, I saw blood pouring down my forehead, yet I didn’t have a cut there from the boxing match.”

Before this encounter, for Foreman, “the crucifixion of Christ was a fictional television story people watched at Easter time.”

Throughout the ordeal, his masseur, Perry Fuller, a Christian most avoided because he quoted the Bible too much, was praying for him.

Still regaining a sense of spatial awareness, Fuller then affirmed, “You see, Mr Foreman, you can’t trust in your wealth.”

“This man, who had told me about the Lord,” Foreman added, “was an eyewitness to my transformation.”

He then told Fuller, who had been holding his hands down, to move because “He’s bleeding where they crucified him.”

Looking down at his own hands, Foreman saw them bleeding. No one else did.

“To this day,” he wrote, “I can’t figure out why I said “He” when this experience was happening to me.”

“I believed in God, but I didn’t believe in religion.”

“Now God was revealing himself to me in a way I would never forget. He wasn’t simply one of many gods.

“God was showing me that Jesus truly did bleed while wearing that crown of thorns, and when they pounded those nails into his hands.”

“Although I didn’t completely understand it,” Foreman admitted, “and certainly didn’t deserve such a sacrifice, I was beginning to realise that he did it for me.”

Foreman Comes Alive

“Still lying prone on the training table, I suddenly sat straight up and yelled at the top of my voice, “JESUS CHRIST IS COMING ALIVE IN ME!”

Shocked, everyone reacted as though a ghost had walked into the room.

Won’t ever forget that day; I saw blood on my forehead & my hands; started screaming “Jesus Christ is coming alive in me” I never believed in such until then. https://t.co/CnMrAkWwbl

— George Foreman (@GeorgeForeman) March 21, 2023

“Prior to this experience, I had never talked about religion,” he clarified.

“But something stirred inside me, in the lower part of my stomach, and I could no longer control what I was saying.”

He started quoting Scripture he had never read before, because most of his life, Foreman testified, “he had been ruled by anger and hatred.”

“Now, every hostile emotion had been drained out of me, and a spigot of God’s love had been turned on inside me, filling me up, and overflowing out of me.”

Finally coming to, Foreman said he “jumped off the table and hugged everyone in the room.”

Expressing joy unspeakable, he used “words he never thought he’d ever speak.”

Cleaning up after the bout and near-death knockout, Foreman said he stood in the shower shouting, “Hallelujah, I’m clean! HALLELUJAH, I’VE BEEN BORN AGAIN!”

“This was so out of character for me. I wouldn’t stop talking about Jesus, and no one could shut me up.”

“This born-again experience was everything I ever wanted.”

Even “the thrill of being introduced as the heavyweight champion of the world didn’t even come close to this.”

Foreman wrote that the experience ended with Jesus saying, “I come to my brothers, and they don’t believe me. I come to my friends, and they don’t understand me.”

Responding to pleas from the boxer for Jesus to stay, Foreman said he was told, “Now I go to my Father in heaven.”

Worried, doctors insisted on running tests, “but couldn’t find anything” that might make medical sense of the experience.

Convinced it was a holy moment, Foreman declared: “In that dressing room, God opened my spiritually blind eyes and introduced himself to me.”

“Think about that: He came looking for me; the Almighty condescended to encounter me! No experience on Earth could make me feel more important than that.”

To this, Foreman added that the experience was just as real in 2007 “as the day it happened.”

For thirty years, the unexplained experience remained a game-changing moment that never left the boxing legend.

Alongside the vision of being ripped out of hell, Foreman felt spiritually clean.

He had been brought back to life and, in the process, transformed by a real encounter with Jesus Christ.

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Images via Wikimedia Commons.