George Foreman is regarded as a legend in boxing and in the kitchen thanks to his iconic grill – but he nearly lost out to Hulk Hogan on the deal of a lifetime.
The former world heavyweight champion, who has died at the age of 76, was involved in one of the most iconic fights in boxing history, known as Rumble In The Jungle, where he lost to Muhammad Ali in Zaire in 1974.
But Foreman, who also became the oldest heavyweight world champion in history, amassed his fortune outside of the ring by endorsing his George Foreman ‘Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine’.
The double-sided grill, which was invented by Michael Boehm and endorsed by Foreman, was a huge success worldwide, selling over 100 million units since 1994.
Foreman revealed that following the last fight of his professional career in 1997 – a defeat to Shannon Briggs – he received a $1 million royalty bonus for the grill.
Foreman later revealed just how lucrative the grill endorsement continued to be during his retirement.
‘There were months I was being paid $8 million per month,’ he told AARP.
However, the George Foreman Grill as we know it may never have existed if Hulk Hogan had answered a phone call before the product launched.
It was initially claimed that Hogan passed up the chance to endorse the grill and instead picked a meatball maker.
‘He [Hogan] gave me some investment advice because his manager said to him, ‘You should get into these things, kitchen appliances, put your name on something’,’ Avatar star Sam Worthington said in 2011.
‘The Hulk said, ‘Well, what have you got?’ The manager said, ‘Well, I’ve got this meatball maker, it pounds the meatballs’. The Hulk went, ‘That’s fantastic, I want the Hulkamania Meatball Maker’.
‘The manager goes, ‘what about the other thing?’ He goes, ‘Ah, give that to your other client.’ The other client turned out to be George Foreman, it was the grill! So George Foreman’s made $300 billion and how many people own a Hulkamania Meatball Maker?’
However, in an interview with The Herd in 2019, Hogan claimed that he actually missed the phone call which offered him the endorsement and was instead lumbered with the Hulk Hogan Thunder Mixer, which flopped.
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Asked if passed up on the George Foreman Grill, Hogan replied: ‘Stop, that’s not true.
‘My kids were upset because I was always picking them up late from school. So I said, ‘I’m going to beat all these soccer moms today’, and went to McDonalds, got a cooler, had everything ready, and got to the school at like 2:30, instead of 3:30, and now I’ve finally got all the soccer moms behind me and my kids excited I got there early.
‘Then I get home and press the old school voicemail recorder machine and it says. ‘Hey Hulk, this is Sam Perlmutter, I’ve got a grill and I’ve got a blender and I’m going to call you and George [Foreman] to see who wants it.’ I wasn’t there to answer the call, so when I call Sam back he said George took the grill.
‘So basically, $550 million later, George got the ‘Lean, Mean Grilling Machine’ and I got a blender that when you put double-AA batteries in, it would fart and then turn off.’
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