Friday 18th July 2025
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George Foreman: getting up after getting knocked down

Daniel Sutton
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George Foreman: getting up after getting knocked down

“When I was a kid”, booms a deep Texan voice, “I used to bunk off school. I’d set off, like any other kid, then go to the woods, stay there a little while, then climb back in through my window and go back to bed. One day, as I was climbing through the window, I saw my cousin Rita, and she said ‘Hey Monkey’ – she always used to call me Monkey – and I said ‘I just forgot something, I’ll be off to school’. She looked at me, and smiled. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t go to school. Nobody in this family ever comes to anything.’ I got my stuff, stormed off and almost went to school.”

After two world heavyweight boxing championships, 40 years as an evangelist and around $200 million in earnings from his eponymous grill, George Foreman tells his tale with a smile at the Oxford Union. His epic weaves from childhood truancy to spiritual rebirth, Olympic gold to multi-million dollar commercials, but at its centre was the world championship fight against Muhammed Ali, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the defeat for which he is still best remembered among boxing fans today. As I sit opposite Foreman, 42 years on, he describes how it felt to lose the world championship fight.

“Before then, it was like winning, winning, winning, and that was the only time I really lost; I lost plenty of other decisions, but I figured they could have gone either way. To leave defeated, where one day everyone is looking up at you, thinking ‘whoa’, and the next day they’re patting you on the back with sorrow, it’s the most devastating thing that could happen to you. It’s terrible. It’s like a darkness come over you, and you must get back and you’ve got to fight. That was the worst I’ve ever felt in boxing.”

Foreman continues, describing the challenges of entering a fight as champion. “The hardest thing, you know, about being world champion is you start believing things you hear about yourself. It’s hard to resist that, and I said I wouldn’t, but I became part of it, believing I was as tough as people said I was. That was a hard thing to resist.” Asked whether he had a role model himself when he was growing up, Foreman grins and sits back in his chair. “There was a great football player by the name of Jimmy Brown, who later became a great actor. I wanted to be him. He could run real fast and he was the first guy I’d seen without the football helmet, and I saw his face and I thought: ‘that’s the face I want’.”

At that time, was Foreman already set on being a boxer? “I really hated boxing – when I was street fighting as a kid, I thought I could easily fight without being a boxer, but it came to the point in my life where I realised there were things I needed for my family, and I could only get them by boxing. There was a time when I was in the Job Corps and a load of us were listening to a fight on the radio, and some of them looked at me and said ‘If you’re so tough, why don’t you go and do boxing?’ So I did.”

To start with, though, boxing didn’t go as planned. “The first time I went into a ring, I was up against this real weedy guy, and I thought, ‘This is gonna be too easy’. Then he hit me – bam – and it hurt! I tried to hit him, but I kept missing and he kept punching and the crowd started laughing, and I got real angry. I picked the guy up, and the referee said ‘put him down’, and the crowd laughed harder. When I lost, I ran out, and told myself, ‘I’m done with boxing’. None of my friends would look at me, and when I asked if they saw the fight, they just shook their heads.

“As I was walking down the street, my coach ran up to me, and he asked ‘Where are you going?’, and I told him I was done with boxing. He looked up at me and asked why, so, looking for an excuse, I said I had no boxing shoes. He then said ‘Wait here’, and ran off. I waited for about an hour, and then he returned with a pair of boxing shoes. That left me with no choice!’”

After a defeat at the hands of Jimmy Young in 1977 and what he has described as a near-death experience, Foreman converted to Christianity. Following this, he retired from boxing for a time to be an evangelist, initially on street corners, and set up a youth centre in Houston, Texas. Asked how his faith impacted his work, he paused. “I’ve been a preacher,” he said, “but faith is what I have, and it’s hard for me to describe its effect because I just know what I know. I suppose it builds you, it shapes you, and for more or less 40 years I’ve been telling people the same story of how Jesus Christ has worked in me. He’s been the only consistent thing for me, for so long now.”

Though he last fought professionally in 1997, Foreman still remembers the pressure of the ring and how he grew to relish it. “You know, the first time I got knocked down, I was an amateur, the guy hit me so hard, and I didn’t know what winning would get me, or losing, but I remember being on that floor thinking ‘I’ve gotta get up. I’ve gotta get up’. And in that moment, I didn’t have to win, but I had to get up. In boxing, when you hear that bell ring, you feel real confident because you know you have to get up. Sometimes you just get hit real hard, but you still have to get up.”

And the greatest moment of his career? “Winning an Olympic gold medal, in Mexico City. Even once I turned professional and won world titles, nothing came close. I’d represented my country, and I was so proud. I wore my medal so much that the gold began to wear off the back, and I said to my friend ‘Isn’t this a gold medal?’, and he went, ‘It’s gold-plated, George, but I’ll fix it for you’. And I remember my cousin Rita saw me soon after – the one who told me nobody in our family ever came to anything – and she said, ‘I always knew you’d do well, Monkey.’”

Google asks Oxford to find the ‘off’ button

Colin Donnelly
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Google asks Oxford to find the ‘off’ button

Google has partnered with Oxford academic Stuart Armstrong to ensure their new artificial intelligence program, ‘DeepMind’ can be turned off by humans.

Google had been concerned the program, which relies upon a neural network style of computing that mimics human intelligence, might have been able to refuse to obey instructions, and use its intelligence to circumvent human authority.

Students held a variety of views on this collaboration and the possibility that technology may become so advanced that we cannot completely control it.

“It doesn’t seem at all likely to me that software would attempt to harm humans in order to keep its execution running”, said Magdalen JCR computer rep Winston Wright, who is interning with Google this summer.

On another level, the possibilities with artificial intelligence could greatly increase quality of life. “AI and machine learning have the potential to greatly help people do a variety of tasks. Areas that particularly excite me are automated medical diagnosis, driverless vehicles, and natural language processing,” Wright said.

Oxford’s burning destruction

Daniel Curtis
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Oxford’s burning destruction

A friend once made the point that the central quote from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, is the ultimate descriptor of Oxford: to chart our experiences with how much caffeine is needed to get through to the next panic-inducing deadline or scenario is quaint. But in this quote lies a contradiction: the considered nature of “measured” cannot coexist with the explosion of energy and pace conveyed by the caffeine of “coffee”. It is a striking, yet jarring, juxtaposition, one which comes closer to describing Oxford than my friend ever realised. Indeed, it is this which makes our collective temperatures rise – the dual necessities of calmness and freneticism.

Needless to say, Oxford leans towards the latter. Yet this is not only in an academic sense, as overwhelming as the demands are here. Instead, other spheres all vie for the same space in our minds, with politics, relationships and our own individual challenges coming to the fore to render any mental space a luxury – a psychological reflection of the Oxford property crisis.

The other day I walked to seek refuge in the tranquillity of Port Meadow. I bumped into some friends along the way, but their conversation was already firmly parked in the arena of economic debate and political allegiance. As much as I love them, I left them, and headed back to college, ironically to resume working. This is indicative of our mental state: the need to de-stress is scuppered by the pressing concerns which harass us into action. It is as if we cannot give ourselves the space we need to cool down when there is always something below the surface vying for our attention.

Referenda are the prime offender in this regard. While much of the campaigning the NUS referendum reflected that of the upcoming EU one, the former is over while the latter rages on. How should we respond to political foot-dragging when not directly involved? Railing against the world in its entirety is an appealing proposition, channelling the immortal cry of “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” from 1976’s cutting, Oscar-winning satire Network. This anger can be cerebral, too: The Smiths’ defiant creed in ‘Still Ill’ of, “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine; it owes me a living” assumes a prominent edge in our battle not only to be heard, but to drown out the voices of those that we resent.

Yet sadly, in my experience, the likelier outcome is one of resignation. Jay McInerney, in the stunning post-modernist novel Bright Lights, Big City (1984), writes, “You suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you.” It is perhaps the most brilliantly simple summation of the plight of the outsider – and indeed, the plight of the Oxford student.

This is an environment that fosters comparison – toxic, non-constructive comparison – and the baseless assertion that the whole world has their life together except for you. That you are the exception. That you are a failure. Thus, the natural evolution of our presence here leads to a yearning for a simpler time – a nostalgia for home, for school, for reckless abandon.

Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is obsessed with this notion: that the only true way to deal with failure is to scrabble around in search of a time long gone. The settings, books and characters of his narrator’s past are all identified, analysed and unfurled in much the same way as our own – a revision class with A2-sized paper and black marker pens brought back pleasing memories of my own faded school days of innocence and levity. “We can cap the old times, make playing only logical harm”, cries singer Paul Banks on post-punk band Interpol’s ‘Obstacle 1’. “We can top the old times, clay-making that nothing else will change”. All of this is the logical result of the natural need to grip a constant when everything else seems amiss.

Surely, then, the answer lies somewhere in the middle – to have enough of a sense of justice to get stuck in where necessary, but to always maintain enough of a sense of perspective to stay grounded. Indeed, in Brideshead Revisited (1945), Evelyn Waugh presents a recollection of an idyllic Trinity term and Oxford in the summer. His protagonist writes on reflection that “it is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence.” So leave yourself no need to do any such thing.

Yes, Oxford and life are both catalysts for burning frustration. But what goes less noticed are the opportunities they give to cool down. Waugh’s breath-taking description of the ‘dreaming spires’ puts it best, writing of the city that “her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days… when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth”. Look around you. Take it in. Cool your temperature. Measuring out your life with coffee spoons may well be necessary. But just make sure that you leave plenty of room between them.

Rewind: Bhutan’s tobacco ban

Simran Uppal
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Rewind: Bhutan’s tobacco ban

This week in 2010, Bhutan became the first country in recent history to totally ban tobacco. Bhutan doesn’t shape its economy to try to produce the largest gross national product: it aims instead at Gross National Happiness. It’s one of the few countries that colonialists never invaded, and has quite consciously rejected Western values in favour of its traditional Buddhist ones: psychological, sociological, philosophical and even economic.

In short, if you’re going to be setting things on fire in Bhutan, you’re more likely to be lighting a stick of incense and chanting refuge in the Buddha than spluttering through a Marlboro Red while downing cheap Indian beer on your definitely-not-neo-colonialist Grand Tour to Goa and Thailand. Buddhists of all denominations chant the advice every morning to ‘avoid taking anything that causes intoxication or heedlessness’. This is less from a position of dogmatic rule-keeping and more from the angle of trying to help you keep your mind clear: the logic is that taking intoxicants as part of your pursuit of happiness and fun just won’t lead to as happy a life as you could have, and that a calm, aware mind is more likely to help you make others’ lives happier too.

The distinction we make between stimulant and intoxicant isn’t quite drawn in the same way. More importantly, tobacco is associated with the general, you know, moral degeneracy and capitalist total lack of concern for others that constitute a certain stereotype of the West. Many Buddhist countries are extremely keen on that dangerous stimulant tea, for example, whether it’s drunk Western style but with powdered milk as in Sri Lanka, fermented and eaten as leaves in Burma or stirred up with Shinto ceremony in Japan.

Tobacco is obviously horrendous for your health. In the UK, the tobacco industry in fact gains more revenue for the state than it takes it away in healthcare costs: there is no real financial motive to reduce its massive, though undeniably harmful, popularity. Compassion-based politics, like the Bhutanese option, offers a very attractive alternative. One factor of Gross National Happiness is sustainable development. You don’t even have to be anti-growth, like the Green Party, to base your whole socioeconomic mindset on something far more human and intuitive than ‘Let’s just make as much money as we can’.

Solidarity for victims of sexual assault at the Radcam

Guy Bennett-Jones
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Solidarity for victims of sexual assault at the Radcam

The gates of the Radcliffe Camera have been covered with notes expressing solidarity for victims of sexual assault.

“To girls everywhere I am with you” is written across one large banner. On smaller notes others have written “It is not your fault”, “You are not alone” and “It happens here too – a survivor”.

These shows of solidarity come amid international outrage following the sentencing of Brock Turner. Turner, a former Stanford freshman, was caught assaulting an unconscious woman behind a frat house in 2015. He was recently sentenced to six months in jail after being convicted of sexual assault, which carries a penalty of up to 14 years.

During the trial, Turner blamed Stanford’s “party culture”. His father pleaded that his son should not go to jail for “twenty minutes of action”.

A petition to remove Judge Aaron Persky from the judicial bench for his leniency has received close to 1.2 million signatures.

Government to test student learning

Hannah Cox
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Government to test student learning

As part of the government’s ongoing efforts to improve teaching standards at universities, a new set of tests, one taken before beginning a degree and another taken after graduation, is being introduced. They will aim to examine critical thinking and problem solving skills in an attempt to establish how much students have improved during their degree and whether the respective university is providing value-for-money.

Starting this autumn, up to 50,000 students will pilot the initial test. Such a system is just a part of the wider programme by the government to ensure students are getting good value in their degrees, as many universities are now charging the maximum £9,000 in tuition fees. Jo Johnson, the Universities Minister, has recently criticised the quality of teaching in some universities as “lamentable,” stressing the need for the test.

Criticism launched at British higher education often questions factors such as the amount of contact time students receive, especially in comparison to courses taught abroad. For example, it has been suggested that even top British universities, including Oxford, are not off ering good value-for-money when compared to American Ivy League institutions such as Harvard and Yale, even though those universities charge five times as much as the £9,000 limit in the UK.

The response from universities to the “before and after test”, as Jo Johnson terms it, has been one of caution, with several suggesting the proposed test would be too generic to be meaningful, whilst others have warned that some universities may simply “teach to the test.”

There is also a concern the test is too narrow in its approach, and will neglect other skills gained during a degree, as well as potentially sidelining degrees, such as fi ne art and music, which may place more emphasis upon other skills, like performance and craftsmanship, that are outside the test’s parameters.

But while new to Britain, similar tests are already used in other countries such as the US. An example is the Collegiate Learning Assessment test, which aims to measure critical thinking and written communication skills. It is currently used by more than 700 institutions in the US and across the world. The test lasts 60 minutes and involves students analysing a set of documents and writing an appropriate response. This is then followed by a multiple-choice paper. Whilst the tests available in the US are voluntary, Brazil carries out mandatory testing for all university students.

Offering another perspective to the situation, English student Paul Ritchie suggests it seems “rather horrendous that the government is trying to legitimise tuition fee increases under the guise of rewarding ‘academic excellence.’”

The government has recently passed legislation to allow the best achieving universities to increase tuition fees in line with inflation, pushing beyond £9000 a year. This new legislation, aided by the proposed test, allows a push for higher tuition fees at excellent universities and fee reductions at under-performing ones.

Oxford Maths Department wins Regius professorship

William Taylor
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Oxford Maths Department wins Regius professorship

AS PART OF the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations, Oxford’s Mathematical Institute has been awarded a prestigious Regius Professorship.

The award, whose recipients were announced on Monday, is rare and highly esteemed. Since the last round of Professorships bestowed by Queen Victoria in 1842, only 14 new Regius seats have been granted. The Professorship is roughly equivalent to an Honours List for university departments, providing a royal seal of approval for outstanding research.

This year has proven a bumper year for the Mathematical Institute, with the Professorship being just the latest in a series of prizes. In May, Professor Nigel Hitchin took home the 2016 Shaw Prize in recognition of his far-reaching contributions to geometry and Professor Andrew Wiles took the 2016 Abel Prize for his world-famous proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Maths fresher Cong Lu told Cherwell “I was very aware of a few people from Oxford who popularized maths like Marcus du Sautoy and Vicky Neale who led a maths summer camp in Leeds and definitely influenced me to study it” but big names in research were less of an attraction.

“I was definitely aware of Andrew Wiles’ monumental effort proving Fermat’s Last Theorem before coming here but I didn’t realise he was actually at Oxford,” Cong said. He believes some of Oxford’s research success does come from the way they teach Maths to undergraduates though.

“You’re encouraged to tackle extremely abstract concepts that build on your mathematical intuition and lead you a very deep understanding of maths.”

In the past a Regius Professorship was created when a monarch founded or endowed a department at a narrow group of older universities, namely Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Trinity College, Dublin. Rather than have the Queen spoil her party by labouring through monographs, the recipients of the latest round were chosen by a select body of experts drawn from business and academia.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Professor Louise Richardson, said, “2016 is proving to be quite a year for the Mathematical Institute at Oxford with the Abel Prize presented to Sir Andrew Wiles and Nigel Hitchin recently announced as Shaw Prize laureate. Being awarded a Regius Professorship in Mathematics is wonderful news for the University and another mark of distinction for Oxford Mathematics.”

The list comprises 12 universities and contains some surprises: the Professorships granted to Queen’s College, Belfast and Cardiff University are the first to be granted in Northern Ireland and Wales, respectively, and the success of Aston University’s pharmacy department and the Institute of Cancer Research, part of the University of London, marks a hitherto unusual shift away from the Russell Group.

£13.5m library addition at John’s

Marianna Spring
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£13.5m library addition at John’s

St John’s has started work on a new £13.5m study centre and library extension to allow wheel-chair access, increase storage space and improve study areas.

The new facility, which will join to the first floor of the Laudian library, will include a two-storey study centre, as well as a new central archive within part of the President’s garden.

The centre “will double the number of reader seats” available to students and will provide a seminar room and study spaces with IT facilities for“ quiet, individual or team research and study”.

Extra shelving space will allow all undergraduate books and special collections to be stored inside the library or in a special basement area.

The college’s libraries are currently home to a number of rare books and manuscripts dating back to the 9th century.

St John’s JCR President Jessica Colston told Cherwell, “I think the main difficulties with the current college library is that we cannot open it for 24 hours a day, and it is inaccessible for students in wheelchairs or with other mobility issues. It’s really important that we support students with disabilities and the library is an essential part of the college, which should be accessible for all. Our current library also cannot be opened for 24 hours a day, and I know many would appreciate both earlier opening times for work before lectures and also opening through the night for those with less conventional work patterns!

“A new custom built space will allow students to study however they want and whenever they want. Undergraduate students will appreciate the new facilities such as communal areas that will let students work together in groups as well as enjoying more traditional study spaces for individual study. Making the college library accessible will also mean that disabled students can have the same access to study facilities as everyone else!”

Colston declined to comment on the cost of the project.

Principal Bursar, Professor Andrew Parker, told Cherwell, “St John’s College Library is a beautiful, historic building dating from 1595 but is lacking modern facilities and suffi cient study space. In addition, the current facility is not accessible for wheelchair users. The college has decided to build a new Study Centre, which links directly to the historic Library of the College. We believe that our students will greatly value the new improved facilities.” The new facilities will link the college’s Canterbury Quadrangle, which houses three of its four listed libraries, the Laudian Library, the Paddy Room and the 15th century Old Library, from the Groves area of St John’s College, a Grade II-listed park and garden, through to the President’s Garden.

Both the existing old Library and new Study Centre will be fully accessible for wheelchair users once the work is completed in December 2017. The existing Library will continue to be open as normal for students during the construction. The project is being completed by the construction company Stepnell who refurbished and extended the New Library at Magdalen College.

The stories that shaped Oxford life in 2015-2016

Daniel Kodsi
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The stories that shaped Oxford life in 2015-2016

There was a period of several weeks near the beginning of Hilary when all anyone could talk about was Rhodes Must Fall. From Junior Common Rooms to bars, college dinners to social media, Oxford was dominated by RMF. That Oriel finally decided to retain its controversial statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes, one suspects, will not diminish the lasting legacy of the protest group.

University news can often be tremendously dull – I cannot count how many times Cherwell has been forced to rely on academic reports to fill the space in lieu of more interesting content. But 2015-2016 has been an exciting year at Oxford, at least for this former news editor. Even beyond RMF, we have had more than our fair share of stories that have gotten the University buzzing and which have been picked up by the national media.

Consider this term’s referendum on whether to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students over the election of Malia Bouattia or last term’s allegations of anti-Semitism within the Oxford University Labour Club. Microcosms of a national debate over anti-Semitism within the ranks of the political left, the two events forced Oxford to grapple with weighty issues, such as how to balance the needs of different minority groups. Indeed, the rights of members of underrepresented communities – black and minority ethnic students, Jewish students, queer students – have been at the fore this year.

In other news, political correctness movements and discussion of the limits of free speech have seemed ubiquitous, with Michaelmas seeing a healthy dose of debate over ‘no platforming’. And unfortunately, the formal installation of Oxford’s first female Vice-Chancellor was overshadowed the remarks of Chancellor Chris Patten, who has repeatedly provoked ire for comments about RMF, safe spaces and admissions quotas.

To the not-so-great shock of all observers, Oxford continues to underperform in terms of access. The proportion of students admitted from state schools, just over 50 per cent, is unimproved from previous years. Dismally, only 38 students of black or black British ethnic background were accepted for entry in 2015. Nonetheless, we have retained our strong place in international university rankings, receiving second place from Times Higher Education (although only sixth in the QS World University Ranking).

There have been other, more light-hearted stories too, for instance about a Green Templeton professor who lives much of his life as different animals. And at Christ Church in February, after a graduate student initiated confrontations over the college’s LGBTQ flag and quoted an anti-homosexual Corinthians verse, the college banded together in solidarity to support the queer community.

As for Rhodes Must Fall, despite issuing a seven-point manifesto and organising a march at the end of term, the group has largely gone mum. We will have to wait until October to see what comes next.

Work continues on Eve the plesiosaur

Ben Ray
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Work continues on Eve the plesiosaur

Work is continuing at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on piecing together the remains of Eve, a 165 million year old plesiosaur discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry. The museum, which has been working on the skeleton since it was donated in November 2015, recently sent the skull to have a CT scan in the Royal Veterinary College, and subsequently to Bristol University, to create a digital reconstruction.

Cherwell was taken behind the scenes to see the ongoing excavation of the creature’s skull, which has been rotated 190 degrees so it can be easier examined. Examiners have so far spend around 70 hours working on the skull, added to an estimated 600 hours piecing the jigsaw of bones together. Work on the skull has revealed a large collection of Belemnites, tiny squid-like sea creatures, which presumably either made up the creature’s last meal or settled on the dying animal.

Although existing in the same period as the dinosaurs, the plesiosaur is in fact a huge aquatic reptile: currently it is unclear whether these creatures are closer to snakes or crocodiles in ancestry. Hopefully the ongoing investigation on Eve, Oxford’s plesiosaur, will yield more information about these creatures.

There is a fascinating display case containing information on and sections of the plesiosaur skeleton, on exhibit in the entrance hall of OUMNH until the 25th of July.

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