Yuri Foreman was done. He told me so in the summer of 2014—seven months into his so-called retirement from professional boxing—in a cafe near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He was done fighting, done with the bullshit that forced him to part ways with his ex-manager.
“In the end I was like… ‘Peace,’” Foreman, 35, told me a couple weeks ago, with laughter. “See you, not see you.”
And yet here he was, again, two weeks prior to his first bout in 24 months, taking huge bites of the pizza he’d coated with oregano. “Generally, I don’t like food,” said Foreman, a vegetarian who also keeps kosher. “I’m eating because I need it. It’s not pleasure, it’s sustenance.”
Foreman was ravenous, having come from a training session with Pedro Saiz at Gleason’s Gym. He stood tall with a natural lean forward, a sort of kind aggression. He struts. He’s ready.
For the last two years, Foreman, a former WBA super welterweight champ, has focused his energies on spending time with his wife, Leyla, a documentary filmmaker and life coach, and his two children, Lev, 5, and Eliyah, 2, and bettering his health, including the ACL and meniscus he injured in 2011. Now that he was away from the rigor of making weight for a bout, he also stayed in shape like the rest of us do: running clockwise around Prospect Park and fitting in some pull-ups on those bare-bones playground gyms, Brooklyn’s version of Venice Beach.
He also pushed himself further into his Jewish faith, “a tree that grows for years and finally gives fruit,” he said. Over the last seven years Foreman has been studying off and on toward a rabbinical diploma with Kabbalist Rabbi DovBer Pinson. He completed his course in May. Like boxing, Judaism has taught him that there are no shortcuts.
On Saturday, Foreman (32-2-0, 9 KOs) will return to the ring on the Danny Jacobs-Peter Quillin undercard at Barclays Center. “I live only ten blocks away,” he said. “It’s not bad. I’m going to take the B63 bus, goes right there.” For this bout he’ll face Lenwood “Mr. Composure” Dozier (9-9-1), a journeyman opponent, and a far cry from Miguel Cotto, to whom Foreman lost his super welterweight title in 2010 at Yankee Stadium. Cotto, now 35, did not take time away from the sport like Foreman. On November 21, Cotto lost the WBC world middleweight title to Canelo Alvarez.
Prior to his loss to Cotto, Foreman was a darling, especially among Jews, who do not often see one of their own reach world-class heights in sports. In 2009, Foreman became the first Israeli to become world boxing champion after he decisioned Daniel Santos in Las Vegas that November. Though Foreman grew up in Haifa, where his father lives, Israel is not where Foreman first learned to fight. That journey began in Belarus, in the city of Gomel, then a part of the Soviet Union. There, his mother walked around town with a knife for protection.
When he was boy, Foreman’s mother would take him to a big complex, which offered free, state-funded training in a number of sports. His mother signed him up for swimming. One day, in the showers, a younger albeit bigger kid punched him in the face with a plastic bag filled with a bar of soap. “I had a big, big red-blue eye. I came home crying.”
His mother signed him up for boxing.
“So maybe a year, year and half later, I bump into the same kid after he was bullying a friend of mind. It was already winter. I told him, ‘You. You remember? You remember you punched me in the shower?’ He didn’t remember. I just punched him in the face. Pop!”
Foreman’s confidence comes from within, which, he says, comes from God. He cites a passage in Numbers 20, in the Bible, in which Moses strikes a rock in Meribah, disobeying God. “There’s [Moses], a superhuman, a person with such a faith, and God would tell him, ‘You don’t believe in me?’ The thing is: Imagine if God believes in you, but you don’t believe in yourself. It means, by default, that you don’t believe in God because God gave you this strength—all the abilities in the world—but you don’t believe in yourself, in your abilities. God gives you the abilities [that are] going to work for you.
“When I was just starting fighting, I was seven years old, and my mother and father totally believed in me, you know? But them believing in me is one thing. But do I believe in myself?”
As his professional fighting career steps into twilight, Foreman is learning how to apply the battle-tested life lessons he believes in—like defending oneself, and learning to fight creatively and with intuition—through teaching. Now he trains fighters. One of his clients is a 12-year-old boy, a youngster.
“You see kids coming to the gym,” he said. “Some puny little kid…he’s still puny after 3-5 months. But maybe he’s a little better, and you see him walking upright. And he has confidence. Bullies, they’re not even going to attack him because this kid with the confidence might punch back.”
VoxVault: In Training
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
