Grilling George Foreman
How Henry Holmes helped create one of the most successful product introductions of the era
Published in 2005 Southern California Super Lawyers magazine
By Erik Lundegaard on January 26, 2005
Last summer in his Malibu home on Point Dume, sports and entertainment lawyer Henry Holmes spotted his 5-year-old son, Benjamin, running around with a boxing glove trying to punch their yellow Lab, Max. Besides being an avid boxing fan, Holmes has represented boxers and promoters, and was, at one time, the boxing consultant for Direct TV, and he has an extensive collection of gloves. So he didn’t think much of it until he saw the signature on the glove: George Foreman. Then his heart dropped.
“No, no, no,” he said, catching up with his son outside the front door and easing the glove off his hand. “No, that’s Daddy’s glove. That’s not your glove.” After returning the Foreman glove to its proper place in a Plexiglas case in the foyer, and after lecturing Benjamin on what not to punch (the dog, the cat, his mother, his father or any of the neighbor kids), Holmes offered Benjamin a not-poor substitute: a pair of boxing gloves signed by Sugar Ray Leonard.
Why sacrifice Leonard rather than Foreman? It’s more than the fact that George Foreman is Holmes’ friend and flagship client. The two met once in the early ’70s when Holmes was a young litigator and Foreman was the silent, glowering heavyweight champion of the world, but they didn’t work together until the early ’90s, by which time Holmes had morphed into a transactional sports and entertainment attorney, and Foreman, after famously losing his title to Muhammad Ali in the “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974, had remade himself into an enthusiastic, gregarious minister-boxer. By 1991 interest in him was fierce and there was talk of a television sitcom. He needed an entertainment lawyer, and Henry Holmes came highly recommended.
The sitcom, George, turned out to be short-lived, but not their friendship. Holmes helped him with other contracts and endorsements deals and won a place in Foreman’s heart when he ensured that Foreman’s kids got paid, and trust funds set up, for appearing in a Doritos commercial. “That built the relationship,” Foreman remembers, “because he started bringing in money for the children.”
Then came the Moorer fight. In 1994 Michael Moorer won the heavyweight championship and agreed to fight Foreman in his first title defense. As part of his training, Foreman rented a house in Malibu and ran several miles every morning down the beach to Holmes’ house and back again. One morning, according to Foreman’s autobiography, By George, his attorney was unusually serious. The World Boxing Association (WBA) was refusing to sanction the fight. “They say you’re too old,” Holmes told Foreman, “and that you’re not a top contender.” Foreman was distraught, and Holmes and his team, after researching the matter, decided to sue.
Asked today what his counterarguments were, Holmes rattles them off as if it were a decade ago and he was still in court. “The counterarguments were that George was not too old to fight for the heavyweight championship, that his comeback had been remarkable, that he was in tip-top shape, that Michael Moorer was ready to fight him, that HBO, the Nevada Boxing Commission, the casino site, everybody agreed that Foreman was the most suitable opponent for Michael Moorer.”
These arguments won the day and on November 5, 1994, Foreman won the heavyweight championship with a short, hard right to Moorer’s chin in the 10th round. Holmes watched it all from ringside and afterwards enthusiastically made his way back to the locker room, where he found Foreman and his trainer, Angelo Dundee, in the middle of a joyful crowd. “I remember George saying, ‘Angie? Cut this off. Henry? You got me here,’ and he handed me the glove. That’s when I started crying. And George goes, ‘Whoa! You ever see a lawyer cry?’ And somebody in the back yells, ‘Yeah, when they don’t get paid!’”
The glove that young Benjamin had been using to punch Max the dog, in other words, was the glove — the hard right — that had won the heavyweight championship of the world.
Foreman’s glove is significant not only for the events leading up to the fight but away from it. After the fight Holmes had to sort through a blitzkrieg of endorsement offers — more than 100 were waiting on his desk when he returned from Las Vegas that weekend. “I think we were getting an e-mail, a letter or a telephone call every nine minutes,” he recalls. “From big to small companies. And with products I’d never heard of. Remember pogs? They were really hot for a while. I had a guy call, he was going on about pogs for like five minutes. I had no idea what he was talking about.”
A friend and lawyer named Sam Perlmutter, to whom Holmes owed a favor, also eyed Holmes’ flagship client. Perlmutter was interested in getting into marketing and product endorsements, and Foreman suggested a hamburger maker — and Perlmutter found a good one in China: something called “The Lean Mean Grilling Machine.” In the past Holmes had witnessed clients getting lesser deals or being dropped completely after helping launch a product, so he wasn’t after a strict endorsement contract but a joint venture. Foreman would become part owner of the product. Ironically the toughest sell on this concept wasn’t Salton, Inc., the parent company, but George Foreman. Foreman remembers it humorously:
Foreman: How much are they going to pay me?
Holmes: Nothing, George.
Foreman: Nothing? All the money I’m making and I’m gonna do something for nothing?
Holmes: Yeah, but there’s a thing now called joint venture.
Foreman: Joint nothing! I want money!
“I had the grill in my house for months,” Foreman says. “The little thing. I looked at it. Finally I said, ‘I’m gonna try this thing.’ My wife told me she’d already tried it. She told me ‘It’s really nice, makes the meat all juicy and everything,’ and so I tried it and lo and behold it really did work. I called Henry and said, ‘How can I get a bunch of these?’”
“The early results were modest,” Holmes remembers, “and George’s participation and his checks were modest” — Foreman recalls getting $3,500 here, $3,500 there, and being happy about it — “and then all of a sudden it just blew up. And it became probably the most successful direct-sale consumer product — ultimately retail consumer product — of all time.”
By 2003 more than 50 million units had been sold, and when Salton, Inc., bought out Foreman’s share in 1999, it paid through the nose: an estimated $137.5 million. “I should call him Henry ‘Joint Venture’ Holmes,” Foreman says today.
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