George Foreman

The loss was a severe blow to Foreman's pride. He was devastated. "Now that he had lost for the first time, he lived with a quiet terror. He could not stop spending money or conquering women. Every day for the next 30 days he went to bed with a different woman—some days, two," wrote Sports Illustrated reporter Gary Smith. Foreman himself told Smith, "After I'd lost to Ali, I'd decided I needed more hate. I'd hit you in the kidneys or on the back of the head. I'd beat women as hard as I beat men. You psych yourself to become an animal to box, and that's what you become."

When he lost a big match to Jimmy Young, on March 17, 1977, Foreman went into a strange cathartic state in the dressing room. He tried to look past the fight, toward other opportunities in his life. "But no matter how hard I focused on positives, my thinking was dominated by death," he wrote in his autobiography. "My pacing back and forth was no longer about cooling down; it was about staying alive.… As I fell to the floor of my dressing room, my leg crumpling beneath me, my nostrils filled with the stink of infection. I recognized it instantly as the smell of absolute despair and hopelessness." At that point, he underwent a real religious conversion, embracing Christianity for the first time in his life. He even saw the signs of crucifixion on his own body.