A man in full

 George Foreman was the patron saint of codgers, once upon a time.

He was the almost 46-year-old who climbed back in the ring more than a decade after he left it to knock out Michael Moorer, a mere pup of 26. Whipped the whippersnapper, old George did. Won one last championship belt for doing it. Proved once and for all that you can teach an old dog new tricks, provided one of them is a lethal sledgehammer hook.

"The older we get, the better we were"? Phooey on that. The older we get, the better we are.

That was George Foreman.

He was the kindly man-mountain who sold you the George Foreman Grill on your TV -- just look at all that icky grease drain away! -- and the loving father who named all his sons George. He was the angry young thug saved from Houston's uglier quarters, and likely from prison, by the ring. He was the All-American kid who waved a tiny stars-and-stripes after winning gold in Mexico City ... the scowling engine of destruction who put another engine of destruction, Joe Frazier, on the canvas six times in a 1973 bout ... the unwitting dupe bewitched by Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope a year later.

He was a bully. A menace. A mean, frightening young man who found God and became a gentle, smiling teddy bear who sold kitchen appliances and wouldn't hurt a fly unless his name was Michael Moorer.

If a man's life can be objectified, then George Foreman's was a kaleidoscope: The sum of uncounted disparate parts somehow adding up to a man in full.

He left us yesterday at 76, too soon by the way we judge the passing of good men, and all of boxing mourned.  It wasn't just that he was one of the most formidable boxers of all time, with a 76-5 record, 68 knockouts and eight alphabet-soup heavyweight titles. It was that he became so beloved after all that, and yet another lesson in both the redemptive power of faith and the leavening of years.

So long, Big George. Rest well in the peace you were blessed to find, and with which you made us all smile.