Two-time Heavyweight Champion of the World, ordained minister and author George Foremen never finished a book until he found Job Corps. Neither did he aspire to the sport that made him a legend.

Growing up in an impoverished section of Houston, the teenage Foremen was a street thug with an aversion to high school and little direction, the boxer told a crowd at the Job Corps Alpha Awards July 23. Foreman received the program’s first-ever Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award granted by the national Job Corps Association.

He credited Job Corps with introducing him to boxing as well as instilling values that helped him build a rewarding life.

In 1965, at the dawn of Job Corps, Foreman saw Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown endorse the program on television and decided to join up. His life stated to change. “When people started caring about me, I started to respond,” Foreman said.

Pursuit of a general equivalency diploma and electronics assembly training took Foreman initially to the Ft. Vanney Training Center, in Oregon, and then to Parks Job Corps Center, in California. Their kitchens offered him three meals a day for the first time. The center’s instructors, he said, “could have cared less about boxing. They cared about teaching me to read, I can remember finishing my first whole book in Job Corps.” Since then, the pugilist has authored a few books of his own on cooking and life.

Foreman’s career path, however, started outside Job Corps instructional classrooms and shops.

At the Parks Center’s recreation program Charles “Doc” Broadus was teaching boxing. Foreman joined the class and caught his future trainer’s eye.

“He said to me, ‘George, if you stop fighting in the street and dedicating yourself to getting in trouble, you can be on Olympic champion,’” Foreman said. And he did, winning the Olympic Gold Medal in Mexico City, in 1968.

In his early professional fighting career, Foreman’s robe carried as his ring name “The Fighting Corpsman.”

“I’ve never gotten in tax trouble like some athletes,” he said. “No accountant has ever been able to tell me they can find a way I don’t have to pay, because I love the idea of paying back my country for what Job Corps did for me.”