“Bruised, But Not Broken”   

This autobiographical piece chronicles one woman’s journey from winning the title of Miss Black Teenage America to marrying George Foreman, the Heavyweight Champion of the World.

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Cynthia Lewis was a beauty queen barely out of her teens when she became the wife of heavyweight champ George Foreman. The marriage was short and unhappy. Cynthia Foreman, 46, tells her side of the story in a one-woman play she performs Saturday at the Oakland Box Theater.

"Bruised But Not Broken: The Cynthia Foreman Story," which Foreman adapted from an unpublished book on her five-year marriage in the 1970s to boxing's all-time knockout king, is a story about a woman's recovery from traumatic experiences early in life. The recovery is slow in coming and takes place from within.

The real-life protagonist survives and grows to maturity by facing the truth about herself, a process that lasts 20 years. Her recovery stands on solid ground when she reclaims a childhood passion -- acting -- and uses her native ability to play out her story in the form of a dramatic narrative. In the end, she grows beyond victimhood by confronting her trauma and sharing her insights with a public she hopes can learn from them.

She writes and performs her own script, extricating herself from the loser roles she felt she filled in the stories of two powerful people who dominated her early life -- her ex-husband and her mother. Her father also played a powerful part by his absence.

Foreman, a petite, animated woman, shuttles between Houston , her hometown, and Oakland , her adopted home. She performed two shows at the Oakland Box in March. Saturday's show is a fund-raiser for The African-American Museum and Library in Oakland .

Cynthia and George both became champs in the early '70s. She was crowned Miss Black Teenage America at age 15. He beat Joe Frazier in Jamaica to win the world heavyweight belt, a moment he describes on his Web site as the happiest of his career.

They met through her mother, who was working in the gift shop at a Houston hotel where George was staying to attend the Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match in 1973. Cynthia told her mother that if she bumped into the boxer she should get his autograph.

"By coincidence, a few days later he happened to come into the gift shop when my mother was on duty," Cynthia said. "He came in and was flirting with my mother. My mother was a very attractive woman.

"She did go out to dinner with him," she said. "Mother was single. She was excited."

"He came home with her, and that's how I met him."

The girl and the boxer chatted about their careers and about her plans to attend the University of Southern California . Her father lived in California .

"I'd never had a relationship with my father, and I wanted to find him," she said. "I never found him at SC."

They became friends. Their relationship was not romantic. It was closer to that of an uncle and niece. Cynthia was in the 10th grade.

" 'We're going to call each other champs,' " she recalled George saying. " 'We're both champs.' "

"All that sounds corny now," she said, "but when you're a kid, it doesn't seem corny."

When Cynthia went to college in California , George helped pay for it through his George Foreman Youth Foundation. But she remembers George questioning why she didn't pick a school in Texas .

As a freshman, she dated a football All-American. George, she said, had an opinion about that. "He said he didn't send me to college to get boyfriends, " she said.

The relationship grew complicated. George became upset when he learned she was attending a formal ball, but a couple of days later he called to say he had lined up a tailor in Hollywood to make her a dress. He would offer advice on Cynthia's boyfriend, but it was never inappropriate, Cynthia said.

Meanwhile, George hit the low point in his career when he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974's "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire . In "By George: The Autobiography of George Foreman," he writes of the pain of having to hear himself called a loser. "I felt as if my core had evaporated," he writes.

He gave up boxing after his next loss, to Jimmy Young in 1977. He experienced a religious conversion and the following year was ordained at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Houston . His relationship toward Cynthia began to change.

A month after the Young fight, George bought her a yellow VW. "I saw him that whole weekend," she said.

As Cynthia tells it, he went to an evangelical church and testified that he had renounced boxing. The next time she saw him, he was clean-shaven and carried a Bible. He invited her to church. She accepted and became "Sister Cynthia."

He wanted to baptize her. Although she thought it was odd that church attendees spoke in tongues, she accepted.

"I figured if it would please him, I'd do it," she said. She was immersed in the San Jacinto River outside Houston , at midnight, to the music of tambourines and guitars.

"He baptized me," she said. "He said how happy I'd made him."

Cynthia went to New York to study acting. She talked to George every day, listening to him read from the Bible. "He said God told him I was going to be his wife forever," she said.

She returned home on a Monday. George proposed.

"He had tears in his eyes," she said. "His point was we'd be studying the Bible together and together we could do a lot of good for people. I felt he needed me and was reaching out. I did say I would marry him.''

Cynthia was 20, immature, looking for love, rebelling against and competing with her mother -- a beautiful woman who had always dreamed of becoming a ballerina -- and feeling the absence of her father.

"I was not familiar with hearing the sound of a man's voice, so I had nothing to judge or compare it to," she said.

She said she and her mother were two women "both wanting to please our man."

As a result, she said, George "was almost able to dictate the order of things."

She described a marriage of painful scenes. She said she was subjected to strict religious demands, such as fasting and speaking in tongues. She said George butchered a cow and made her clean it and hold its still-warm heart. It was her job to feed George's pet lion and tiger. She was very isolated and very frightened.

In his autobiography, George, whose famous barbecue grills have made him a highly successful entrepreneur, describes the marriage as difficult. "Our marriage was a live lobster in a big steam pot," he writes. "Cynthia believed that we were the stars of a movie."

He writes that he's sorry her expectations weren't met. He said he promised to help her get back on her feet after they divorced.

Cynthia, who said she hasn't read George's book, said the emotional damage from five years of marriage was so severe that she had to seek treatment. "I was extremely rattled, fragile," she said, explaining that her condition came from hiding her pain.

"I'm not trying to burn him over the grill," she said of her former husband. "I may never know the reason God let that experience happen in my life. I never was angry with George. What I've been was hurt."

Ultimately, the message behind the story of the beauty queen who married the heavyweight champ is twofold: take responsibility and speak the truth. Painful as it was, her marriage helped her to know herself and led to growth as a mature woman, she said.

"A lot of things you're going to have to live with," Cynthia said. "They're going to stick with you like tar on a summer day."

She wants to carry this message to all who will hear it. "I want to get it to college campuses, churches," she said. "I want to get it in any arena I can where people can be helped."

On stage

"Bruised But Not Broken: The Cynthia Foreman Story," 8 pm. Saturday, Oakland Box Theater, 1928 Telegraph Ave. $10-15, sliding scale. (510) 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com.   

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