Several hours after George Foreman's remarkable 1994 knockout of Michael Moorer, in which he regained the heavyweight championship of the world at the age of 45, I was seated at a blackjack table at the MGM Grand when, from far across the room, there commenced a thunderous roar. It sounded as if a freight train was rolling its way across the floor of the cavernous casino.

At first I took the din to be the sound effects from one of the noisy attractions at the amusement park outside the Las Vegas hotel, before realising it was after midnight. I then looked up and saw Foreman making his way across the casino, which effectively stopped doing business as everyone from the dealers and croupiers to the cocktail waitresses and the gamblers themselves paused to offer a heartfelt ovation.

Foreman, who had just performed one of the most remarkable achievements in sport, was rushing to the airport to catch a plane back to Houston where he had a sermon to preach at his church the following morning.

Two days ago Foreman, now 50, was standing in the pulpit at the Holy Family Church in Southill, Limerick. It was his fifth stop on the trot following his transatlantic journey, but if he was exhausted, he did his best not to show it.

Before a congregation largely made up of children, Foreman began his mini-homily with a cautionary tale from his own boyhood. He recalled growing up in a Houston ghetto not unlike Southill. After feeding him his breakfast, his mother would head out the door to catch the bus for work as he left for school. More often than not, recalled Foreman, he would circle around the block, return home, and, in his mother's absence, crawl back into bed.

One day young Foreman returned to the tenement only to be surprised by a cousin who had stopped off. He began to stammer out an excuse, but the cousin was wise to the ploy.

"Don't worry, I ain't gonna tell on you," she told him. "Besides, it don't make no difference whether you go to school or not, `cause you're never going to amount to anything anyway. Nobody who comes from here EVER amounts to anything whether they go to school or not."

"That hurt me," confessed Foreman. "It made me so angry that I ALMOST went to school!" In his younger, scarier, and hairier incarnation, George Foreman was the most intimidating man on the planet. A year following that New Orleans encounter, he would knock Frazier down six times in winning the heavyweight title. He affected a perpetual scowl, having made a conscious decision to model his countenance after that of the thuggish Charles (Sonny) Liston. Prior to his 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" against Muhammad Ali in Kinshasha, a delegation of Ali's closest Muslim advisors sought a private audience with Foreman. The message they delivered went something along the lines of "if you get Ali in trouble, please make sure you don't kill him."

When fight night finally arrived, Ali outwitted Foreman, wearing him down with his now-legendary "rope-a-dope," tactics and even when an exhausted Foreman finally pitched to the canvas he was convinced that he had been tricked.

"You lose more than the heavyweight championship," he recalled over dinner the other night. "You've lost who you are. It was almost as if I wasn't a man anymore."

Following a period of brooding reflection, he agreed to make his comeback fight against Ron Lyle, a hard-punching ex-con whom most of the top heavyweights of the day made a point of avoiding. A few rounds into the bout one of Lyle's booming rights connected, Foreman finding himself on the floor.

"I was laying there thinking `What are you going to tell people THIS time? That the ropes were loose? That the water was poisoned?' Foreman recalled.

He got up from the two knockdowns to stop Lyle.

SOME 10 years after that Foreman returned for a second career which culminated in a second heavyweight championship and, to the surprise of everyone including himself, lasted considerably longer than the first. Moreover, he had thoroughly reinvented his persona. I knew both George Foremans, and I like the present version a whole lot better than I did the first.

His unlikely re-ascension to the title also won him a position as one of America's most beloved pitchmen. Having packed on an extra 35 pounds during his 10-year layoff, he capitalised on his legendary voracious appetite by pitching cheeseburgers. To this day, he appears on more nationally-aired television commercials than any other athlete except Michael Jordan.

George Foreman's present trip to Ireland has been five years in the making, but its roots go back further than that. When I introduced Foreman to Father Joe Young days before his 1989 fight against Gerry Cooney, he mentioned to the Limerick priest that he would like to visit Ireland someday. The curate, with his eternal optimism, took that to be a promise to visit his parish at Southill, and has been after me to get Foreman to Limerick ever since. A few years ago we were sitting on the front porch of Foreman's ranch outside Marshall, Texas, when the subject came up again. Foreman asked about Father Joe's ministry, which I assured him was very much like his own inner-city domain in Houston, "except that the kids in this ghetto have blue eyes."

"They have lots of nice horses in Ireland, don't they?" asked Foreman, and I promised him he would see some of those, too.

At the time negotiations were underway for him to fight in Germany the following summer, and he pledged to make a detour to Ireland on the way. That fight never came off, but when we learned Foreman would be on the broadcast team for the Naseem Hamed-Paul Ingle fight in Manchester this weekend, we began plotting the stopover in Ireland.

Clearly touched by his Limerick experience, Foreman made his way through five stops around Southill Tuesday afternoon, quietly leaving behind three separate cheques for $20,000 apiece. Yesterday he mixed business with pleasure, touring a stud farm in Co Tipperary on the way to Dublin. He visits Our Lady's Children Hospital, Crumlim this morning before making his way on to Manchester, but by Tuesday evening he was plainly knackered, having been on the trot for nearly 36 sleepless hours. Told he looked like he was ready for bed, Foreman looked up with a twinkle in his eye.

"That's exactly where I'm going," said Big George. "But first I'm gonna EAT!"