George Foreman passed away on Friday at the age of 76. We had a rare friendship, and now all that is left are the memories.

But, thank the Lord, there are so many of them. On the mantlepiece of my fireplace, there is a bust of the late Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. The inscription reads, “Excellence In journalism from the Thurgood Marshall College Scholarship Committee, 2017.”

The presenter I chose was George Forman. He came although he had just had a knee replacement that hobbled him. He grabbed the bust and held it high as he spoke.

“Some of you don’t know each other,” he said. “Some of you may not know why you are here. You are here because through his written words, he has touched every one of you.”

And then he walked over to me, put his arm around my shoulder and told them, “He touched me — and I mean outside the ring — with the things he told me and the things he did.”

He was in pain, but he refused to show it. I will never forget that. That was George.

The little thoughtful things he did meant the most to me. Too many people judge him by his performance against Muhammad Ali in Zaire, where he lost an epic heavyweight bout in 1974 that will forever be known as the Rumble in the Jungle.

That was business.

I prefer to recall one night in front of the gift shop at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas when he asked me if I was waiting for someone to go to dinner with, and I told him my wife was inside buying T-shirts for our grandkids. He asked me to point her out. He walked inside and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Hello, little lady,” he said.

She is 5-foot-4 and George was bigger than Goliath.

She kept looking up and George kept looking down, and he laughed and said, “Your husband didn’t lie. You are beautiful.”

He came out to Las Vegas often and visited. He always remembered her name when he saw her. That, too, was George.

After he lost in Zaire, he launched an abortive comeback in 1977, and I was there in Puerto Rico when an underrated heavyweight named Jimmy Young gave him a terrific beating and George — after losing a unanimous decision — had to be supported by his trainer as he left the ring.

Someone told me that in the closed locker room, George ran to the shower and started to baptize himself. I thought at the time it was heat stroke.

But several years later, I saw a wire photo of him walking the streets of Marshall, Texas, with a bullhorn, preaching the Gospel. I called a fight guy I knew down there, gave him my phone number and asked him to pass it on to George, who called me at 4 a.m. New Jersey time.

He said, “You wanted to talk?”

Well, yeah.

“I’m here. So talk.”

“Well, I don’t know a polite way to ask, so I’ll just say it. Were you really preaching on street corners?”

“I was. Let me explain.”

And he did. I asked if I could write about this and his response was, “Not yet.”

He added: “Tell me what you know about the Bible. Not the Old Testament, because I know you are Jewish.”

So we talked about the New Testament. I knew more than he thought because in college I had a minor in comparative religion. I repeated my interview request and he repeated his “Not yet.”

There were more 4 a.m. phone calls, and I guess it was two or three years later when he said, “You can write whatever I told you, but no TV interviews. Do not give anyone this number.”

So, I wrote it, offered to mail it to George, and with his typical insight he said, “Don’t bother. I already read it. I will come to New Jersey and you can ask me anything on camera. Rent a hotel room near the airport and we will do it there, but no other reporters. By the way, I am going to start a comeback.”

Are you crazy? How hard did Ali hit you? You probably have to lose a hundred pounds.

“No, just 50.”

So, he eventually fooled the world. In his first comeback title fight, he lost a ferocious battle with Evander Holyfield, who later told me, “Nobody — I mean nobody — ever hit me as hard as he did.“

For his next title shot, the opponent was Michael Moorer. Teddy Atlas, Moorer’s trainer, invited me to watch Foreman tapes with Moorer to prepare for the fight. Atlas gave him an oral lesson in how to beat George:

“You must fight him on the outside. You can’t let him get close. You can’t hang a lazy jab or he will come over the top with a right and … and … damnit, pay attention or he will take your head off. Moorer continued laughing.

Moorer won the first seven rounds on two judges’ cards. By the 10th round, both of Foreman’s eyes were badly swollen. He could hardly see. But as Foreman later told me, “I didn’t care. He kept getting closer. That’s where I wanted him. I stopped his movement with a single jab and then I threw the right hand. He went down and he never got up.”

Foreman, at age 45, had reclaimed the heavyweight championship.

That night, I told him it hadn’t been a fight.

“What do you, mean?” he said.

“Hey, I was in Zaire. I saw what Ali did to you. I knew since that night how it affected you, the burden you carried. To me, this was more than a fight. It was the exorcism you were chasing.”

George listened and then said: “I dreamed about making this happen since Zaire. I should have found a way to get up in Zaire. I didn’t. I needed for tonight to happen just the way it did. Exorcism? Probably.”

It was a rare moment for a sensitive man in a brutal business. In that instant, the perennial smile disappeared from the laughing commercial spokesman, but then it came right back because that, too, was George Foreman.

He was a fighter and a salesman and a preacher, who retired with a record of 76 wins (68 knockouts) and five losses.

When I wrote my only novel, he asked if he could give me a blurb for the cover. It was the story of a Black-white love affair set against the background of the Newark riots of 1967.

Later he told me he had read it cover to cover. He knew my wife and I had been a mixed couple for more than 40 years.

“The kids in your book were so familiar, they reminded me of you two,” he said. “I understand they had a lot of heart — like you guys.“

He taught me the difference between being an acquaintance and a friend.

Jerry Izenberg is Columnist Emeritus for NJ Advance Media. He can be reached at [email protected].