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HE had a rough, lined face, battle scars above both eyes, a nose that had been battered flat but he still had a champion’s smile. The T-shirt he wore was navy blue. On the left chest there was a pair of boxing gloves and the initials MSM. Centralised on the back over two lines were the words Team Saad.
Former WBC light-heavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad had fallen on hard times and was living in Atlantic City at the turn of the century, 20 years on from his time at the top of the sport. He was around 50, working as a roofer and rising as early as 4am to get to work each day. The $4million-plus he’d made in the late-70s and early-80s was long gone. Beyond bankruptcy, he’d wound up owing the IRS more than quarter of a million dollars.
He’d become a tragic cliché, falling from star and pound-for-pound contender to an also-ran whose name was used to pad the records of up-and-comers. Then he became a sparring partner. When some commissions refused to licence him on the grounds of reduced skills, he travelled further afield to slip through the loopholes of the less strict regulatory bodies and jurisdictions. When 10 disastrous years of bleeding his name dry came to an end, he had a spell training fighters but it didn’t work out and with bills to pay he found work as a roofer for the union. Ironically, some days he was working on the roofs of the big Atlantic City casinos and it wasn’t lost on him that he was the boxer who instigated the New Jersey seaside resort town becoming a fight capital. His first bout with John Conteh opened the door for big-time boxing to come to the Boardwalk – in all
