I’ve not worn this shirt for 25 years.
It was the summer of 2001 and I was crashing on any number of sofas and pull-out beds in and around Atlantic City and spending countless hours with former light-heavyweight world champion Matthew Saad Muhammad.
He was labouring by day, making early starts, but we found plenty of time to talk, whether it was grabbing a sandwich here or there, going to fights, going to the gym… For it was Saad who often found me a place to stay at night.
I’d had plenty of nights in Atlantic City where I hadn’t had anywhere to go, and it’s not a pleasant place to be.
The homeless population drifts around the Boardwalk and the further you leave that comparative safe haven and head inland, well, you could be in real trouble.
Saad made sure I wasn’t.
*
(Matthew and I in Atlantic City)
During our chats, Matthew would confide in me about how and why life had gone wrong for him. He hadn’t got off to a great start. He was abandoned by his brother on instruction of an aunt when he was only four, left alone on the streets of Philadelphia.
An orphanage, foster care, prison, it all followed, but what he wanted more than anything was to find his family.
In my early-twenties, it was unfathomable how a man who’d made millions no longer had a home, many possessions or much of anything, and I recall asking him about his memorabilia.
Later, people told me it was stolen or sold. He assured me it was in a lock-up in New Orleans, and I think there’s a chance all three could be true.
I was broke. There’s no other way of putting it. I can’t even really explain how I stayed out in the US as long as I did on rations but I guess it doesn’t cost a lot if you’re often without a place to sleep and you build up a tolerance of going two or three days at a time without food.
But I decided, anyway, that I would thank Matthew for all he was doing for me so one day, out near Pleasantville, I went to a printing shop and had two T-shirts created, one for him and one for me.
They were the same. They were navy blue and had MSM and a pair of boxing gloves on the left chest and Team Saad emblazoned across the back.
Even me, at I think about 22, thought they looked like cheap knock-offs, but later that day I presented Saad with his.
“Oh geez, who’s this for?” he asked shyly.
“It’s yours,” I replied.
“Maaaaannnn. No way. Look at this,” he said holding it up and investigating the front and back.
He was infinitely more thrilled with it than I was, and if he was faking it he did a stellar job.
He hurriedly put it on over his existing T-shirt and looked at himself in a mirror.
He was genuinely elated. I felt both embarrassed at the tacky gesture but delighted it had gone down so well.
**
I didn’t see Saad in the T-shirt for a while, nor did I expect to. Team Saad was something from 1980, when Matthew was flying high as the WBC champion. His entourage reached out well into double figures… a photographer, a chef, a bag carrier, trainer, security, publicist et al.
During this summer of 2001, I had Matthew pretty much to myself. We went for a sandwich at the famous White House in the city. We went to a boxing event in Delaware and I served as a ring card guy for a women’s fight.
We spoke at length about life, death and religion in the aftermath of 9/11 and we - along with a mutual friend - came up with an elaborate plan to attend the postponed bout between Felix Trinidad and Matthew’s fellow Philadelphian Bernard Hopkins at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The mutual friend was a low-key crook who’d spent years on boxing’s peripheries and, given that Don King was promoting the show, this guy hauled out an old DKP credential on a lanyard and started trying doctoring it so it would look like he had a way to get into the fight.
