Talented Muhammad defies labels

LAS VEGAS – Eddie Mustafa Muhammad trains boxers, but he’s not a guy you can pigeonhole as a boxing trainer.

He drives a Mercedes 600 SL convertible, put enough kids through college to field a basketball team and always has something in his pocket for a down-on-his-luck fighter with a sob story. He isn’t rich, though, he laughs vociferously.

“I am blessed. Truly, I am blessed, for what I have,” Muhammad said. “I worked. I bled, for every single thing I have. I haven’t spent a day in jail. I haven’t had a single problem with the police. I have nine children. None of them have ever – EVER – been in any trouble. All the ones who wanted to go to college, I sent ‘em. I paid for ‘em. Myself. My money.”

He’s a former world champion who was tough enough to have beaten guys like Matthew Saad Muhammad and Marvin Johnson in a golden age for light heavyweights, yet he’s as loyal as a puppy dog.

Muhammad, who has prepared Chad Dawson to challenge Antonio Tarver on Saturday at The Palms Hotel for the IBF light heavyweight title in a bout that will be televised live on Showtime, refused to turn his back on his fighter even though they don’t have much of a history together. Muhammad began training Dawson a year ago, when Dawson and Floyd Mayweather Sr. began having personal problems.

Three weeks ago, Muhammad said he received a call from someone in WBC heavyweight champion Samuel Peter’s camp, begging him to get on the next plane to Germany.

Peter is defending his belt in Berlin against Vitali Klitschko on the same day as Dawson is fighting Tarver.

“Believe me, it would have been a lot more money to go over there,” Muhammad said.

Peter was having issues with his trainer to the point where the camp was in near revolt. The person who had called Muhammad was pleading with him.

“The easy thing to do would have been to tell Chad what had happened and gone ahead and gotten on the plane and gone on over,” Muhammad said. “But I gave the man my word I would have his back and I’m going to finish the job I came to start.”

And that’s why Mayweather Sr., who is notorious for being quick to insult other trainers, is effusive in his praise not only of Muhammad’s ability in the gym, but of his character.

“This man right here,” Mayweather Sr. says, poking a finger in the middle of Muhammad’s chest a while back at the Top Rank Gym, “this man right here, he ain’t just a good person in the boxing game. He’s a good person in any game, in any part of life. They don’t make them better than this man.”

But good men often face big challenges and Muhammad faces many each day, some because of his race and others because of his religion.

Growing up as a black man, discrimination and racism are as much a part of life as breakfast, lunch and dinner. When he’s driving his car with the top down and wearing his sunglasses to protect his eyes because of the bad allergies he suffers from, he frequently gets nasty looks from drivers of cars who pull up next to him at lights.

“They do like this,” Muhammad said, sneering and then slowly turning his head, first left, then right. “And you know what they’re thinking. They see a black guy with sunglasses in a car like that and they think, ‘Gotta be a drug dealer.’ There ain’t a day that goes by in my life I don’t see things like that. Not one.”

Muhammad is active in The Teamsters and is president of a union for boxers, the Joint Association of Boxers, which already has over 2,000 members. He’s politically active as well and was recently out campaigning on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

He was at a factory when he met a white woman who was a member of The Teamsters. He began to plead Obama’s case.

“I introduced myself and said, ‘Hi, I’m Eddie. Who are you voting for?’ ” he said. “She kind of smiled like she was uncomfortable and said she wasn’t sure. I said, ‘Well, that’s OK. I just want to let you know that McCain is not pro-union. Obama is pro-union. And you’re a Teamster, right?’ She says, ‘Yes, I’m a Teamster.’ And so I told her Barack was for all our issues, but I could see there was something still holding her back.

“Finally, she said, ‘I don’t know. He’s a Muslim.’ And I said, ‘Really? So how do you think this conversation is going? You and I are getting along fine aren’t we? We aren’t having problems, are we?’ And she shakes her head no. She said she was happy with it and was enjoying the conversation.”

Muhammad then told her his name and the secret, that he was a Muslim. The woman recoiled in horror. But as he’s been able to do at so many critical turns in his life, Muhammad eased the situation.

He made the woman feel good about herself and the conversation. He told her he wasn’t insulted and wanted her to leave with a positive feeling.

“It’s out there, believe me it’s out there,” he said. “You could go crazy if you would let it. There are certain things you cannot accept, but outside of those things, the little insults and the things that people don’t even realize that they do that hurt, you just let them pass. In this life, we have to care about each other.”

And part of the reason why he’s such an esteemed trainer is because of his willingness to step into a ring and stop a fight when it’s appropriate.

There isn’t a fighter alive who hasn’t complained when his corner or a referee has stopped a fight, but those who work with Muhammad in their corner know that Muhammad won’t allow them to take one punch they shouldn’t take.

Complain or not, championship or not, Muhammad will stop a fight when he believes it’s time and won’t let anyone convince him otherwise. Pleas for an extra round fall on deaf ears. Ringside physicians love him for it, because they know if his fighter is in trouble and Muhammad is sitting calmly, the fighter is probably all right.

“He loves those kids,” said Rafael Garcia, who works the corner with Muhammad for many of his fighters. “He knows how hard this game is. If a kid has had enough, he tells them. He doesn’t care if they get mad, because he knows that in the long run, they’ll know he was right.”

He doesn’t have a big stable and he’s not known as a “super trainer,” seemingly the private realm of men such as Mayweather Sr., Emanuel Steward, Freddie Roach, Buddy McGirt, Nacho Beristain, Kenny Adams and a few others.

He doesn’t seek attention, though he didn’t have to judging by the steady stream of people who made their way over to see him prior to a news conference Wednesday at The Palms. It was almost like people awaiting an audience with the pope.

There were hugs and smiles and handshakes and backslaps constantly. He was out of his seat a lot more than he was in it.

“You see how he is,” Garcia said. “He loves being around the people.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, Muhammad, like most other Americans, awoke to the devastating news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. His mother phoned him after the first plane hit the tower.

He turned on the television and saw the second, though he thought it was a replay of the first.

“It was devastating,” Muhammad said. “This is my country. This is the country I have loved and I’ve worked hard to make better. And I’m watching it get attacked on television and watching all of these innocent people die. It was horrifying.”

It got worse, though. As a Muslim, Muhammad was quickly lumped with the radical extremists who had perpetrated the attacks. Suddenly, he and his fellow Muslims “were on the defensive. Our way of life, our religion, our freedom in this country, was under attack. Muslims aren’t bad people. I’ve devastated by the loss of life and the destruction and then it’s coming back on me.”

It got more than personal for him about a week later. His sister, Pattia, was walking down a street in New York, a block from Ground Zero, and was wearing her burqa, when some men encountered her and began harassing her.

“I wanted to get on a plane and go hunt those guys down myself,” Muhammad said.

Muhammad, who said he makes a stop at Ground Zero in remembrance of the victims on every one of his trips to New York, realized it was a mistake to even consider it for more than a second.

And do he decided to use the philosophy that has been successful for him in so many other parts of his life.

“I have been fortunate and I have gotten some knowledge in certain areas of life, and I believe it is my obligation to share that knowledge,” he said. “I share my boxing knowledge, to help make my fighters better. I share my business knowledge, to help the fighters be better citizens and to live better lives. If I can do something for someone and help them and help make them a better person, that makes the world a little better. And that’s a positive thing they can say about me when I’m gone, that at least I tried to make the world a better place and to help those who I came into contact with.”