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The Contender debuted on NBC on March 7, 2005. This text is a part of a month-to-month collection all through 2025 — the twentieth anniversary 12 months — catching up with alumni of the present.
You possibly can name Tarick Salmaci a number of issues. You possibly can name him a adorned newbie boxer who almost made the 1992 U.S. Olympic group. You possibly can name him a revered professional who was as soon as lined up for a brilliant middleweight title shot towards Joe Calzaghe. You possibly can name him a likeable character on the lone NBC-televised season of The Contender. You possibly can name him a product of the Kronk Health club who turned himself right into a profitable Detroit-area realtor.
However when you’re Sergio Mora, you simply name him “Furniture.”
Anybody who indicators as much as go on a actuality TV present is handing their story over to the producers and editors — and people producers and editors determined in placing collectively the primary season of The Contender 20 years in the past that Salmaci’s story was not one they wished to focus an excessive amount of on telling.
“Believe it or not, I was one of the main characters in the loft during my time on the show,” Salmaci, 52, displays. “But I didn’t win my first fight. Had I won my first fight, you would have seen a lot more of me. But a lot of my character moments were cut out, and I understand why — because I lost in the first round.
“So when it aired on TV, Sergio and I were joking around. I was like, ‘What the hell? Where’s all the funny stuff that happened? I’m not doing shit. I’m just, like, furniture on there.’ And Sergio started cracking up. He goes, ‘You’re furniture.’ That became an inside joke with him, to call me ‘Furniture.’”
Mora, in fact, went on to win the Contender match and get an abundance of display screen time alongside the way in which. Salmaci is a comparatively forgotten solid member. However to not his fellow contestants. When it was over — maybe as a result of he was older than most, extra settled down than most, and able to retire from the struggle sport — he emerged as that man who maintains the connections with extra of his fellow alumni than simply about anybody else.
And he has nothing however fond reminiscences of his time on The Contender, even when a lot of these reminiscences ended up on the cutting-room ground.
“Man, it was a great experience, getting to know these guys,” Salmaci says. “What I took away from being there is, deep down, everyone’s the same. I don’t care what race you are, where you’re from, how you grew up, we’re human beings, your core values are the same. If you’re a good person, you’re a good person, no matter where you’re from or what you do. Had I not been on that show, I never would gotten to know a guy like Brent Cooper, from Tennessee, with the cowboy hat — I never would have spoken to a guy like that. But you get to know him, and you have a relationship, and you realize, we’re all the same.
“Being in the loft and not having any type of phone, no internet, nothing, we only had each other for entertainment, and you really make a bond with these guys that you never expected.”
These bonds have been purely optimistic as soon as the present was over. Throughout filming, nevertheless, they sophisticated the whole lot.
“You go on the show with a mindset, ‘I’m not gonna get close to anybody because I’m gonna have to fight these guys. There’s a million dollars on the line, and I’m gonna keep my business private,’” Salmaci mentioned. “But, these producers, they know what they’re doing. When you go on that show and you have no other forms of entertainment, you start telling each other family secrets and confiding in each other. I believe that affected a lot of guys on that show, getting to know your opponent beforehand. A lot of guys may have had more respect for people than they should have going into the ring.”
When Salmaci lastly obtained his likelihood to field within the present’s seventh episode, it wasn’t an extra of respect for the a lot youthful Juan De La Rosa that value him. Salmaci pins his five-round unanimous determination loss to the undefeated De La Rosa on an assortment of things, most of them stemming from the truth that he’d been retired from boxing for greater than three years when The Contender lured him again. His timing was off, he’d gone on a crash food plan to get down from about 185 kilos to 158 in two months, and he simply wasn’t as fast at 32 because the 19-year-old De La Rosa was.
Salmaci fought yet another time after that, dropping a five-round majority determination to Jimmy Lange on The Contender finale card, and although co-host Sugar Ray Leonard tried to persuade him to maintain preventing, Salmaci knew he’d reached the tip.
To completely perceive why that was the tip for him, you need to return to the start. Raised in Dearborn, Michigan, the son of Lebanese immigrants, Salmaci began boxing at age 8 and first set foot within the world-famous Kronk Health club at 13 — proper on the peak of Tommy Hearns’ recognition, within the mid ‘80s. He traveled the country alongside future welterweight contender Oba Carr, with Carr’s dad, Eddie, coaching him.
Like most of the prime amateurs coaching on the Kronk, Salmaci developed a bond with Emanuel Steward.
“Emanuel used to come over our house like every few months, we’d be cooking a Middle Eastern barbecue in the back, and we were in a lower-income neighborhood, and Emanuel would show up in his Rolls Royce convertible,” Salmaci recalled. “I was like 13, 14, 15 years old, and Emanuel was at the top of his game, and looking back now — who had time to do that, you know what I mean? Emanuel took so much time for us kids. You know, we’d never been to nice restaurants in our life, and he’d pick like 10 or 12 of us up in a gold limo and take us to the most expensive restaurant in Detroit.”
Steward wasn’t the one boxing icon Salmaci encountered as a child. When he was 10, he met Muhammad Ali in individual and handed him a letter he’d written. Their interplay was temporary, however Ali made some extent to inform younger Tarick to remain off medicine and in class and hearken to his dad and mom.
The following morning, as Salmaci was on the brink of go away for college, his telephone rang. He forgot that he’d written his household’s telephone quantity on the letter he gave Ali. Positive sufficient, it was Ali calling, blowing Salmaci’s thoughts.
Whereas Salmaci’s good friend Carr turned professional at 17 in 1989, Tarick stayed newbie in hopes of creating the ’92 Olympic group, and damned close to did, dropping within the finals of the Olympic Trials to Pepe Reilly.
The skilled ranks beckoned after that, and Salmaci turned professional below supervisor Jackie Kallen and, in 1997, in his sixteenth struggle, received a regional title that quickly made him a compulsory to Joe Calzaghe. The title shot was scheduled, however Calzaghe obtained injured, and issues spiraled for Salmaci — managerial points, coach modifications, one factor after one other till, in 1999, on a Naseem Hamed undercard at Joe Louis Enviornment in Detroit, Salmaci discovered himself in with last-minute sub Kippy Warren, a 6-foot-3 southpaw. Salmaci and Steward, who was by then his head coach, realized Warren was a southpaw on the similar time: when Warren began shadowboxing out of that stance because the ring announcer launched the fighters.
Salmaci misplaced an eight-round majority determination, didn’t struggle once more for a year-and-a-half, and determined in March 2001, shortly after his twenty ninth birthday, after a win improved his professional report to 18-1, that he’d had sufficient after greater than 20 years in boxing. “I was tired of the politics and the false promises, and just the frustration from boxing,” he remembers.
Ali’s phrases about staying in class impressed him to complete up his research, and he graduated from the College of Michigan in 2002 and commenced his actual property profession. He and his spouse Dena had their daughter Ava that very same 12 months, and boxing was the furthest factor from Salmaci’s thoughts.
Till he obtained a name from reality-TV producer Mark Burnett’s workplace in 2004.
They’d heard about Salmaci and his story and preferred the thought of getting a extra skilled fighter in the home who’d gotten near the highest however by no means obtained his shot. They satisfied him to audition in Detroit, and regardless that he hadn’t been in a health club in three years, Tarick got here to satisfy them and introduced a VHS tape of his highlights — which he remembers he “literally had to blow dust off of.” He had no thought they wished to see him spar in individual. He had to return house and get his gear, then got here again to the health club and sparred, and appeared ok to get an interview with the casting director. From there, it was off to L.A. as one of many closing 45 for 10 days of intense exams, and ultimately got here a knock on his resort room door from Sylvester Stallone and Leonard telling him he’d made the solid.
“I didn’t really grasp the concept of what the show was going to be,” Salmaci admits. “Nobody quite knew what it was going to look like. But, let me tell you, I heard ‘a million dollars,’ and I was in.”
Quick-forward a couple of 12 months to his loss to Lange, which dropped his report to 19-3 (5 KOs), and Salmaci was, for the second time, all finished preventing.
“In this game, you have to have passion. There’s no 90 percent, 80 percent. You gotta be all in 110% — you gotta love what you’re doing every single day to succeed, the way Floyd Mayweather did it,” he says. “I had a talk with Sugar Ray Leonard. Sugar Ray says, ‘I want you to keep fighting.’ He believed in me. But, you know, you can’t lie to yourself. I was like, ‘Do I have the passion I had before?’ I didn’t feel it. And I saw what happened to other fighters. They were great, but they lose that passion, they start getting hit more, they start getting knocked out because that split second makes a big difference, you know. You lose a split second in boxing, that’s everything.”
Plus, in fact, along with his faculty diploma and his actual property profession, Salmaci had different choices.
It could be simple for a boxer who simply barely missed competing within the Olympics in Barcelona, who was as soon as on the cusp of a title shot however by no means landed it, and who obtained one final likelihood on a mainstream community TV present however misplaced his first struggle, to look again with regrets. Salmaci, although, has none.
“I’m a firm believer, everything happens for a reason,” he says. “My boxing career could have gone in a different direction and maybe I could have fought for a world championship, but I could have gotten knocked out or gotten hurt. And instead here I am, president of the Tarick Salmaci Group at American Realty Group — and being on The Contender even helped with the business, with people feeling like they knew me a little bit.”
Salmaci factors out that his outdated good friend Oba Carr is now in a nursing house, one among boxing’s numerous tragic tales. Salmaci was additionally a good friend and sparring companion of Gerald McClellan’s at one time. He has purpose to not suppose a lot about sliding doorways or to want his in-ring profession went in another way. (He’s actually concerned in Lisa McClellan’s Ring of Brotherhood Basis, and located one other solution to keep linked to boxing final November when he was appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a member of the Michigan Unarmed Fight Fee.)
No matter disappointment there could also be when it comes to his outcomes on The Contender, it was price it to Salmaci for the friendships he shaped — with Mora, with Jesse Brinkley, with Peter Manfredo, Jr., who texts Salmaci memes each morning.
And he left the present with numerous heat reminiscences of his time in that loft — even when the viewing public solely obtained to share in a choose few of them.
