Tris Dixon: “I was always aware of Matthew’s story. People had said for years it was the best story that had never been told.”

Tris Dixon: “I was always aware of Matthew’s story. People had said for years it was the best story that had never been told.”

Tris Dixon has been a big part of my boxing education. From his time with Boxing News, his must-see Boxing Life Stories, and as an author of some of the best and most important books ever written on the sport. Road to Nowhere released in 2014 was a labour of love for Dixon. A Greyhound bus pass was purchased, travelling across America on a shoestring budget searching for boxing’s forgotten heroes. It is a trip down memory lane in many ways, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Micky Ward, Jeff Chandler, Joey Giardello and more of boxing’s lost souls are brought back to life by the wonderful descriptive words of Dixon.

Many of the subjects in that book have been left damaged by the sport in various ways, and almost certainly at least part of the inspiration for his brilliant, thought-provoking and must-read Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing would have come from his time working on Road to Nowhere.

Donald McRae said about Damage:

‘Tris Dixon has written the book that boxing has always needed.’ And while McRae was very much right, I’m not sure it is what some of the people who make their living out of the sport wanted. Denial is easy to sit comfortably with when there are dirty dollars to be made.

Dixon has seen first-hand the damage that boxing can do to its brave warriors, and with it, the seed was planted to write the book he told me over Zoom:

“I wrote that book because my feelings were changing. I didn’t pluck that subject out of thin air and gradually start to change as I wrote it. All it did was reinforce the need to write it. I wrote that book because I felt there was a real need for it. There is a serious lack of knowledge and discussion about CTE in boxing and chronic brain injuries through the sport. So it didn’t change anything it just reinforced the fact that there is a lack of information out there and very few people knew about it and understood it. It made me realise that what I was doing was a good thing for families and fighters. I now have the satisfaction that it has helped a lot of fighters and families since it came out.”

While I personally don’t make a living out of the sport I still often question my involvement in the sport even at my level, even more so of late when I watched the shameless cash grab that was Tyson Fury vs Derek Chisora. It was distinctly uncomfortable viewing, and it wasn’t the lack of a competitive fight that was in the present, it was the thought of the future, and if Chisora now really has one. The experience left me numb, thinking about how could anyone with any kind of conscious put this fight on and how could anyone be finding this remotely entertaining. It most certainly wasn’t sport. But it was the aftermath that sickened me perhaps even more. Promoters being careful with their selection of words, and knowing full well that they would promote Chisora again if they could find the hook to use him again. Use, being the keyword.

Dixon does make his living from the sport, and despite all the bad in the sport, there is something about boxing that keeps drawing you back in. I asked him if he ever questioned his own involvement in the sport knowing full well the damage boxing can do:

“I don’t look at it like that. I think if I buried my head in the sand like some do and pretend it doesn’t exist. But I’ve written a piece in Damage that should stand the test of time. It’s trying to make things better for the fighters instead of trying to ignore it and pretending it will go away when it’s not. I do care about the sport and I want to leave the sport better than when I found it and I feel Damage will do that because it has become a real conversation. I think the awareness has been raised significantly because of the book and that should only help people.

“You don’t know who it will happen to. I’ve met a lot of fighters who have been damaged through boxing and spoken to a lot of families related to it. It certainly isn’t an easy subject to bring up, talk about and experience. But this is part of the sport and not just our sport. We know the dangers of chronic brain injuries exist in a lot of different sports. It exists in football, American football and rugby league and union.”

Dixon first met Matthew Saad Muhammad in 2000 and was featured heavily in Road to Nowhere. Matthew, was by that stage eight years into his long painful, unrewarding and lonely retirement, the gravy train long gone for the hangers-on. As were they. Dixon remarked it was now an entourage of one. The millions had long since gone and the old champion had fallen on hard times. Saad Muhammad was some fighter in his prime, the miracles never seemed to stop coming. On the brink of defeat so many times in his early career and in his time as the light-heavyweight champion of the world, only to rally and perform another miracle before the well ran well and truly dry. When the body had seen enough and given far too much beyond the point of repair, Saad Muhammad still continued on the long road to nowhere. It was beyond sad in those final painful years.

The two spent time together in Atlantic City and became friends and made a pact that one day Dixon would tell his story. However, that agreement took longer than expected to come to fruition:

“I was always aware of Matthew’s story. People had said for years it was the best story that had never been told and that it should have been a movie and the rest of it. So I was aware that this guy had this phenomenal story. And then when I was spending a lot of time with him in Atlantic City when I was trying to crack it as a journalist and he had fallen on hard times, and I think I mention it in the book, that nobody wants a book about a fighter who isn’t in the public eye anymore by an author nobody knows. I took it to an agent who liked the story’s premise but couldn’t get any interest from a publisher. I always knew Matthew’s story was exceptional but it is another thing trying to get a publisher involved particularly when you have no pedigree yourself.”

When the time was right to write his friend’s story, Dixon meticulously went back in time to all the old interviews and conversations he had done with Saad Muhammad and his former opponents for research for the now-released Warrior:

“By the time I transcribed our tapes I had about 20,000 words, so I had a lot of stuff that we did together. When I was living with Matthew in Atlantic City, there was a period of time over several weeks where I would get on the train to Philadelphia and go to the public library and go through all the old microfilms to try and find all his old fight reports, all the old previews and interviews and so forth. I was looking at old issues of the Bulletin, the Philadelphia Enquirer, and the New York Times. I wound up with a box full of cuttings from Matthew’s career because I was getting photocopies, so I accrued a huge collection of his fights. And back then I also interviewed a lot of his opponents like Marvin Johnson, Yaqui Lopez and so on.”

There is a famous if terribly sad story when Saad Muhammad was bankrupt and now working as a roofer in 2001 and already showing signs of decay and Dixon and the former world champion travelled to New York with fake credentials to watch the Bernard Hopkins Felix Trinidad fight at the iconic Madison Square Garden. The fake credentials didn’t work and the aspiring journalist had to nearly max his credit card to buy the cheapest seats available so the pair could get in. The cheap seats were a far cry from what the old champion was used to and another visible cruel sign of how far he had fallen. The Hall of Famer had to sit and watch as far lesser fighters were given the ringside introduction treatment.

Dixon had spent some of his then very limited resources on two custom-made t-shirts with Team Saad emblazoned on them. He gave one of them to his friend. During the course of the evening, Saad Muhammad sold the t-shirt for $20 and a replacement lumberjack shirt.

“It was a really sad story. I was pissed at the time, I was mad about it because it kind of meant something, I’ve still got mine. It was one of only two ever made, I would love to know where the other one is. I was upset because it meant something to me but when he said I have to eat it made more sense, it doesn’t put food on the table.”

How the story of his friend played out is bitterly painful, and writing Warrior was equally painful for Dixon:

“Some of Matthew’s story was very upsetting, especially in the later years. I remember hitting a wall thinking I don’t need to see that for a few weeks, I am going to take a break and revisit it. I think there are about 115,000 words in there and I managed to source about seventy pictures so it is a pretty comprehensive book, a lot of it through his eyes. One of the saddest things is, when you go back to his heyday he was so determined not to become a boxing stereotype and not wanting to finish up punchy. Matthew talked about retiring with his faculties and getting out of boxing and living a nice life and going into different businesses. He was determined that it wasn’t going to end that way. But inevitably fighters get sucked back in and they can’t make that break from it. Unfortunately for Matthew, I think he trusted the wrong people with his money and in 1984 he ended up with very little money and a very deep dark spiral started from which he never really emerged.”

Warrior is a heavily researched book and a thoroughly engrossing read and while it is deeply uncomfortable at times as the Matthew Saad Muhammad story winds down to his sad inevitable conclusion, it comes highly recommended.