Boxing: Amir Mansour ‘Prepared to Die’ to Beat Dominic Breazeale

PHILADELPHIA -- Amir Mansour carries the veneer well. He’s so relaxed, so smooth and poised that you can’t believe he’s been through so much, especially looking at his sharply defined face.

That’s when you note two glaring features: the cuts, one high on his right cheekbone, the other at the corner of his right eyebrow. They came from a car accident and slippery church shoes. It’s hard to believe that there aren’t more abrasions. It’s also hard to fathom that he’s 43, with a chiseled physique that belies his age, and that his ability to knock people out, he says, comes from his mother. Words spill from his mouth in eloquent passages.

But, as he mentally unfolds his past like luggage on a hardwood floor, each incident lands with a thud. At 10, he was on the streets dealing drugs. At 12, he was barely able to see over the steering wheel in high-speed car chases. At 17, he was incarcerated for the first time. He eventually did three prison stints for drugs, learning one valuable lesson during 16 years and eight months in the can: that he doesn’t want to go back.

That realization came to him in a glaring epiphany as he sat in a 10-by-10 cell with a shank in his hand, about to kill someone. It came from rolling around in a wheelchair from a mishap in prison, where nothing is pure coincidence.

Mansour doesn’t dwell on the past. At least, he says, he tries not to. He doesn’t stew over missed opportunities. The power-punching Mansour is determined to live in the present, and the present will not get any grander than his meeting this Saturday night against former college quarterback and U.S. Olympian Dominic Breazeale (16-0, 14 KOs) in a 10-round heavyweight fight on Fox from Staples Center in Los Angeles. The main event will feature the welterweight fight between Danny Garcia and Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero for the vacant WBC title.

Mansour’s story is far from unique in boxing. What is distinctive is that Mansour (22-1-1, 15 KOs) is still try-ing to make something out of boxing at 43. Looking his fight résumé, the only spike that arises is the 10-round war he lost to Steve Cunningham on April 4, 2014, in which he had “USS” down twice in the fifth round.

Look more closely at his ledger and it has one of those dubious gaps. Nine years, to be exact, from June 1, 2001, to Aug. 27, 2010. That was his last prison stay.

“It’s why I keep looking ahead, and why your rearview mirror is so tiny and your windshield is so large,” says Mansour. “I don’t make excuses. What I did was wrong. But it took me three stays to get it right. Rock bottom for me was one time in a cell with this guy, just me and him. He had a blade and I had a blade. Someone was going to get ready to die, when we decided to have a mutual truce. He backed off and then I backed off.

“I was so angry at myself that I was in this type of situation, and how far down I was. I had to live like this, like an animal. That was my rock bottom, about six years into my third stint. If I took his life, I was done. If he took my life, I was done. No one was going to win. It’s when you have to live like that, with cans on your cell doors because guys would get bum-rushed when they’re asleep, that you wise up.”

Mansour makes it hard to believe he was guilty of anything, considering the person he is today. After his fight with Cunningham, it was Mansour that began a charitable function to raise money for Cunningham’s ailing daughter Kennedy, who underwent a heart transplant in December 2014.

Mansour began boxing during his first stay in prison. He was always good with his hands, an ability he feels he got from his mother, Jacqueline Moorer. During his last prison stay, Mansour even ran into someone that his mother had actually knocked out. The man asked Mansour if he was the son of “Pudding,” his mother’s nick-name.

His trainer, Philly’s legendary Moses Robinson, says Mansour has the kind of organic power of a young Mike Tyson.

“Boxing is like legal crime to me,” Mansour said. “Maybe this is my release, when I think about it, all the situ-ations and the guys I left behind [in prison]. It’s heartbreaking. Imagine having a son who’s 21 years old and he gets caught in the wrong crowd, and he might be guilty. But it’s the first time he’s ever been in trouble for any-thing and receives a life sentence for a non-violent crime. How would you feel about that? And about the sys-tem?

“I can go into any prison and find you thousands of young, black men like this -- not hundreds, thousands. I was one of them. I know. I’m angry over other people’s situations and I get to take that anger out in the ring. When I get into the ring, that’s all on my shoulders. That’s all on my back.”

Mansour says he’s desperate, but he is fighting another desperate, dangerous man in the Breazeale, who has stopped five of his last six opponents and can ill afford to lose to someone like Mansour.

Mansour wants to grow to a larger platform. To remain heard as an advocate for prisoners’ rights, he knows he has to continue winning in exciting fashion, considering the sliver of light still shining through his narrow ca-reer corridor.

Mansour has been incarcerated three times and survived being hit by a drunk driver. At 27, he ruptured three discs in his back from a fall in prison, which forced him into a wheelchair for four months. He had to learn to walk again.

“I’ve done drug deals with strangers. I’ve risked my life in abandoned buildings for a couple thousand dollars, so this is nothing compared to that,” said Mansour, who learned carpentry and became a paralegal in prison. “I knew every time I made a deal, my life was on the line. This is something legit. I’m prepared to die every time I step into that ring because I faced death. Is someone like Breazeale prepared to die?

“I go into the ring with the same mentality. I’m prepared to leave that ring in a bag if I have to, because his situation is nowhere near as desperate as mine.”

Joseph Santoliquito is the president of the Boxing Writ-er's Association of America and a frequent contributor to Sherdog.com's mixed martial arts and boxing cover-age. His archive can be found here.