HASIM 'THE ROCK' RAHMAN

March 14, 2006 - by Kevin Pearce

No matter what happens to Hasim Rahman when he steps into the ring against James Toney on Saturday night, it is unlikely that it will be the toughest night of his life.

How can it compare to the night when the teenage Hasim, trapped in a wrecked car, tried to console the friend that he did not know had already died? Or the time later, when police, seeing his ruined and nearly detached face, assumed he was dead as well?

"It's a night I don't like to think about much," Rahman told HBO's boxing producer Jon Crystal. "But I think everything happens for a reason. It was a way that God was telling me, 'slow down, you're moving too fast."

Perhaps the life-altering event, one of a series of occurrences that changed Rahman from a West Baltimore street kid into the once and future heavyweight champion, somehow explains his somewhat philosophical approach to life, and to fighting.

In the five years since he stunned the boxing world by knocking out heavyweight champ Lennox Lewis, Rahman remains the division's Man of Mystery. Which storyline is his? Is he still the man with the big right hand, one of only two fighters to knock out Lewis? The man whose 41-5-1 record is unfairly marred by disputed contests with Evander Holyfield and John Ruiz? The man who has steadily worked his way back to contender status and is now smarter and stronger than ever?

Or is he an unenthusiastic trainer, an inconsistent fighter who has never again approached his greatest moment, who went without a victory in five fights after Lewis, and who backed his way into a belt with the retirement of Vladimir Klitschko?

The truth is, Rahman has always been a difficult guy to stereotype. He walked into a gym for the first time at the advanced age of 20, and his amateur career consisted of a total of ten fights. He remembers himself as a tough kid from one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country, but his father - an engineer - forbid him to play football because it was too dangerous.

He was a talented swimmer as a boy, and played Little League; he was so good in school he had to learn to keep it to himself. "I was the only kindergartener in the class with second graders, and I had a lot of mouth," Rahman remembered. "They didn't appreciate that. So they used to rough me up. I always fought 'em back. But when you got an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, often times, the eight-year-old's gonna win."

Things changed for a young Hasim when his separated parents moved from Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighborhood to West Baltimore. Rahman saw an opportunity to reinvent himself. Never afraid to mix things up, he adopted a "bop" based on the strut of The Jeffersons' eponymous hero George and was soon spending less time in school and more time on the sidewalk.

"I was always getting into trouble," Rahman said. "Every street fight I got into from the time I was about 15 ended in a knockout. I mean the kind of knockouts that get you sent to prison."

It was that life that landed him in the wrecked car, lying in a pile of broken glass and facing 500 stitches. "My face was really gone," he said. "My head was two or three times the size it normally is."

It was also during that time that Rahman was shot in a drive-by aimed at one of his friends. Though a bullet went through his hand and one lodged in his spine, Rahman was so calm he planned to drive himself to the hospital until a friend talked him out of it. Looking back, he thinks that incident, too, was a warning of sorts: "A bullet goes through your hand, and you can still use it to make a living. A bullet hits your spine, but you're not paralyzed. It's almost like a miracle."

Hasim Rahman might have continued tempting fate, believing that he would be dead or in jail anyway by the time he was 21, but for two events. The first was a chance meeting with Brother Lou, a hard-edged neighborhood boxer who had made a name for himself as a professional. As Rahman remembers it, Lou goaded him into a "body challenge" -- a punching contest -- which Hasim won. "He said, 'Man, you gotta let me take you to the gym," Rahman said. "You'll make a million dollars."

The other event was the birth of his son. "When my son was born, I was really looking for something to do," Rahman says. "You know a child is gonna follow his dad. If the dad is a gangster or a killer or a drug dealer, the child's going to think: If it was good enough for my dad, it's good enough for me. And I didn't want that for my son."

Brother Lou never did show up to train Rahman, but he started working out there anyway. He worked his way up, eventually sparring with heavyweight Mike Whitfield, who was known as "Little Foreman."

"He beat me up," Rahman said. "He'd send me home with my jaw hurting so bad I had to chew gum all the way home."

Rahman was soon a professional himself, though he now regrets missing out on the long amateur careers that helped prepare his contemporaries. "A lot of things I had to learn as a pro, you know, that amateurs come into the game with," he said. "The more I go on, the more I fight, the less nervous I am going in."

Now, coming off a string of successes against mostly unaccomplished fighters, he says he has learned not to underestimate his opponents. Once again the WBC heavyweight beltholder, he is anxious to prove that he is still a boxer to be feared. "I'm going to make believers out of everybody," he said.

Because of the much-postponed and then aborted match with Klitschko, Rahman has been training since September, and reports are that he is in superb shape. And if his training focus needed any additional sharpening, he is trying to rebound from a bankruptcy filing, the result of a string of disastrous business breaks following his defeat of Lewis. Fit and hungry, he is still only 33 years old; he is younger, bigger and stronger than Toney.

But looking forward to the biggest heavyweight fight in years - and one of the most important in his career - the affable Rahman remains philosophical. "We fought for the title. We lost the title. We had our ups and downs," he told Crystal. "Then we had to rebuild everything, start over from scratch. And now I got a chance to defend the title again. And I'm gonna make the most of my opportunities."