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March
/ april 2006:
The
COntender
Israeli boxer Merhav Mohar came to Atlanta for one reason: To knock out his opponent and keep his 16-1 record intact. One coma and a brain shifting injury later, he's just happy to still be breathing. Now with an uncertain future, he's calling Atlanta home.
Story by Benyamin Cohen | Photo by Alex Martinez
Merhav Mohar is still fighting. Not for bragging rights. Not for a welterweight title. Not even for respect. Twenty-two year old Merhav Mohar, once Israeli boxing’s prodigal son, is now fighting for a reason to live.
In the sixth round of a world championship fight held, in of all places, Gwinnett County, Mohar saw his life flash before his eyes. With a scorecard advantage, he was mere minutes from being declared the winner and a lifetime of wealth, fame, and happiness.
But God had other plans that night.
Out of nowhere, a powerful left hook to his head knocked the fighter unconscious. Three days later, he awoke bruised, bloodied, and barely breathing in the trauma unit of Grady Memorial Hospital to the voices of doctor’s telling him his brain had actually shifted almost two inches off its core. The wallop, combined with one helluva subdural hematoma, had caused massive bleeding throughout his entire head. Doctors were unsure if he would survive and rushed him into surgery.
Just moments before the doctors were to drill holes in his head, a nurse ran in with a new scan of Mohar's head. His brain had miraculously moved back into place and the bleeding had subsided.
He had severe back pain, could barely walk, and was doped up on morphine. But he was alive, barely. After months of rigorous recuperation and rehabilitation, coupled with the mental anguish of losing his dream, Merhav has been advised he can never return to the sport that nearly robbed him of his still youthful life. Indeed, the doctors don't even want him jogging down the street for fear of his brain falling off its pedestal.
So now, after years of training, the 22-year-old is bereft of a career, much less a reason to wake up in the morning. "I'm like Moses," the surprisingly philosophical Merhav says. "God took Moses and let him lead all these people and do all this s--t and he stops at the gates of Israel never to go in."
“I spent years fighting for my dreams. I was 12 minutes
away from being a champion. I gotta pick up the pieces.”
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Unable to box himself, Merhav now teaches the sport two nights a week at the Velocity Gym in Sandy Springs. That’s where I find him today, dressed in a blue sweatshirt with “Jewboys” emblazoned across its front and a baggy pair of jeans worn urban style practically falling off his size 28 waist. A blue baseball cap covers the former Israeli soldier’s military haircut.
As he warms up, he removes the sweatshirt to reveal a tattoo across the length of his right arm. It’s in Hebrew and is the last verse of the Israeli national anthem. It speaks of faith and optimism. “My grandma was in Auschwitz. She had a number on her arm,” he says as he stretches. “My hope is on my right arm.”
For Mohar, the devastating injury has made hope a commodity that doesn’t come in spades. The finality of the defeat has robbed him of an identity. Yet, as if a prophet, Mohar had already begun searching to redefine himself before he even stepped onto the red Georgia clay.
Landing on the shores of New York months before his Atlanta bout, the 5’9” 140-pound boxer was only planning on staying in America for a couple weeks to fight his 13th match in Brooklyn. The subsequent media hype after a first round knockout led Mohar to reconsider leaving the U.S. so soon. “I realized the possibilities that the U.S. boxing market had to offer,” he says.
So he decided to stick around and see how far he could take his new career. At first, it didn’t take him far. A shady business manager took advantage of the naïve athlete and quickly stole what little he had already earned, leaving Mohar with nothing more than $150 in his pocket and the clothes on his back. Dirt poor, the once star of Israeli boxing took odd jobs — mopping floors, bartending, even modeling — just to make rent.
With nowhere to turn, a close friend invited the embattled Mohar to stay with him in his tiny apartment in Crown Heights, the epicenter of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. With nowhere else to turn and no clue that he was entering America’s most Chasidic neighborhood, Mohar moved in.
This was not the first time Mohar, a secular Israeli, felt like the odd man out. A few weeks after being born in Haifa, Mohar’s family moved to Kenya where he and his older brother spent most of their youth. An Israeli in Africa, he was different. But when he moved to the States, that sense of self was lost. “In New York, I was just one among millions,” he recalls. “I needed to identify who I was. Being Jewish is special.”
That desire to define himself allowed him to enter the Lubavitch neighborhood with open arms. “It’s kind of like going to jail,” he says of his first few months in New York. “I was alone. I didn’t have any friends. So I found Judaism. My belief in God grew. It was comforting.”
With renewed strength and vigor, Mohar started training at the famed Gleason’s Gym under the tutelage of the legendary Hector Roca, Hilary Swank’s boxing coach for the film Million Dollar Baby. Harking back to his time spent in the Israeli military, Mohar fought under the nickname “The Sergeant” and entered the ring draped in an Israeli flag and camouflage shorts with a Star of David on them.
A new, more honest, manager stepped in and helped him fight to sold out crowds. He quickly racked up a 16-1 record with 10 knockouts, and won 14 straight matches. His unique story and unbelievable winning streak made him a popular ticket. “They loved me in Las Vegas,” he recalls with a smile on his face. HBO broadcast his victory in a Los Angeles arena in front of thousands. An Israeli-based documentary crew decided to follow Mohar around to tell his underdog tale to the world.
Little did they know, the upcoming trip to Atlanta would make their story a lot more interesting.
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It’s a recent Friday night and Mohar is having Shabbat dinner with half a dozen rabbinical students at the home of a Sandy Springs family. His Lubavitch connections in New York hooked him up with the local branch here and he’s quickly made friends amongst the bearded set.
A veritable feast waits on the table. Six different kinds of salad, homemade hummus, and some kind of vegetable soup. And this is just the appetizers. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s paying attention to the food anyway. At the moment, all eyes are transfixed on Mohar as he’s asked, as I’m sure he frequently is, to retell the events of that fateful fight.
“That night I was born again,” he says, not realizing his resurrection metaphor may not go over so well with the rabbis in training.
“I lost my own fight,” he says pensively. “He didn’t beat me. It wasn’t all for nothing. I failed, straight up, I failed. I’m just like all the other people who talked and talked and didn’t achieve what they wanted to do.” He shifts in his seat.
“Nobody likes a has-been. And unfortunately, right now, I’m a has-been.”
Despite the fact that the documentary film crew caught the infamous blow to his brain from multiple camera angles making it ripe for instant replay study, Mohar has only watched it once. And that was more than enough.
“The only thing I noticed in the video was my uncle. He was holding my hand and saying, ‘You’re a champ’. He was in the Israeli army. He’s a true f--king commander. He was telling everyone what to do.”
While spreading hummus on a slice of challah, he explains how Xavier “The X-Man” Tolliver, an African American fighter from College Park, knocked the bejeezus out of him in the sixth round. And since this is dinner, Mohar is reluctant to give the gory details. “Suffice it to say, I was basically laying there dying.”
After five days at Grady, Mohar spent a week recuperating with a local Israeli family. “They basically opened their home to me and let my friends and family stay there.” Still barely able to walk and with severe back pain, he endured an 11-hour flight back to the Holy Land to regroup and figure out what to do with the rest of his life.
Even before landing back at Ben Gurion Airport, he had his answer. “I wasn’t ready to give up,” he remembers. “I wasn’t ready for someone to tell me I’ve lost. Even if I came back to America for one day and then decided to turn around, it would be me making that decision.”
Figuring Atlanta was as good a city as any to make a new beginning, he returned to the place where his life was thrown off kilter. The night of the knockout, Mohar actually had plans to go on a first date with an Atlanta girl he had just met. That obviously never happened. But she visited him every day in the hospital and over the next few weeks they grew close. “We fell in love,” he says, making fake quotation marks in the air.
Upon his return to Atlanta, he moved in with her. To make ends meet he began working at a clothing store near Underground Atlanta. And, those gathered at the Shabbat table are happy to hear, he’s reconnecting with his faith.
“I’ve always been a religious man,” he tells the rabbinical students. “At first, it was boxing, not Judaism.”
It’s nearing midnight when the dessert is brought to the table. The night is clearly getting late and Mohar is tired. But before he leaves, enraptured by his tale, someone at the table asks how Judaism has helped him in his journey. “The answers I need, I need to find for myself. Judaism will make me find it faster. It gives me strength.”
With that, Mohar hugs everyone goodbye and goes off into the darkness.
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Back at the gym, the room vibrates with music blaring out of the speakers. “Cypress Hill,” Mohar interjects naming the band. “It’s old school.”
His urban attire notwithstanding, he claims not to like this genre of music. “I don’t like the Southern hip hop, ghetto fabulous, baby daddy in jail thing.” A member of the film crew is standing a few feet off to the side chronicling our musicology conversation for all posterity.
“Merhav is certainly made of the stuff that champions are made of,” says Arik Davidovich, one of the film’s producers. “He’s charismatic, knowledgeable, and lyrical. It’s the conflict between the sensitivity of his soul and the brute force of the profession that’s taking a toll on his body. But it hasn’t broken his spirit. As a true fighter, he will find his way back to the ring or soon create a new arena for himself.”
Those new arenas, Mohar tells me, include his grandiose plans to start his own urban clothing line or to create an after school program to teach Jewish children self defense. “There is prosperity after boxing. I can still model,” he says half jokingly.
When I ask Mohar how his life would be different had he won that night, he responds the way you’d expect him to. “That’s a big heavy question. On an emotional and long term level it’s very hard for me to answer,” he says, pausing for a moment to collect his thoughts. “There are things that change your whole life. I would’ve been more satisfied. I would’ve been a whole man. I would’ve achieved my own personal greatness.”
Mohar’s a man in search of a mission — and money. Since my first encounter with Mohar, he was fired from his retail job near Underground Atlanta because, he claims, he refused to work on Shabbat. Another clothing store, this one at Stonecrest Mall, did the same thing. He sifts through the classifieds daily. “It’s odd,” he admits. “When I was a boxer, I had a reason to be poor. I’m not ready to compromise on anything. It’s not money or fame I want. I wanted to achieve that goal. Being a boxer made me who I am. I lost my identity.”
He maintains that identity by moonlighting as a personal trainer in his spare time. “That’s what I do for money,” he explains. “What I do for a living — that’s another question.”
Asked whether he’d go through all the pain again, he’s quick to respond. “Sometimes it’s not about the road you travel, but about the destination. I’ve learned many things and now I have a good story to tell.”
Well, the documentary crew surely thinks so. They’re hoping for a happy ending. And they might just get it.
I ask Mohar where he sees himself in five years. “Hopefully happier than I am today. Hopefully with a reason to live. With God’s help.”
He looks off into the distance. “I hope I will be leading, not following. I hope I will be inspiring. I hope I can make a difference. And that’s all I can say.”
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