“The Camden Buzzsaw” finally ground to a halt on Friday, when Dwight Muhammad Qawi – one of the great light heavyweights and cruiserweights – died at the age of 72.
Qawi was unique – a hand grenade of a man who stood less than 5ft 7ins but routinely whipped bigger men, and even moved up to heavyweight. He also did not have a single amateur fight before going pro, and made his professional debut just one month after being released from prison.
Qawi, then Dwight Braxton, served five-and-half years for an armed robbery when he was 19, and while prison was tough, he put his time there to good use.
He decided his life should take a different path. He studied and earned his general diploma, and he started to box.
By the time he got out, he was a keg of dynamite, venom and mistrust and, with a reputation as a street fighter, a man Dwight knew as Ike Hammonds saw him walking the streets after his release.
“What are you doin’?” Hammonds asked.
“Not much,” snapped the gruff Camden man.
Hammonds bought him some sneakers and took Dwight straight to Joe Frazier’s Gym on North Broad.
“This guy can fight,” bragged Hammonds excitedly. Boy, could he fight.
A month later, Dwight made his pro debut. He only drew with Leonard Langley, but such was Dwight’s improvement he wiped Langley out in two rounds two years later.
But it was not easy at the start. Braxton was 1-1-1 in his first three fights, even if the six-rounder he lost – to Johnny Davis – was a robbery.
“Braxton bullied and pummelled Davis in all corners all night only to lose a split decision in six,” read one report. The education continued.
He’d catch the early train from Camden to Philadelphia at around 5am, do a day’s work, go to Frazier’s, and catch the train back to get home by 10pm.
In the Philly gyms he sparred the likes of Willie Monroe, Bennie Briscoe, and Marvin Johnson
“They put me in the ring with those guys and I did good,” he recalled. However, frustrated by his uneven start, he asked coaches Wesley Mouzon and Quenzell McCall to help him with his defense.
“There’s got to be a better way of getting at these guys when they’re running,” he said.
With that, Braxton adopted the cross-and-block style, improved his head movement, and practised cutting off the ring.
“I learned my skills well and knew boxing wasn’t all bout blood and guts,” he once told me. “You need determination and a killer instinct, but it’s a sweet science. For every action, there’s an opposite, an equal reaction, and there’s a counter for everything.”
After eight fights Qawi boxed the undefeated 6ft 3ins South African Theunis Kok in South Africa during apartheid.
It was a hard fight to the extent that he later said: “That was that intense I can’t tell you nothing about it.” He made just $2,000 for stopping Kok in the 10th and final round.
Braxton had come out of nowhere and was causing such a stir that people didn’t think he was who he said he was. They thought Dwight was a ringer.
“He’s had more fights than he’s saying,” cried Angelo Dundee, Kok’s trainer. “He’s going under pseudonyms. Who is he really?”
Braxton’s education continued in the gyms, and he started working with the 1976 Olympic gold medalist Michael Spinks, sometimes sparring eight five-minute rounds a day.
“We were going at it – it was even better than the fight we had,” Braxton said.
What he was picking up in the gyms was priceless. He parlayed it into battering the former WBA champion Mike Rossman in seven rounds in Atlantic City, by when his reputation was preceding him. “I was confident I could just look at a guy and stop him,” he snarled.
He’d beaten Johnny Davis in their rematch, too, and after Rossman, despite saying he would never go back to prison, he returned.
It was inside the walls at Rahway State Penitentiary where Braxton faced the leading contender James Scott, who was still allowed to box behind the prison walls despite his conviction on a homicide charge.
There was bad blood between the pair. Braxton claimed Scott owed him a few hundred bucks for services rendered as a sparring partner when he was inside and usually it was Scott who was the bully, cutting a bald, menacing and intimidating figure.
Dwight laughed off whether he was apprehensive about going into Rahway for the fight, and when they boxed, in September of 1981, Braxton outworked his old prison buddy over 10 rounds.
That was the victory that earned Dwight his first title shot, and he was paired with fan-favorite Matthew Saad Muhammad for the Philadelphian’s WBC title. The winner would earn a lucrative unification fight with Spinks; Saad-Spinks was the dream fight of the generation.
Braxton simply loved fighting. In the lead up to the contest, he recalled sparring as many as 30 rounds a day working on what he needed to in order to claim Matthew’s coveted WBC crown. Braxton doubled up on sweatsuits and cranked up the heat in the gym, knowing that there was a storm coming his way.
Saad Muhammad was a warrior, known for always being able to battle back from the brink of disaster to often stop or knock out his opponents. He had done it time and again, to the extent that he’d been dubbed “Miracle Matthew”.
“In training, I told myself this guy keeps coming back,” Braxton explained. “He was very good. He hurt me in that fight and the whole room turned upside down. He did a lot of things that were textbook.
“[But] I knew he was made for me. I knew what was going to happen in that fight.”
It was the night Saad Muhammad, brutally beaten in 10 rounds, ran out of miracles. It was the night when a young Mike Tyson recalled crying in the Brownsville ghetto realizing that Saad Muhammad’s superpowers had an expiration date.
After winning the title, Dwight changed his name to Dwight Muhammad Qawi. You could argue he was never adored by the fans because of their love for who he took the title off. No matter, he doubled down.
“I’m going to knock the ‘a’ out of him and make him Sad Muhammad,” Qawi said, heading into the rematch.
Not only had Saad Muhammad run out of miracles, but the previous beatings he’d absorbed as the heartbeat of a brutal 175lbs era had crippled his durability and previously-insane powers of recuperation.
“The second fight was a blowout – I was right at the top of my game,” said Qawi, who then battered Saad in six.
A couple of decades later, I asked Qawi if Saad was “shot” by that point. “If he was, I shot him,” he replied.
Qawi had said it then, in 1982, he said it years later and he said it into old age – that was Qawi at his violent best. A sawn-off-yet-sophisticated beast; a calculated pressure fighter with a ridiculously good jab for a small man who, despite always giving away height and reach, was hard to hit, despite often being stood in range. He could outslug opponents, sure, but he could outbox them, too.
Crushing Saad brought Qawi to Spinks, and one of the biggest 175lbs fights in history. Qawi lost a decision and while the Camden warrior wanted a return, a pinched nerve in his shoulder meant that the rematch was scrapped.
Outside of the ring, Qawi’s life was filled with constant challenges.
His brother Lawrence had beaten their father Charles to death (Charles’ skull was fractured and a pipe was found nearby). Qawi was going through a divorce and when the cruiserweight division was created, he saw another way of getting Spinks back in the ring.
Having won the WBA cruiserweight belt in South Africa against Piet Crous, Qawi signed to defend against Leon Spinks, Michael’s older brother. One South African reporter had said watching Crous’ shots bounce off Qawi’s formidable dome was like watching “peashooters against a tank”. Qawi figured that if he could annihilate Leon, he would goad the younger sibling into a return and sure enough, Qawi had his way with Leon, taunting and teasing him all the way through a savage beatdown in Reno before Spinks was stopped in the sixth round.
The cruiserweight division, however, was then in its infancy. Several reporters were calling it boxing’s “bastard son”, and Qawi volunteered to be the man to legitimize it.
“One guy wrote that there are no great athletes in boxing at 180, 190lbs,” he said at the time. “That’s nonsense. True, there have been no great names as cruiserweight champion. But I have a chance now to stop them from saying that the division is nothing. I owe it to my peers; to those who will follow after me.”
Spinks, after everything, didn’t entertain the return. He moved up to heavyweight but by then the 1984 Olympics had created another star in Evander Holyfield, and he made his debut at cruiserweight.
Holyfield was 11-0 when he took on Qawi, by then a 30-fight veteran, for the WBA cruiserweight belt.
The fight was in Atlanta, Holyfield’s hometown, and Qawi felt he got a raw deal.
“They had it in for me,” he lamented. “All [Holyfield] had to do was stand up at the end.”
As negative as Qawi was about the fight, he made history. It was one of the great fights. Arguably it is still the best cruiserweight fight of all time. He had put the division on the map. And it was possibly the last great 15-round fight. Holyfield won a split decision.
Qawi actually rocked Holyfield in the first round, but Holyfield blazed back, thus setting the tone.
“He’s going to come right at you,” shrieked Lou Duva, with George Benton, in Holyfield’s corner. “If he bangs you, bang him right back. Don’t show him respect. Keep the fight even for six rounds and then turn it on.”
But Qawi was not deterred. KO Magazine wrote that the champion “marched forward constantly, sneering, spitting, snarling, and winging left hooks from somewhere in the third row”. That was Qawi to a tee.
In later years, Qawi would make accusations of foul play against Holyfield, but they were never proven, with Holyfield never having failed a test.
“Everyone gets a second wind, but in the ninth round you don’t come back and get a second wind and look better than you did in the first,” said an exasperated Qawi. Ironically, post-fight, Holyfield said of Qawi: “He was tough, like I expected. I did everything I could. Qawi kept pressing. I felt he’d get tired by the sixth or seventh round, but he didn’t.”
Some 18 months on, they did it again. Qawi had lost to Ossie Ocasio and before stepping into the ring with Holyfield, Qawi reckoned he had heard what each fighter was due to make. Holyfield’s purse was $1m; Qawi’s was just $75,000.
The air left the challenger, and a deflated version of Qawi made it to the ring, thinking he would fire his shots early and get it over with. But when that didn’t work in the opening exchanges, he questioned what he was doing there for such a paltry sum. “If you’re only going to give me $75,000, then I’m not going to be here all night,” he remembered thinking, and in the fourth round he went down. He rolled on to his stomach, turned to face the referee, thought about getting back up but stayed down.
“They treated me like a piece of meat, like they all did, and that was my way of saying, ‘Here’s one back at you. Stick it,’ I gave the fans my all, but I waved that one off,” he told me.
Away from the ring, things got no easier and he battled depression.
He told the hall-of-fame journalist Steve Farhood: “I’m a nervous eater. I eat a lot when I’m nervous.”
He drank to celebrate the wins, and he drank to soften the defeats. It became an addiction, and his weight ballooned.
Three months after fighting Holyfield at 190lbs he was 222lbs to face George Foreman at heavyweight. He pocketed $50,000 for the seven rounds he lasted with the returning ex-champion.
“I never fought anyone that big,” he smiled, reflecting. “He looked like a giant… If I’m being honest, I wasn’t really into it.”
He later shed around 20lbs but admits by that point he had got in with the wrong people and alcohol was now being paired with cocaine.
He isolated himself from old friends; he nurtured a big ego based on his achievements but his self-esteem had run dry.
He still tried fighting, but he could feel the ravages of it taking hold.
He fought as a heavyweight through the 1990s as a functioning alcoholic.
“That stuff affects your body,” he said. “It was starting to take an effect on me. I wasn’t focused and it took a big edge off me.”
He tried several comebacks, winning two of his final three bouts in 1997 but by that point he could see what his future looked like if he fought on. He had won 41 bouts, lost 11, and drawn one, scoring 25 knockouts.
“I’m not going to come back and be a name for nobody – this stuff is not going to happen to me,” he said. “They’re not going to rob and steal from me. So I walked away and said that’s it.”
He did more than that. He got sober, fought the demons of his past and in 2004 was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Having struggled towards the end of his career, he remained a passionate advocate about a union for fighters, and spoke of the need for a pension fund.
“If they stop looking at us like pieces of meat, there’s enough money out there to do that and have some left over,” he would say. “They make money off us, but their attitude is that we owe them.”
Away from the ring, life got better, and he improved his own by helping others. He lived in Somers Point in New Jersey, and worked at the Lighthouse, helping addicts and those facing tough living situations. He found it rewarding above all else.
“I work with kids and help them overcome drugs and alcohol because I conquered it,” he said. “The one thing I love is recovery and helping people. I do something I really have a passion for. I don’t fix anybody and I don’t claim to. But I am helping them and I think I have a knack for it. I’m a mentor to those kids and I’m loving it.”
No longer in the bad-guy role he’d unfortunately assumed having defeated Saad, Qawi was a good man.
We last talked on the phone in 2021, and he spoke softly. He said he wished, in particular, his fights with Saad Muhammad had not been so violent given how Saad’s health suffered in retirement.
“If I could have done things a little differently, I would have,” he said.
When Matthew was on his deathbed, Dwight visited but he couldn’t bring his old rival back. Dwight left a note that simply said: “Saad, Qawi came to see you. Love you for the sake of Allah.”
In his final years, Qawi struggled with dementia. He had moved to Baltimore and I asked him if he was doing okay. “Somewhat,” he replied.
He wanted to write a book. He had a helluva story to tell but, on Friday, July 25 and at the age of 72, finally the “Camden Buzzsaw” stopped buzzing.
