The Contender debuted on NBC on March 7, 2005. This article is part of a monthly series throughout 2025 — the 20th anniversary year — catching up with alumni of the show.
Previous profiles in this series: Sergio Mora, Tarick Salmaci, producer Adam Briles, Peter Manfredo.
It’s been a staple of reality TV ever since Puck stuck his fingers in Pedro’s peanut butter on “The Real World” in 1994. If you want your show to engage its audience to maximum emotional effect, you need a villain.
There was Puck, there was Jonny Fairplay on “Survivor,” there was Omarosa on “The Apprentice,” there was judge Simon Cowell on “American Idol.” And on the debut season of “The Contender,” two fighters were positioned as the villains: Ahmed Kaddour and Ishe Smith.
On these reality shows, sometimes you’re actually a villain, and sometimes you just have the misfortune of giving producers enough material to give you the “villain edit.”
Now 46 years old, Smith looks back on his Contender experience two decades later and takes full ownership of the reality-TV archetype he fell into.
“Yeah, I was a villain,” he reflected in a conversation with Boxing Scene. “I wanted to be the villain.
“I was brash, and I honestly felt like I was the best fighter in the house at that time, and I didn’t try to hide that. When I got there, I was looking at these other guys, and I’m like, there's no way they stand a chance.
“My edit wasn’t too bad. They also showed I was a family man who leaned on his wife, who cared about his kid. There were sides of me they didn’t show, conversations they didn’t show, but all in all, I can’t complain about how I came across.”
Smith was 14-0 when he arrived at the Contender loft. He suffered his first defeat in the second round of the show’s tournament, a decision to eventual Contender winner Sergio Mora that Smith disputes to this day. (Or at least that he would love to see for the first time in its unedited form so he could know whether to dispute it.) He left the show on bad terms, said unfavorable things to the media about the people behind the show, and ended up not fighting again for just over a year while trying to get out of his contract.
And yet …
“I wouldn’t change a thing about the show,” he said. “For all the negatives that I have, the positives outweigh them 120 percent. It was way more positive than it is negative. I’m very grateful. For being on the show, them selecting me — it was a great experience. I mean, I got to fight live at Caesars Palace on the finale show. I remember every detail of what that whole week was like.
“There was some bad stuff for me with being on The Contender, but the good definitely outweighs the bad.”
Smith’s story of getting onto the show is a bit different than most, as he was an established lowercase-“c” contender at the time, fresh off winning several regional welterweight titles by beating ex-champ Randall Bailey. So Ishe didn’t walk into an open casting call, hoping to get noticed, the way his competitors did.
He instead got a call directly from a producer, asking him to come in and interview. He didn’t need to show them his in-ring skills at all, he didn’t need to spar or hit the bag. He just needed to give them a sense of his personality. And they liked what they saw enough to cast him.
Smith was skeptical about the whole project, though. He had assumed the show was going to be built around lower-level prospects (like what Fox’s competing “The Next Great Champ” turned out to be) and wasn’t sure if it made sense for him.
But when you’re toiling away for a purse of $11,000 to fight Bailey — and taking home about $2,000 after sanctioning fees, training expenses, and paying your team — a seven-figure top prize can paper over your skepticism in a hurry.
“The million dollars, that was everything,” he said. “And I was such a brash kid, I was so confident that I could win the million dollars. This was before I knew the format, like the fights being five-rounders, the tiny ring they used. I was so confident that I would win this. I was like, dude, none of these guys are gonna beat me.”
Through the first round of the tournament, Smith’s confidence seemed well-placed. He and the show’s other outwardly cocky villain type, Kaddour, were on a trash-talk-fueled collision course — although Smith also said the two of them had meaningful, civil private conversations when they weren’t performing for the cameras — and Smith prevailed by two shutout scores of 50-45 and a third tally of 49-46.
According to Smith, Sylvester Stallone, one of the co-hosts of The Contender, was a huge Kaddour fan and was unhappy that Smith won. Smith says “Sly” wanted to make Kaddour into a star and was the driving force behind his coming back to the show, after losing to Smith, when a spot opened up in the quarterfinals.
Twenty years later, Smith doesn’t hesitate when asked what his experience with Stallone was like.
“Stallone was a prick,” he said. “He was a prick. He wanted the show to go the way he wanted it to go.”
Although Smith, embracing his “villain” side, had personality clashes on the set, he also developed friendships with a few of his fellow contestants. (Though he acknowledges he’s barely in touch with any of them now; “I’m bad at that,” he admitted.)
He grew particularly close with the late Najai Turpin, who Smith said was like a “little brother” to him. And Smith recounted how one night, without cameras trained on them, he, Turpin, and Juan De La Rosa snuck out of the house.
“Najai told us about a way that we could go up on the roof of the house, then go down the fire escape. And so we jump down, and we’re just walking around Pasadena. We ended up getting reprimanded when they found out, but that was a fun night.”
Six episodes (and 19 days of real time) after his win over Kaddour, Smith’s path led him to a quarterfinal meeting with Mora. The scores were split — 50-45 and 49-46 for Mora, and a contrasting 49-46 for Smith.
“I thought I did enough to win,” Smith reflected. “To this day, I’ve never seen the unedited version. That is the one fight that has never sat well with me in my career.”
Smith said that Jeremy Williams, one of the trainers on the show, pointed out to him afterward how, in the version that aired, when the final bell rang, you could see Williams run into the ring and pick Mora up — which he said he did to prevent “The Latin Snake” from falling to the canvas, because Smith had hurt him in the closing seconds.
Ishe is not shy about going low-key conspiracy theorist as he looks back.
“You know, Sergio had the perfect story and maybe they wanted him to win. That fight always angered me and pissed me off. And, you know, as a young kid full of testosterone and full of adrenaline, it made me just say things on the record that I probably shouldn’t have said and that I probably regret saying.”
Smith bad-mouthed Executive Producer Mark Burnett, and though he was pleased with his paycheck for his fight against Anthony Bonsante on the live finale ($75,000, as Smith recalls, by far the most he’d made to that point), he was not pleased with what they offered him to fight Jesse Brinkley on the Mora-Peter Manfredo rematch card in October 2005, and that was the end of his professional relationship with The Contender.
After showing up on The Contender set with a 14-0 record and going 2-1 on the show, Smith’s post-Contender career was full of ups and downs across 23 fights, of which he won 13 and lost 10.
The highlight — “most definitely,” he says — was his 2013 win over The Contender Season Two contestant Cornelius “K9” Bundrage in Bundrage’s hometown of Detroit, which made Smith the first Las Vegas-born boxer ever to win a major title.
The title reign was brief — Carlos Molina took the belt by split decision on the Floyd Mayweather-Saul “Canelo” Alvarez undercard in Smith’s first defense — but Ishe remained a tough out for several more years after that, able to brag through his first 39 pro fights that he’d never been stopped.
That streak ended when he fought Erickson Lubin in February 2019. Inspired by memories of his good friend Diego Corrales’ massive fighting heart, Smith got up all four times he was knocked down, but referee Jack Reiss wouldn’t let him take any more punishment and halted the fight after round three.
Smith, 40 years old at that point, had no trouble deciding to retire after the way that bout went — and actually knew it was time coming into that fight.
“The punches in training camp started hurting, and I’d heard stories, fighters would say, ‘You don’t lose it really in the fights. You lose it in the camps and in the sparring.’ And I was struggling so bad in camp, struggling in sparring with this one guy who I know in my day I would beat the shit out of.
“So it was easy to walk away. I achieved everything I wanted to in my career. I was able to retire and feel proud of what I was able to do.”
And, for what it’s worth, Smith will go down as one of the premier sparring partners of his generation. He first gained a measure of fame when Fernando Vargas talked him up (while butchering his first name, unfortunately) during an HBO interview, and Smith went on to spar with Oscar De La Hoya, Shane Mosley, and Mayweather, and even got called into Vernon Forrest’s camp specifically to help Forrest try to avenge his loss to Smith’s old Contender foe Mora.
Since his boxing career wrapped up, Smith — as Boxing Scene’s Kieran Mulvaney detailed last year — has gone on to work as a mailman in Vegas, and on top of being a father of four, is now a grandfather.
He doesn’t look like your average grandfather. In fact, he looks almost exactly the same as he did 20 years ago.
And that’s part of the reason that, two decades after appearing on The Contender, he still gets recognized from it regularly.
“It’s surreal to me to think it was 20 years ago,” he said. “But it’s crazy, when I go out, I still get recognized from that show, even to this day. I might think people would say, ‘Hey, man, I saw you when you won the title.’ And I do get that sometimes. But most of the time, people remember me from that show.”
Hey, it’s hard to forget a good villain. Ishe Smith may not have gone as deep as he expected to in his reality-TV tournament, but he nevertheless — like a finger in a jar of peanut butter — left an impression.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.