Ishe Smith’s journey from boxing champ to Las Vegas postal worker | Boxing

The right hand lands with the thwack! of a fastball hitting a catcher’s mitt, one man’s dream fast becoming another’s nightmare.

Cornelius “K9” Bundrage has just taken one to the jaw.

The world champion boxer and equally accomplished trash talker fancies himself a dog in the ring — hence his nickname. True to his handle, Bundrage has done plenty of barking of late.

“I’m gonna crush that man right there, I’m telling you!” the Detroit native booms two days earlier at a news conference hyping up his hometown showdown with Las Vegas challenger Ishe Smith. “I’m gonna give that man the business.”

Those are fighting words — and now he’s eating them, along with a short left from Smith that precipitates a torrent of blows as Bundrage stumbles back into the ropes, his suddenly wobbly legs abandoning him like sailors fleeing a sinking ship.

His opponent swarms, delivering a dozen punches in half as many seconds, attacking the head, then the body, his fists a blur of red leather, in a decisive Round 9 of their junior middleweight clash.

Around 20 minutes later, the scorecards are read, and referee Sam Williams raises the challenger’s arm in victory.

Ishe Oluwa Kamau Ali Smith has just become the first Las Vegas-born fighter to win a world title, taking home the 154-pound IBF belt.

A whole galaxy of boxing stars have lived, trained and competed in this world capital of the sport. This weekend, Canelo Alvarez took on Terence Crawford at Allegiant Stadium in the kind of mega-event that this city has become known for.

But while plenty of title-holders have fought out of Vegas, no champs were ever actually from here. On Feb. 23, 2013, Ishe Smith changed all of that.

Inducted into the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame in August 2024 with a professional record of 29-11 with 12 knockouts, he remains Vegas’ most accomplished native son in a sport long synonymous with the city.

“Dude, his résumé, it’s incredible,” says former middleweight champion Sergio Mora, who in 2005 won the first season of boxing reality TV show “The Contender,” which also featured Smith. “You can ask any champion that’s been in the ring with him, and they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, s - - -, Ishe can fight.’ ”

“He was one of these throwback, old-school-minded fighters that didn’t really do anything flashy,” Mora continues, “but you respected his strength, his skill, his IQ. And that’s the reason he became a world champion.”

Here’s the thing about boxing, though: As arduous as it is to make a living in the ring, it’s often tougher to make ends meet outside the ring. In this sport, there are no pensions, health insurance plans or safety nets of any kind.

When the fights end, a new kind of fight begins: survival.

“Boxing is a very unforgiving, brutal way to earn a living — and most people’s lives don’t end so well,” notes Lou DiBella, a promoter who represented Smith and helped shape the careers of champs including Sergio Martínez, Jermain Taylor, Bernard Hopkins and Paulie Malignaggi.

“Ishe worked his a - - off at everything he ever did, and then he didn’t catch a break,” he continues. “He always understood that he couldn’t count on boxing. He learned it the hard way, right? And then he got some real dropkicks in his personal life, man. I mean, he went through some horrible s - - -.”

And now, Ishe Smith just might be the guy delivering your mail.

‘I don’t hold my head down, man’

It’s just before 8 on a summer morning that could already use some shade. Heat emanates from the concrete surrounding the U.S. Postal Service branch on South Decatur Boulevard as we wait outside for Smith’s shift to begin.

He’s fairly easy to recognize, what with his “Golden Girls”-themed socks and neck tattoo of The Joker.

Mail carriers dread this time of year, lugging around phone book-thick stacks of advertising circulars in temperatures more suited for chicken nuggets in an air fryer.

Smith, 47, is just glad he gets to drive a newer model van equipped with air conditioning.

“There’s no AC in all these little mail trucks you see,” he notes of the parking lot’s array of mobile sweat boxes. “If it’s 110 outside, it’s like 120-130 in the car. It’s just an old-school fan in there that you got on, blowing heat.”

He leads us into the warehouse-like facilities where a shrill chorus of handheld mail scanner beeps soundtrack a rush hour traffic jam of postal carts piled high with packages.

Some of Smith’s co-workers greet him with a playful nod to his fighting background.

“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!” a silver-haired safety inspector jokes, hands raised in mock fear.

As he sorts through his day’s deliveries, Smith swears he’s suffered more wear and tear in the four years he’s worked here than in two decades in the ring.

“I tell my co-workers all the time, in almost a 20-year professional career, I hardly dealt with any injuries,” Smith says. “I’ve been here, and it’s my back, shoulder, arm. I’m like, ‘Bro, you guys are getting your knees replaced, hips replaced.’ This job is physically demanding.”

Smith can appreciate a demanding job — he just wants to get paid fairly for it. This was a beef of his with boxing.

He recalls one of his first big televised fights against the notoriously iron-fisted Randall Bailey on Showtime in January 2004.

Smith wasn’t thrilled about his modest $11,000 purse to begin with — remember, fighters pay their team (trainer, cut man, etc.) out of their own pocket. And then Smith got his check.

“It was like $3,000, just all these fees taken out — this fee, that fee — and I’m like, ‘How the hell am I gonna pay my team with a $3,000 check?’ ” he says. “At least when I go to this job, it’s an honorable job. A hard day’s work rewards you with a hard day’s pay.

“Boxing is not set up for us to make it afterwards. That’s why I’m glad I entered the workforce. That’s why I don’t hold my head down, man. I really don’t.”

Before Smith leaves to load his truck, we ask about the flyers promoting some of his fights that he’s arranged beneath the glass of his workspace.

“I put these in here just to remember what I was,” he says. “And what I’m not anymore.”

A boy enters the ring

Ishe Smith was bullied into boxing.

He was 8 years old, getting picked on by the kids in his North Las Vegas neighborhood.

Smith never knew his father, but his mother had a friend who knew boxing.

“He taught me how to defend myself,” Smith recalls. “I was really small for my age, so I started going to the gym, learning how to throw punches in my bedroom and that kind of stuff.”

He’d soon graduate to the famed Golden Gloves Gym, a former steel warehouse near Cashman Field opened by late Las Vegas police officer and boxing judge Hal Miller. Countless underprivileged Vegas kids learned the sport at no cost at the now-long-shuttered gym.

Tons of boxing greats also trained there, and Smith was exposed to champs such as Terry Norris, Azuma Nelson, Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe working out nearby, occasionally noticing the youngster.

“I would try to imitate them,” he remembers. “When they started telling me I was good and that one day I would be champ, that’s when I really fell in love with the game. I was seeing those pros at a young age — like, ‘Man, I want to do what they did.’ When I found out that Vegas never had a world champion, I wanted to do that.”

Smith became obsessed, recording every fight he could on his VCR, playing the tapes over and over, studying them, thrilling at Felix Trinidad’s seemingly indefatigable will, Nelson’s alchemical blend of offense and defense, Joe Louis’ technical wizardry — all of which would inform the fighter he’d become.

He’d also learn to place an emphasis on evasiveness, which would become both a hallmark of Smith’s career and a limitation to it.

“My trainer always taught me defense and to not get hit,” he explains. “Always take less punishment as possible.”

At Golden Gloves, Smith befriended another rising young local boxer, Augie Sanchez. The two became fixated on a shared dream.

“Mine and Ishe’s goals were to become Olympians in ’96,” Sanchez, now a boxing trainer, recalls on a video call from Japan, where some of his fighters are competing. “That was our main focus after school. We’d go to the gym, and we’d train and spar. Both of us just had one mindset: trying to be an Olympian.”

They would come closer than any other local fighters ever had.

In 1996, Smith, Sanchez and fellow locals Limmie Young and Charles Shufford, who called themselves “The Four Horsemen,” became the first Vegas boxers to make the Olympic trials, held in Oakland, California.

Smith fell two wins short of a spot on the team, eliminated by a close decision loss to future welterweight champ Zab Judah.

He was devastated.

“At that point, it destroyed me,” he says. “I came back. I realized I was only 17. I had devoted my whole life to boxing — no parties, no nothing. I never got in trouble, never did anything wrong. I was just like, ‘Man, I want to be a kid.’ And I started just hanging out.”

Smith quit boxing for two years.

After graduating early from Durango High School, he hit up a party on Senior Ditch Day. It’d change his life.

“I was shooting craps with some of my friends, probably doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, and a guy robbed me,” Smith says. “He stuck a gun to my head and robbed me.

“I thought to myself like, ‘What am I doing? This lifestyle isn’t my lifestyle,’ ” he continues. “I decided to start getting back to boxing.”

Becoming a ‘Contender’

Smith turned pro in 2000, cutting his teeth locally at raucous club shows at The Orleans put on by now-defunct Vegas boxing company Guilty Promotions. He quickly became a main attraction.

“He was probably the best guy on our roster, the one that was going to go furthest out of anybody, tons of skill,” recalls Brad Goodman, a boxing hall of famer who was Guilty Promotions’ matchmaker and now does the same for Top Rank Boxing. “People started really getting to know him over there. Out of the local kids we’d always put on, he would bring tons of people. It would always sell out. It was fun, man.”

“He was definitely a star on those shows,” remembers recently retired journalist Kevin Iole, who covered boxing for years at the Las Vegas Review-Journal and is a member of the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame. “He was definitely a big, big timer.”

If those club shows bolstered Smith’s popularity in his hometown, it was “The Contender” that helped make him a national name.

He went against character to play the heel during the reality show’s inaugural season in 2005, taunting other fighters from the very first episode — “I always thought I was the best fighter on the show, so I never hid from the fact that I was the villain,” he explains.

Though Smith suffered his first pro loss to Mora during Episode 10 in a fight so heated we see Mora’s mother cover her eyes at one point, the show’s weekly audience of 10 million to 13 million viewers significantly heightened his public profile.

In more candid moments, “The Contender” captured Smith’s close relationship with his first wife, Latoya Woolen.

“When he gets in that ring, he’s not fighting for him,” Woolen says early in the first episode, flanked by Smith, who cradles their young son. “He’s fighting for our family.”

Bright future, dark days

The gun was right there on the table before him, loaded. He’d gotten it for protection. Now, Ishe Smith was about to use it on himself.

“I was one moment away from pulling the trigger,” he recalls. “I was so depressed and so sad. My childhood sweetheart was leaving me and taking my kids. I was sitting in that apartment just ready to kill myself. I was so close.”

Smith and Woolen met as teenagers at UNLV, fell in love, married young and had three children together.

When Smith was grinding and making hardly any money early in his career, Woolen wouldn’t let him take a day job, insisting that he stay focused on boxing. She’d keep the house together.

“My wife is the woman that every man dreams about,” Smith says earnestly in an episode of “The Contender.” “She’s going to be there through bad times, and she’s going to be there through good times.”

But after 10 years together, the former began to outnumber the latter, and their relationship ended. Smith was crestfallen, suicidal.

Then he thought of his kids.

“The only thing that stopped me was thinking about growing up without a father,” Smith says. “And I was like, ‘This is selfish. I can’t do them the way my dad did me.’ And I didn’t.”

Smith got rid of the gun.

He later remarried, had another son with his second wife and adopted her two children. The father of six had to learn how to be a dad on the fly.

“You try to do your best as a father, try to do your best as a fighter, and try to lay it on the line,” Smith says. “But sometimes life is just life. You can do your best, but just like some of my fights, sometimes I thought I won and the other guy got it.

“So you can totally give your all in life,” he continues, “and sometimes you don’t get the same courtesy back.”

Hard fighter, hard sell

“Let your hands go!”

Eddie Mustafa Muhammad is getting frustrated, and Ishe Smith’s trainer is not the only one.

“He’s not throwing punches,” HBO color commentator Bob Papa notes with audible exasperation during the broadcast of Smith’s 2009 bout with future middleweight champ Daniel Jacobs, noting how Smith had thrown 200 fewer punches through Round 4.

Though Smith catches Jacobs with a hard left jab in Round 3 and rocks him with a left hook later on, Jacobs earns a unanimous decision.

The loss was emblematic of many of Smith’s 11 pro defeats: He simply didn’t press the action enough to impress the judges.

This was always the knock on Smith, that he was too risk-averse in the ring.

But Smith says that’s because he wanted a life after the ring.

“Sometimes I was a little bit too defensive,” he acknowledges. “I should have let my hands go a little more sometimes, but I mean, it was just about taking less punishment.

“When you take a lot of punishment, there’s fighters that you wouldn’t understand them sitting here doing an interview with you right now — and that’s sad,” he continues. “That’s a story I didn’t want to have for myself later in my career.”

But boxing fans don’t splurge on pricey pay-per-views or fight tickets to see a defensive-minded chess match.

Smith’s methodical, counterpunching approach made him both a tough out for opponents and a tough watch for anyone looking for action-packed brawls.

“I was that style of fighter, but I was that style of fighter because I didn’t have power,” notes Sergio Mora, a slick, crafty boxer himself. “Ishe has power. Ishe hurt me in our fight; he hurt me in sparring.

“So the guy can punch,” he continues. “He just wouldn’t put himself in danger to land that punch — and if he did land it, he wouldn’t go for the knockout. Now, mind you, Ishe wouldn’t get knocked out, either.”

And so Smith’s fights could be grueling endurance tests for competitors and viewers alike.

It eventually caught up to him: When Smith followed his loss to Jacobs with another defeat to Fernando Guerrero in a bruising battle, DiBella tried to get Smith on an upcoming ESPN card and the network rejected the fighter.

“Lou really defended me and went off. He was like, ‘I don’t believe this.’ He’s cussing them out,” Smith recalls. “And then he said, ‘Kid, I’m not gonna hold you back. Obviously, I can’t do for you what I thought I could.’”

Dibella released Smith from his contract, even though the fighter owed him a couple of thousand dollars in expenses. Smith vowed to pay him back as soon as he could.

“It was hard for me to get fights,” he recalls. “Nobody was calling anymore. For about a year and a half to two years, I had nothing.”

A title shot at last

If big-name boxers never exactly lined up to fight Ishe Smith when the TV cameras were rolling and win-loss records were on the line, they did the opposite during their training camps: With his high ring IQ and cocksure toughness, Smith was one of boxing’s most sought-after sparring partners.

“At one point, he was probably considered the best sparring partner out of anybody,” Goodman says. “He was, like, that main sparring guy.”

The amount of champs who sparred with Smith could fill a wing of the Boxing Hall of Fame. To name but a few: Pernell Whitaker, Shane Mosley, Oscar De La Hoya, Bernard Hopkins and Fernando Vargas, who was so impressed with Smith that he mentioned him to HBO early in his career to help him get on the network. (Vargas’ son, Fernando Vargas Jr., lives and trains out of Vegas and fought in the co-main event of the Alvarez-Crawford card.)

In early 2012, Floyd Mayweather joined the list when he recruited Smith — whom he’d known since their amateur days — to help him prep for his megafight with Miguel Cotto that May.

“Once we started talking during camp, he was like, ‘Man, this isn’t right, how boxing has done you,’ ” Smith remembers Mayweather telling him. “ ‘I’m gonna make sure you fight for a world championship, and what you do is gonna be on you. But I’m gonna get you the opportunity.’ ”

He’d live up to his words: After arranging a pair of fights for Smith at the Hard Rock Hotel in 2012 — which enabled him to pay back DiBella — Mayweather’s promotion company scored him his shot at Bundrage’s belt the following year.

“Thirteen years! Thirteen years!” an emotional Smith bellowed in the ring after his win, tears and sweat intermingling on his face as he reflected on how long it took to earn a title fight.

But Smith’s championship reign was short-lived.

After his win against Bundrage, he was supposed to headline his own card in Vegas. But Smith cut himself during the last week of training camp, and the fight was postponed.

Instead of waiting for another headlining opportunity, he agreed to fight Carlos Molina on the undercard of Mayweather’s highly anticipated bout with Canelo Alvarez that September, resting for just two weeks before starting another full, two-month training camp.

It was too much for his body. Smith was drained. He dropped a split decision.

“I thought it would be exciting to fight on Floyd’s card and all of that, but I wish I would have just said, ‘I’m gonna have my own show later in the year,’ ” Smith says. “I just had absolutely nothing that night. I was completely dead. I was so angry that I lost. I fought so stale. I had no pop in anything. I was just out of it.”

Smith earned a solid $250,000 payday, but he’d never get another title shot.

Tragedy strikes again

On March 19, 2017, Latoya Woolen was shot in the back of head and killed, her body found in a parking lot near UNLV. She had been shopping at a nearby Dollar Tree, targeted for no reason.

A 55-year-old man was soon arrested and pleaded guilty to her murder.

Three of Smith’s children were suddenly left without a mother. He was now their sole provider, a full-time parent of six.

“When you grow up with somebody like that, you share that many memories with somebody, to have them senselessly murdered like that was hard for me to deal with,” Smith says. “That was a hard point in my career. It made me refocus, really. I realized that now I’m fighting a different type of fight.”

But life didn’t get any easier in the ring.

After Woolen’s death, Smith lost two in a row to rising talents Julian Williams and Tony Harrison, fighting well but coming up short.

As he trained to face another young contender in Erickson Lubin, Smith knew the end was near: For the first time in his career, the sparring started getting to him.

“I remember telling my wife like, ‘These punches hurt,’ ” Smith says. “I was like, ‘I’m not having a good camp.’ ”

The pain was prescient: Lubin dropped the 40-year-old Smith four times in three rounds. Referee Jack Reiss called it after that. “I’m glad he did, because I would have just kept going out,” Smith says.

After a 20-year career, his last fight resulted in his first stoppage.

He might have tried to soldier on, but Smith’s youngest son — then 8 years old, the same age his dad was when he started boxing — told his father he didn’t want him to fight anymore.

“I looked at him, and I realized that I didn’t want to be the guy that couldn’t talk, couldn’t comprehend his family, didn’t remember people, didn’t remember life,” Smith says, “A lot of fighters experienced that, and I didn’t want to be that guy. I told him, ‘All right, I will never fight again.’ ”

Embracing the 9-to-5

Ishe Smith slams shut the back door on his mail truck, just happy to have a truck at all.

“Before I had this route, I had a walking route, and that’s more wear and tear on your body,” he says. “Summers are really hard when you have to deal with walking to every house, especially on ad day. If you’ve got a walking route that consists of a thousand deliveries, you got a thousand ads you have to deliver to every house.”

Those ads can come in handy every now and then, though: One day, Smith was charged by an aggressive dog and the circulars he was carrying saved him. “He grabbed the ad and ripped it up,” he recalls. “Lucky it was ad day.”

Truck loaded, Smith is soon zipping around back alleys and parking lots in a warehouse district near Chinatown.

He seems to genuinely enjoy his job. “I love my customers,” he notes.

When he retired from boxing, Smith didn’t envision himself in this position, punching a time clock each morning.

He’d made decent money, had some investments and was never a big spender.

“I knew that I had made enough to be OK,” he says. “But then the pandemic hit, and 2020 was, like, the worst for money and businesses and retirement accounts. My kids were having health and mental issues as far as their mom passing, and I had no insurance for them whatsoever. I’m just looking around like, ‘I gotta get in the workforce. I’m gonna go get a job and be a man and make sure I could take care of my family.’ And that’s what I did.”

Why become a postal worker?

“I was online, and I was just like, ‘It’d be pretty cool to be a mailman,’ ” he says, before delivering an inadvertent pun. “It just kind of hit me.”

Looking back, moving on

Ishe Smith opens a large Gucci bag at a Summerlin Starbucks and spreads his life out all over the table.

“I don’t think I ever really got to look back at everything I’ve done until probably today,” he says on a Sunday afternoon as he removes stacks and stacks of newspapers, magazines, notebooks, even a laminated sign that he made for himself in high school computer class. “This is kind of the first time I actually went through it.”

There must be over 100 articles, with Smith splashed across the pages of Ring Magazine, USA Today, Muscle & Fitness, TV Guide, the New York Daily News, and dozens of stories in the RJ.

He brought them all here because we asked him to, thinking it might be interesting to see him interact with his past.

It doesn’t feel like something he’s naturally inclined to do — not because he’s reticent to share his feelings. Smith is an open book. It’s just that there are plenty of moments in his life that he’s been eager to turn the page on.

“I’ve dealt with so much trauma and pain, I probably need therapy, but I’m, like, scared. I don’t want layers pulled back,” he acknowledges. “I’m kind of functioning now, and I don’t know if I’m ready to deal with those things where I’m at in life right now.”

He remembers that during “The Contender,” competitors were required to speak with a therapist.

“I was in the office crying like a baby,” he says of the experience. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet, but I know I can use it. But I’m functioning right now. I’m OK.”

Smith somewhat seems to enjoy reminiscing over decades-old articles in his high school newspaper, teenage photos of him and Augie Sanchez, a program from the ’96 Olympics, a pair of handwritten letters from Floyd Mayweather sent from jail.

“This brought back a lot of memories,” he says. “It was good to do this.”

But he expresses some ambivalence over doing so. “It’s a lot of sadness,” he shares, “because it’s over.”

Is it really, though? Does Ishe Smith need a ring to be a fighter? Did he ever?

“People sometimes think that everything’s about who got the biggest bags, who wore the jewelry, who got all the s - - -,” DiBella says. “It’s also about who had the longevity, who had a life where they had ups-and-downs, but they were able to steady the course.

“There’s different ways to look at winning,” he continues. “A guy that’s out there working, earning a living, still supporting his family, able to redirect his life when he had to earn money, go out and get a job. That is f - - - - - - life. That is winning.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.