‘Contender’ alum Tarick Salmaci, from reality to realty

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.

You can call Tarick Salmaci a lot of things. You can call him a decorated amateur boxer who nearly made the 1992 U.S. Olympic team. You can call him a respected pro who was once lined up for a super middleweight title shot against Joe Calzaghe. You can call him a likeable character on the lone NBC-televised season of The Contender. You can call him a product of the Kronk Gym who turned himself into a successful Detroit-area realtor.

But if you’re Sergio Mora, you just call him “Furniture.”

Anyone who signs up to go on a reality TV show is handing their story over to the producers and editors — and those producers and editors decided in putting together the first season of The Contender 20 years ago that Salmaci’s story was not one they wanted to focus too much on telling.

“Believe it or not, I was one of the main characters in the loft during my time on the show,” Salmaci, 52, reflects. “But I didn’t win my first fight. Had I won my first fight, you would have seen a lot more of me. But a lot of my character moments were cut out, and I understand why — because I lost in the first round.

“So when it aired on TV, Sergio and I were joking around. I was like, ‘What the hell? Where’s all the funny stuff that happened? I’m not doing shit. I’m just, like, furniture on there.’ And Sergio started cracking up. He goes, ‘You’re furniture.’ That became an inside joke with him, to call me ‘Furniture.’”

Mora, of course, went on to win the Contender tournament and get an abundance of screen time along the way. Salmaci is a relatively forgotten cast member. But not to his fellow contestants. When it was over — perhaps because he was older than most, more settled down than most, and ready to retire from the fight game — he emerged as that guy who maintains the connections with more of his fellow alumni than just about anyone else.

And he has nothing but fond memories of his time on The Contender, even if many of those memories ended up on the cutting-room floor.

“Man, it was a great experience, getting to know these guys,” Salmaci says. “What I took away from being there is, deep down, everyone’s the same. I don’t care what race you are, where you’re from, how you grew up, we’re human beings, your core values are the same. If you’re a good person, you’re a good person, no matter where you’re from or what you do. Had I not been on that show, I never would gotten to know a guy like Brent Cooper, from Tennessee, with the cowboy hat — I never would have spoken to a guy like that. But you get to know him, and you have a relationship, and you realize, we’re all the same.

“Being in the loft and not having any type of phone, no internet, nothing, we only had each other for entertainment, and you really make a bond with these guys that you never expected.”

Those bonds were purely positive once the show was over. During filming, however, they complicated everything.

“You go on the show with a mindset, ‘I’m not gonna get close to anybody because I’m gonna have to fight these guys. There’s a million dollars on the line, and I’m gonna keep my business private,’” Salmaci said. “But, these producers, they know what they’re doing. When you go on that show and you have no other forms of entertainment, you start telling each other family secrets and confiding in each other. I believe that affected a lot of guys on that show, getting to know your opponent beforehand. A lot of guys may have had more respect for people than they should have going into the ring.”

When Salmaci finally got his chance to box in the show’s seventh episode, it wasn’t an excess of respect for the much younger Juan De La Rosa that cost him. Salmaci pins his five-round unanimous decision loss to the undefeated De La Rosa on an assortment of factors, most of them stemming from the fact that he’d been retired from boxing for more than three years when The Contender lured him back. His timing was off, he’d gone on a crash diet to get down from about 185 pounds to 158 in two months, and he just wasn’t as quick at 32 as the 19-year-old De La Rosa was.

Salmaci fought one more time after that, dropping a five-round majority decision to Jimmy Lange on The Contender finale card, and though co-host Sugar Ray Leonard tried to convince him to keep fighting, Salmaci knew he’d reached the end.

To fully understand why that was the end for him, you have to go back to the beginning. Raised in Dearborn, Michigan, the son of Lebanese immigrants, Salmaci started boxing at age 8 and first set foot in the world-famous Kronk Gym at 13 — right at the peak of Tommy Hearns’ popularity, in the mid ‘80s. He traveled the country alongside future welterweight contender Oba Carr, with Carr’s dad, Eddie, training him.

Like many of the top amateurs training at the Kronk, Salmaci developed a bond with Emanuel Steward.

“Emanuel used to come over our house like every few months, we’d be cooking a Middle Eastern barbecue in the back, and we were in a lower-income neighborhood, and Emanuel would show up in his Rolls Royce convertible,” Salmaci recalled. “I was like 13, 14, 15 years old, and Emanuel was at the top of his game, and looking back now — who had time to do that, you know what I mean? Emanuel took so much time for us kids. You know, we’d never been to nice restaurants in our life, and he’d pick like 10 or 12 of us up in a gold limo and take us to the most expensive restaurant in Detroit.”

Steward wasn’t the only boxing icon Salmaci encountered as a kid. When he was 10, he met Muhammad Ali in person and handed him a letter he’d written. Their interaction was brief, but Ali made a point to tell young Tarick to stay off drugs and in school and listen to his parents.

The next morning, as Salmaci was getting ready to leave for school, his phone rang. He forgot that he’d written his family’s phone number on the letter he gave Ali. Sure enough, it was Ali calling, blowing Salmaci’s mind.

While Salmaci’s friend Carr turned pro at 17 in 1989, Tarick stayed amateur in hopes of making the ’92 Olympic team, and damned near did, losing in the finals of the Olympic Trials to Pepe Reilly.

The professional ranks beckoned after that, and Salmaci turned pro under manager Jackie Kallen and, in 1997, in his 16th fight, won a regional title that soon made him a mandatory to Joe Calzaghe. The title shot was scheduled, but Calzaghe got injured, and things spiraled for Salmaci — managerial issues, trainer changes, one thing after another until, in 1999, on a Naseem Hamed undercard at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Salmaci found himself in with last-minute sub Kippy Warren, a 6-foot-3 southpaw. Salmaci and Steward, who was by then his head trainer, learned Warren was a southpaw at the same time: when Warren started shadowboxing out of that stance as the ring announcer introduced the fighters.

Salmaci lost an eight-round majority decision, didn’t fight again for a year-and-a-half, and decided in March 2001, shortly after his 29th birthday, after a win improved his pro record to 18-1, that he’d had enough after more than 20 years in boxing. “I was tired of the politics and the false promises, and just the frustration from boxing,” he recalls.

Ali’s words about staying in school inspired him to finish up his studies, and he graduated from the University of Michigan in 2002 and began his real estate career. He and his wife Dena had their daughter Ava that same year, and boxing was the furthest thing from Salmaci’s mind.

Until he got a call from reality-TV producer Mark Burnett’s office in 2004.

They’d heard about Salmaci and his story and liked the idea of having a more experienced fighter in the house who’d gotten close to the top but never got his shot. They convinced him to audition in Detroit, and even though he hadn’t been in a gym in three years, Tarick came to meet them and brought a VHS tape of his highlights — which he recalls he “literally had to blow dust off of.” He had no idea they wanted to see him spar in person. He had to go back home and get his gear, then came back to the gym and sparred, and looked good enough to get an interview with the casting director. From there, it was off to L.A. as one of the final 45 for 10 days of intense tests, and eventually came a knock on his hotel room door from Sylvester Stallone and Leonard telling him he’d made the cast.

“I didn’t really grasp the concept of what the show was going to be,” Salmaci admits. “Nobody quite knew what it was going to look like. But, let me tell you, I heard ‘a million dollars,’ and I was in.”

Fast-forward about a year to his loss to Lange, which dropped his record to 19-3 (5 KOs), and Salmaci was, for the second time, all done fighting.

“In this game, you have to have passion. There’s no 90 percent, 80 percent. You gotta be all in 110% — you gotta love what you’re doing every single day to succeed, the way Floyd Mayweather did it,” he says. “I had a talk with Sugar Ray Leonard. Sugar Ray says, ‘I want you to keep fighting.’ He believed in me. But, you know, you can’t lie to yourself. I was like, ‘Do I have the passion I had before?’ I didn’t feel it. And I saw what happened to other fighters. They were great, but they lose that passion, they start getting hit more, they start getting knocked out because that split second makes a big difference, you know. You lose a split second in boxing, that’s everything.”

Plus, of course, with his college degree and his real estate career, Salmaci had other options.

It would be easy for a boxer who just barely missed competing in the Olympics in Barcelona, who was once on the cusp of a title shot but never landed it, and who got one last chance on a mainstream network TV show but lost his first fight, to look back with regrets. Salmaci, though, has none.

“I’m a firm believer, everything happens for a reason,” he says. “My boxing career could have gone in a different direction and maybe I could have fought for a world championship, but I could have gotten knocked out or gotten hurt. And instead here I am, president of the Tarick Salmaci Group at American Realty Group — and being on The Contender even helped with the business, with people feeling like they knew me a little bit.”

Salmaci points out that his old friend Oba Carr is now in a nursing home, one of boxing’s countless tragic stories. Salmaci was also a friend and sparring partner of Gerald McClellan’s at one time. He has reason not to think much about sliding doors or to wish his in-ring career went differently. (He is in fact involved in Lisa McClellan’s Ring of Brotherhood Foundation, and found another way to stay connected to boxing last November when he was appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a member of the Michigan Unarmed Combat Commission.)

Whatever disappointment there may be in terms of his results on The Contender, it was worth it to Salmaci for the friendships he formed — with Mora, with Jesse Brinkley, with Peter Manfredo, Jr., who texts Salmaci memes every morning.

And he left the show with countless warm memories of his time in that loft — even if the viewing public only got to share in a select few of them.

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.