If Scott Pemberton ever forgets the exact date on which he got engaged to Margaret Sylvia, he can always just look it up on BoxRec.
It was July 25, 2003, the day of his instant-classic first fight against Omar Sheika. Minutes before the bout, with gauze and tape wrapped around his knuckles, he slid a ring past two of hers. The ESPN2 Friday Night Fights cameras were there in Pemberton’s dressing room to document the moment, and the heartwarming clip made the broadcast, between the fifth and sixth rounds.
It only took another 21 years, one month, and 18 days for Scott and Margaret to actually get married.
Two weeks ago, on September 12, they finally said their “I do’s.”
“I’ve been with this woman since she was 17 years old, and she’s been through hell and high water and back with me,” Pemberton, now 57, said this week. “I proposed before the Sheika fight, she said yes, she looked absolutely beautiful. But … we just hadn’t done it yet. It’s like, why fix it if it ain’t broken, right? It was one of those deals where I’ve considered her my wife for a long, long time, but we just never did it.”
It took a tragic turn to push Pemberton to make it official. Margaret’s mother, who became like a second mom to Scott after his own mother passed away years ago, fell ill recently.
“She got sick, she was in the hospital,” he explained. “Ya know, she was dying. And she said to me, she goes, ‘Scott.’ She goes, ‘If you don’t treat my daughter good, I’m gonna come back and haunt you.’ We got a good laugh out of it.”
But the health situation was serious, and, sadly, Pemberton’s longtime fiancee’s mom didn’t recover.
Properly motivated to make the proverbial “honest woman” out of Margaret — whether out of a desire to do the right thing or a fear of being haunted — Pemberton finally ended the never-ending engagement this month.
And the clip of the proposal is right there on YouTube for all to see, embedded within the signature victory of one of the most TV-friendly boxing careers of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Pemberton has been retired from the ring for 18 years now. He was your classic clubfighter-turned-contender, a late bloomer from Massachusetts, a warrior who consistently delivered action and drama — a poor man’s Micky Ward, you might say. Becoming super middleweight champion of the world was perhaps slightly beyond his grasp, but he hung around until he at least got a title shot and a decent payday, and as soon as it was apparent he didn’t have it anymore, “The Sandman” got out with his health intact.
“I’m not busted up from boxing at all. I mean, maybe I have a little slurred speech,” he said with a laugh. It was unclear if he was cracking a joke, or maybe half-joking, but the fact is he sounds the same as he did toward the end of his career — perhaps there’s a slight hint of slurring, but it’s difficult to say where the thick New England accent ends and any mild effects of taking punches begins. Ultimately, he sounds like your classic fifty-something blue-collar Boston-area tough guy.
“But yeah, I feel fine from boxing,” Pemberton continued, as he stood in his yard, intermittently yelling at his two overprotective German shepherds whenever they barked at passers-by. “I got injured much worse jumping out of planes in the military. That’s why I had a hip replacement — it had nothing to do with boxing.”
Back to the uncertainty over whether Pemberton was joking about slurred speech — part of the reason to wonder about that is that the man now loves delivering punchlines as much as he once loved delivering punches. Several times during our conversation, he greeted a serious question with a snappy, unserious answer.
“So, Scott, how many kids do you have?”
“Fourteen!”
“What have you been doing for work since you stopped boxing?”
“Extortin’!”
“When you went down or got rocked in the Sheika fights, were you as badly hurt as it looked?”
(Extreme deadpan voice.) “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The actual answer to the first question is three kids. Pemberton has a 32-year-old son, Jarel (yes, named after Superman’s father), from a separate relationship before he started dating his now-wife, and Jarel had a brief pro boxing career, going 3-0 in 2017-18 before focusing on his job as a firefighter in Revere, Massachusetts. And Scott and Margaret have two kids together. Their 22-year-old daughter, Riley, will be making the newlyweds grandparents soon. And their 17-year-old son, Seth, is, like his dad and his half-brother, trying his hand at boxing.
“I’ll tell you a little story,” Pemberton said. “When Seth was 14 years old, I wasn’t trying to push boxing on him or anything, he was playing sports, football and stuff like that. But it’s so political with the football. He was kind of a heavy kid, he weighed 225, and they used to put him on the line, but then he stopped drinking soda and he lost all this weight, and now he’s the same size as me — he’s like 6-foot-1, 6-foot-2, 185 pounds. And, they had him playing offensive tackle. He’s like, ‘I don’t want to play offensive tackle. I’m never gonna get a scholarship playing offensive tackle. I’m not big enough.’ So he’s not playing no sports in school anymore.
“So I decided to bring him to the gym. We went there for two weeks, I was working the mitts with him, I did everything with him. So I said, ‘Seth, I’m gonna have you spar tomorrow.’ I go, ‘The reason why I’m gonna have you spar tomorrow is because I don’t want you to be in here and we’re workin’ out, workin’ out, we’re doing all this, and then you start sparring and you start getting hit and you go, ‘Dad, this is not for me.’ So he goes, ‘Who am I gonna spar?’ And I looked around the gym, and I go, ‘That guy right there.’ And I picked out this guy who’s 24 years old and has been going to the gym for like three years. So Seth goes, ‘No way, Dad, that guy will kick my ass.’ I’m like, ‘Ah, don’t worry about it.’
“So we go home, he tells his mother, ‘Hey, Ma, Dad’s gonna have me spar this man tomorrow.’ But she don’t pay him no mind, because she knows I would never put him in a bad position. So the next day we go there, and I said, ‘Listen, Seth, whenever the guy gets close to you, I want you to pop out that jab just like we do on the mitts. I want you to make him pay for real estate whenever he gets near you.’
“The kid gets out there and starts sparring, and it was like, holy shit. It was like he was boxing for years already. I couldn’t believe how good he did. I personally think he’s going to become a way better fighter than me. He actually has really good defense — and, you know, I didn’t have any defense.”
That’s probably a slight exaggeration — but only slight. Pemberton’s record gives you a sense of the sort of fighter he was. He finished with a mark of 29-5-1. Of his 29 wins, 24 were by stoppage. Of his five losses, all five were by stoppage.
He turned pro in ’94, already 27 years old, getting a late start after his time in the military and an amateur career consisting of only seven fights. Fighting exclusively in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Pemberton won his first 12 pro fights, then got TKO’d two times in a row in ’96, both times in Providence. He shook off the setbacks and went on a run, gradually stepping up the competition. In ’98, he knocked out 11-1 Jaime Velasquez, followed later the same year by a KO win over Richard “The Alien” Grant. In ’99, he avenged a controversial technical draw with a first-round knockout over 12-0-2 Bill Rollins.
Pemberton hit his first legal speed bump in 2000, when he spent 30 days in jail for throwing a punch in a road rage incident, breaking another man’s cheekbone with a single, regrettable left hook.
He got back in the ring and TKO’d veteran Glenwood Brown in nine rounds on Friday Night Fights, a minor breakout victory. But the next year, on the verge of a major fight against Thomas Tate, he was arrested for being a debt collector for a drug trafficker. Others with whom he was associated were sentenced to many years; Pemberton got a little under nine months.
By the time he returned to the ring in 2002, Pemberton was 35 and knew he was running out of time and chances. He won two fights by knockout and earned the biggest opportunity of his career: an August 2002 showdown with former super middleweight titleholder Charles Brewer.
It was an all-out thriller, named the ESPN2 Fight of the Year. Pemberton was knocked down in the second round, but came back to hurt Brewer repeatedly. Brewer, though, dropped him again in the sixth, and referee Steve Smoger — who almost never stopped a fight prematurely — waved it off amid demonstrative protesting from Pemberton.
“Oh man, I almost had Brewer!” Pemberton said animatedly more than 20 years later. “Listen, if Steve Smoger would’ve kept his fucking nose out of my business … there’s no way he should have stopped that fight.”
The Sandman had earned fans and respect in defeat, though, and soon came the wars that would define his time in boxing, his two wild battles with Sheika.
Pemberton had sparred with Sheika a few years earlier and had done well, so he came into their first fight loaded with confidence. That confidence was shaken when the heavy-handed Sheika floored him in the second round. Pemberton recovered (good thing; otherwise ESPN2 wouldn’t have had a chance to show his proposal to Margaret), came back, built a lead — and then got drilled with about six seconds left in the 11th round and was out on his feet, surviving on pure defiant instinct.
“It was right at the end of the round,” Pemberton remembered. “If he would have hurt me that bad at the beginning of the round, the fight would have probably been over.”
Pemberton gutted out the final round and prevailed by split decision, winning by a single point on two scorecards. An immediate rematch was a natural, so it happened six months later, and was a remarkably similar fight: Sheika again dropped Pemberton in round 2, and Pemberton rallied back in an all-out war, but this time there was no 11th-round assault for the New Englander to endure because he stopped Sheika in the 10th.
Two more stoppage wins for Pemberton followed, and when Joe Calzaghe and Jeff Lacy were scheduled for a unification bout in November 2005 and Calzaghe dropped out with an injury, Pemberton got the call to challenge Lacy. It was his long-awaited shot at the big time, for a belt, on Showtime, for a career-high purse of $150,000.
Pemberton had sparred with Lacy a few years earlier, and believed he had a shot at pulling off the upset. “My plan coming in,” he said, “was to make Lacy think that I was a little weak at first, and get him to relax, and then I would surprise him.” He never got the chance to play possum; the power-punching former Olympian hurt Pemberton early and took him out in just two rounds.
But the paycheck helped soothe the pain. Pemberton made a down payment on a house — he’s still paying off the mortgage nearly 20 years later, but he’s much closer to the end than the beginning. Pemberton said that for the last few years of his boxing career, when he was fighting on national TV regularly, he was making about $25,000 a fight and getting in the ring about three times a year, adding up to enough for boxing to be his full-time job for that brief stretch.
But that stretch ended in February 2006, three months after the Lacy disappointment. He took on The Contender star Peter Manfredo in Providence and, at age 39, just wasn’t the same fighter anymore. It was all over in three rounds.
“Listen, there’s no way I was supposed to lose that Manfredo fight. He got me with a lucky freakin’ uppercut, that prick,” Pemberton said with a chuckle. “Nah, I love the Manfredos, they’re good people.”
But it was the end of the road, and Pemberton knew it. One last arrest soon followed — for drug conspiracy and possession in 2007 — but Pemberton has kept off the police blotter since then.
Contrary to his joke answer about his day job, he isn’t “extortin’” anyone — for the last 10 years or so, he’s been driving a garbage truck for Capitol Waste Management. And he has a rewarding unpaid gig as young Seth Pemberton’s trainer.
He still watches all the fights — “I think Anthony Joshua is a freaking bum,” he blurted out, unprompted. And he watches with more than a little envy over the pay scale.
“I wish I was fighting today,” he said. “I might have made a lot more money. I mean, I’d beat Jake Paul’s freaking ass.”
Well, a different ex-fighter in his late 50s got that particular high-paying gig. And the time for Pemberton to be trading punches has passed, anyway.
There are some things you can do a couple of decades after the fact — like get married, for example. But there are other things you should only do when you’re young. Pemberton seems to be in a good place, better served focused on cracking wise than on cracking chins.
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, Ringside Seat, 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 or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].
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