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 or reflecting on alumni of the show.

Previous profiles in this series: Sergio Mora, Tarick Salmaci, Adam Briles, Peter Manfredo, Ishe Smith, Najai Turpin.

When filming began for the first season of “The Contender” in August of 2004, Jackie Kallen had two sons.

By the time the cameras stopped rolling about six weeks later, she had 18.

“They’re all like my kids, and boy, I have such great feelings for those kids,” Kallen, 79, told BoxingScene as she reflected some 21 years after meeting the boxers cast on the NBC reality show. “I mean, they’re grown men now, but to me, they’re kids.

“I’ll always be their den mom. Peter Manfredo, he still calls me ‘den mom.’ Jesse Brinkley, he still calls me ‘den mom.’ I talk to Tarick Salmaci, I talk to Jimmy Lange. They all are just such sweet, wonderful guys, and I have just the best memories of working with them.”

You could be forgiven if you’d forgotten, now 20 years after the show aired, that Kallen was part of the cast, along with hosts Sylvester Stallone and Sugar Ray Leonard, trainers Tommy Gallagher and Jeremy Williams, and, of course, all the fighters. 

Kallen was hired to be – as the fighters still call her – the “den mom” on the show, a maternal figure to help balance some of the youthful testosterone pumping through the episodes. But in the final edits, she didn’t receive an excess of air time.

And that didn’t and doesn’t bother Kallen one bit.

“I felt at the end that I might have been underutilized, and, you know, I think it would have been a little different if that show were done today. I think they would have welcomed a female presence a little bit more and given me more to do,” Kallen said. 

“But I don’t have a single bad thought about that show or the people I worked with. We became a family. We made lifelong friendships. Yes, they left some great scenes on the cutting room floor, but I understood that, for whatever reason, some of those scenes didn’t fit in the context of the show, and they chose what they thought was best to tell the story.”

Kallen has been involved in boxing since the late ’70s, when the Detroit-based entertainment journalist branched out into sports by interviewing local prospect Thomas Hearns. Soon she became the Kronk Boxing publicist, and eventually a manager, most famously guiding James Toney to titles and pound-for-pound glory in the early ’90s.

In 1997, Kallen told her story of struggles and success as a woman in a man’s game in the book Hit Me With Your Best Shot: A Fight Plan for Dealing With All of Life’s Hard Knocks.

That led to the February 2004 film Against the Ropes, starring Meg Ryan as Kallen, and though the movie was not a commercial hit, it caught the eye of reality TV powerbroker Mark Burnett and his team as they were beginning to cast his NBC boxing show.

“Someone suggested to Mark Burnett that maybe it would be good to have a female in the mix,” Kallen remembered. “When they called me and I met with Mark, he was lovely and it just seemed like a fun thing to do – especially because I’d known Sly Stallone since 1980, and I knew Sugar Ray Leonard well. I’ve known him since ’79 and of course was Tommy’s publicist when they fought each other. So, it was easy for me to decide to do the show. It felt like a family reunion to me.”

On the set in Pasadena, California, Kallen shared a dressing room, hairdressers and makeup artists with Stallone and Leonard. Even though some Contender alums have less-than-fond recollections of Stallone, Kallen said he “was a pleasure to work with.”

Kallen was involved in the casting process, helping to pick the right mix of capable boxers and compelling personalities. She had somewhat mixed expectations going in as to whether the show could live up to or even exceed the promise of its title.

“I did not believe the format was going to come up with a world champion. I didn’t think it was going to create the next Mike Tyson,” she said. “But I looked at it realistically and I believed it could introduce a lot of people to the world of boxing that didn’t know the behind the scenes, and it would be effective in showing these people as dads, as husbands, as boyfriends, as sons. And I think it shined a light on what it takes to be in a sport like boxing, which is not a team sport – it’s mano a mano, and it takes a certain grit and a certain kind of tenacity. These guys are a different breed.”

Kallen’s role as den mom involved all of the boxers coming into her office daily for a bit of quantitative and qualitative analysis. 

The quantitative part: stepping on the scale, so Jackie and the producers could keep tabs on how close to being on weight everyone was. The qualitative part: a chat with “Mom,” a chance to discuss how they were feeling and what they were going through in the most competitive of reality-TV bubbles.

Kallen had a candle on her desk for each fighter and removed them one by one as the guys were eliminated – a little on the nose, perhaps, in terms of borrowing from the torch-snuffing tradition on Burnett’s breakout show “Survivor.”

The process of getting to know these 16 new “sons” and then watching them lose and pack their bags had the potential to be emotionally devastating, but Kallen’s experience in that regard helped make her the right pick for the role.

“I’ve been involved in boxing now 47 years, so at that point it had been 27 years of it, so I was very used to seeing guys come and go in the sport, and I’ve learned to watch it with a very objective eye,” she reflected. “It’s just a fight. It’s like watching a game – there’s going to be a winner and a loser. You have to be very stoic. I was happy when any of them won and just grateful no one got badly hurt.”

Kallen was also plenty experienced when it came to the ins and outs of a masculine environment.

“I only had a brother growing up, and my father was one of three sons, and my husband was one of four sons, and I had two sons, so it was just business as usual,” she said. “I’m actually a lot more comfortable around guys than women. I like the same things. I like sports. I like fast cars. I like gambling. I like guy things. I’m also very in touch with my feminine side – you know, you’ll never see me without makeup and my nails perfect and all that.

“Anyway, when I first got into boxing and there were all the usual innuendos and guys dropping their towels and stuff, it never fazed me because I could just look at them and say, ‘You know, I’ve got two boys at home, and I’ve seen better than what you’re showing, so if I were you I’d cover that little thing up.’”

Twenty years on from The Contender, Kallen – a 2024 International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee – remains active, both inside boxing and outside of it.

She’s still managing fighters, including 22-1-2 junior welterweight Mykquan Williams, 9-1 junior lightweight Samuel Rizzo, and 14-5-1 female bantamweight Shurretta Metcalf, last seen fighting on the Katie Taylor-Amanda Serrano III undercard at Madison Square Garden.

Kallen is also a motivational speaker; she’s working on her third book (her second, Between the Ropes, came out in 2013); and she’s involved in something I’d never heard of until she mentioned it – Ice Wars, a new bareknuckle fighting league on ice, basically hockey without the sticks and the puck.

She’s even involved in a forthcoming boxing reality show, and though she couldn’t disclose the working title or the potential network, she explained the concept: Two teams of boxers train in different environments, one in a posh mansion in Miami and the other in a gritty setting in Philadelphia, and then they compete to reveal just how much impact sleeping in metaphorical silk pajamas has on fighters.

You can’t keep Jackie Kallen away from this sport, and you can’t even keep her away from reality TV shows centered around this sport.

“I’ll be 80 next year, and I feel 20,” Kallen said. “I don’t know where I get the energy, but I still can go like I did when I was a kid, and I hope it stays like that because I still have a lot of mountains to climb and a lot of goals to achieve.”

As they say, a mother’s job is never done.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 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.