Reality and tragedy: Remembering The Contender’s Najai Turpin

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, producer Adam Briles, Peter Manfredo, Ishe Smith.

It has to be the most haunting confessional quote ever heard on reality television: “I feel greatness ahead of me. I feel greatness ahead of me.”

No one will ever get to find out if indeed Najai Turpin had greatness ahead of him.

On Valentine’s Day 2005, three weeks before the premiere of “The Contender,” at just 23 years of age, Turpin shot himself in the head in his Chevy Lumina while parked around the corner from his home in West Philadelphia. His lone fight on the reality show — a decision loss in the first round of the tournament to eventual Season 1 winner Sergio Mora — was his last boxing match.

Turpin left behind a 2-year-old daughter, a professional record of 12-2 with 8 KOs, unfulfilled potential, unanswered questions and devastation among those who knew him.

“He was one of the kindest people I have ever met,” Brian Sutcliffe, a friend from the James Shuler Memorial Gym where Turpin trained, wrote on BoxingTalk a month after Turpin’s death. “Najai really was special in how much he cared about people.”

“It was such a blow to all of us who got to know him and care about him. It was just so tragic and senseless,” Contender Supervising Producer Adam Briles said 20 years later. “He had this incredibly sweet side, this delicate and kind of tender side. He was also terrifying and broken. There was this multiplicity in his personality, which made him really compelling.

“But for him to go there — you just want to say, ‘No, no, Najai, there’s no coming back.’ That finality of somebody taking their life is so jarring and so tragic.”

Most boxers — most of the cast of The Contender — come from tough circumstances. But Turpin’s were intense even by those standards.

His mother, Vivian, died when he was 18, leaving Najai to take care of his younger brother, sister, niece and nephew — but to do so largely in secret, to avoid child protective services intervening.

He had his first pro fight at age 19, but worked three other jobs on top of training at the gym.

And, as was revealed on The Contender, his approach to keeping his family safe was to sleep hidden in the closet with a shotgun by his side, ready to spring into action if any intruders entered his house.

It was played partially for laughs on the show, with his roommate, Ahmed Kaddour, telling the rest of the loft about Turpin sleeping in their closet, where he felt most comfortable. In the fourth episode of the season — the one in which Turpin would fight Mora and be eliminated from the competition — Turpin laughed about it along with all of his castmates, and Jeff Fraza said this was the most Turpin had spoken during his time on the show and that they all felt they were beginning to get to know the reclusive Philadelphian.

But there was also so much pain evident.

Hall of Fame manager Jackie Kallen was a consultant on the show and served as an unofficial house mother of sorts. Turpin talked to her about losing his mom five years earlier.

“I still feel her hugs,” he said as the camera zoomed in. “If I close my eyes and I really think about it, I can feel her giving me a hug. A great big hug.”

In that episode, audiences also met Turpin’s girlfriend, Angela Chapple, and their daughter, Anje.

“His daughter, I think, really became his focus, and she replaced some of that hole in his heart from losing his mom,” Briles recalled. “His daughter was everything to him.”

Casting Director Michelle McNulty and many of the other women working on the show saw Turpin’s soft side and adored him, Briles said.

But at the same, “he was somebody who could just rip you apart,” Briles noted. “He had a scary edge to him that way. When I say that, I don’t mean he was mean spirited or dangerous — that wasn’t who he was. But he could sometimes go off. He just had a lot of pain.”

Ishe Smith was perhaps closer to Turpin than anyone else in the cast and considered Najai “like a little brother.” Together, along with Juan De La Rosa, they snuck out of the loft one night.

“I could tell he didn’t like confinement,” Smith said. “He was like, ‘Let’s leave. I know a way to get out of here.’ He must have snuck out before because he was the one that showed us where to go to get out.”

Briles recalled with a laugh the first time the crew discovered Turpin had busted out.

“He shimmied across some rain gutter, over to the parking structure that was attached to our building, and he was so thrilled with himself for accomplishing this escape. And I remember, on the radio, one of our producers was like, ‘Hey, is that Najai over on top of the parking structure?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it looks like him.’ And they go, ‘Well, it looks like he's dancing.’ He was up there just dancing by himself because he was so thrilled with himself. And we asked him, ‘Why did you do that? We told you not to leave.’ He goes, ‘Because you told me I couldn’t escape. So I had to show you that I could.’”

He also later escaped from the house the eliminated fighters stay in, Briles said, stowing away and sneaking into a subsequent fight — only discovered when a cameraman was randomly zooming in on people in the crowd to gather B-roll.

In his BoxingTalk article, friend Sutcliffe noted that before filming began, “We laughed with Najai about what the over/under line should be on how long it would be before he tried to escape.”

When the time came for Turpin to fight on the show, he called out Mora — not only a skilled fighter but a bigger fighter than Turpin, who could make welterweight if he had to, 11 pounds south of the Contender limit.

“A little guy chose a big guy, and he came out swinging!” an impressed Mora said in a confessional recorded after the fight.

Turpin lost the five-round decision, by unanimous scores of 49-46, but appeared in the edit to have performed admirably.

“He was so slick,” Sutcliffe said in his 2005 article about the prospect from the Shuler gym. “He fights like Bernard Hopkins or James Toney. He was beautiful to watch, a natural counterpuncher. He just rolled with every punch and countered back. God, I loved watching him. He was a natural and I have no doubt he would have been champ.”

Turpin was in demonstrable pain in the dressing room after his loss to Mora.

“I feel as though I did nothing wrong,” he said to the camera. “I fought with my heart. I gave it my all, every single second. There’s no reason for me to feel the agony. There’s no reason for me to feel like this.”

Then, as the episode ended, came those devastating words: “I feel greatness ahead of me. I feel greatness ahead of me.”

What exactly caused Turpin to do what he did on Feb. 14, 2005, is a matter of some debate.

Briles recalled that Turpin had been training in the Pocono Mountains and “the amazing disappearing Najai” snuck out and drove to see Chapple, with whom he had a “very tumultuous relationship.” According to Briles and to reports published at the time, Turpin could be a jealous boyfriend, and Chapple would threaten to take away access to their daughter as leverage.

Chapple was in the car with him when he pulled the trigger.

But some people close to Turpin felt there was more to it than just relationship problems.

“After he left the show, he was left without a support structure,” Sutcliffe wrote. “He was completely alone and felt he let everyone down.”

Sutcliffe continued: “The tragedy of The Contender is that the confidentiality requirement he had to sign prevented him from dealing with his loss through the only support system he had. I know they needed to keep the show a secret, but it hurts me that he might have been able to survive this depression if he had been able to discuss what he was going through inside. …

“I think back and wonder if he felt that The Contender was his only shot. If I had seen this show I would have given him a hug and told him how great he fought and how good he did, just like everyone else in his life would have done. He didn’t get that support. I know other people lose all the time, but Najai was one of the ones who needed help getting through these losses.”

Turpin’s trainer, Percy “Buster” Custus, told the Philadelphia Daily News hours after Najai’s suicide, “He was frustrated, because he was, like, training for nothing. He had no motivation. I don’t know if that had anything to do with what happened today or not.”

Added Ishe Smith last month as he reflected on the tragedy: “I was mad because they didn’t give him an outlet, any resources. You know, you go home, and you can’t fight, and you can't talk about the show, and some fighters need that outlet. Some fighters need it.”

But in light of the fact that Turpin was known to be arguing with his girlfriend and committed the act while in the car with her, Briles pushes back sternly against the notion that the show’s confidentiality agreement played a role.

“It was frustrating to hear people say that,” Briles said, “because we were hurting too, and to have somebody point the finger at us so completely unfairly — I mean, we really cared about Najai.

“Listen, it’s been 20 years. If this was on us, I would own it. We had nothing, zero to do with it. If we did, I would own it and say, ‘Yeah, he just didn’t deal well with losing, and it’s horrible and it’s tragic, but he just somehow took it so hard that he couldn’t get over it.’ I’d tell you that if that was the case. But it just wasn't. It was his battle that he had over his relationship and over his little girl, and we saw it in L.A. — he reacted emotionally when he felt out of control. I’m not trying to play psychologist, but I know for sure it had nothing to do with him losing to Sergio Mora.”

Briles noted that sessions with an actual psychologist were part of the casting process — an insurance requirement for most reality shows — and that Turpin cleared all of those evaluations.

When Turpin’s elimination episode aired, Briles received a congratulatory email from Executive Producer Jeffrey Katzenberg — the only such email Katzenberg ever sent him — remarking on how powerful it was.

Briles still insists two decades later, “I think Episode 4 of Contender Season 1 is one of the best episodes of reality TV that I’ve ever seen.”

By the time the episode aired, more than a month had passed since Turpin’s death. The tragedy was acknowledged in a brief postscript read by co-host Sugar Ray Leonard, who directed viewers toward a trust fund for Anje set up by the show. Briles said he believes the fund contained about $1.1 million as of a year after the season aired (though BoxingScene could not independently confirm that estimated figure).

In the end, we’re left with a picture as incomplete as Turpin’s life and boxing career ultimately proved to be.

“He lived a guarded life,” Contender co-host Sylvester Stallone told a reporter shortly after Turpin’s suicide, “but when he was with his daughter and girlfriend, he became incredibly childlike.”

“Najai was, to say the least, eccentric,” Sutcliffe wrote 20 years ago. “Najai was a perfect example of a troublesome youngster who became a respectful, loving person. It was the gym that made him that way.”

“He was so complex,” said Briles. “He had one of the most amazing work ethics of anyone you could ever imagine. And he had this incredible backstory built on grit and determination and hardship.”

In one of his lowest moments, shortly after suffering the second loss of his pro career, Turpin summoned the resolve to declare that greatness awaited him.

But before the world heard him say those words, we already knew they were untrue.

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.