Nostalgia never dies, but time moves on, and The Contender is a strange phenomenon in that it was huge in the moment by boxing standards, disappointing in the moment by NBC standards, beloved 20 years later by the fans who stuck with the show the entire spring of 2005, but entirely irrelevant to anyone who wasn’t there watching it in real time.

There were four additional seasons — on increasingly obscure networks — but The Contender Season One had no second life, no streaming resurgence. You’d think maybe you could find the old episodes on Peacock; you’d be wrong.

Still, 8.1 million U.S. households tuned into the premiere episode on March 7, 2005, and 7.97 million for the finale in which Mora defeated Peter Manfredo Jnr. to win the million-dollar prize — far more than ever watched an Andre Ward fight, a Marco Antonio Barrera fight, even a Roy Jones Jnr fight.

“There’s a lot more channels now, but at the time, NBC, man — it was huge for me to be a part of that,” Mora, now 44, said. “I take it for what it is. It was a great run. I stretched my 15 minutes into well over 15 years. And a lot of good things came out of it in my life, as far as opportunities for big fights, bigger paydays, things outside of boxing like sponsors. I got to travel a lot. I was going to private events. I just tried to enjoy the gravy train — and I never took it for granted. I was always like, Man, how lucky am I?”

Mora first heard about The Contender — strangely enough, one of two network-TV boxing-based reality shows casting at the same time, the other being FOX’s The Next Great Champ hosted by Oscar De La Hoya — when he was in Chicago for his 12th pro fight, against Les Ralston. It was an 8-rounder on the undercard of a May 15, 2004 show featuring heavyweight Calvin Brock and future lightweight titleholder David Diaz, and Mora-Ralston made the broadcast — on NBC.

During the fighter meetings with the broadcast team, a producer asked Mora if he’d heard about The Contender.

“I said, ‘No, tell me about it,’” Mora recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get 16 guys around the country. They’re gonna fight each other. Million dollar prize. I said, ‘I’m the perfect Contender.’ I even said it on camera. I said, ‘Sounds like me. I’m undefeated. I’m waiting for opportunity. I don’t have a promoter, I don’t have a manager, and I wanna strike gold. Man, get me on that show.’”

Getting cast wasn’t as simple as that, though. Thousands of middleweight-or-thereabouts hopefuls attended casting calls around the country in the late spring and early summer of ’04. Mora was a sparring partner of Fernando Vargas’ at the time, and as the Latin Snake recalls, Vargas was friendly with Sylvester Stallone — one of the hosts and producers of The Contender — so the Vargas connection got Mora and fellow Vargas sparring partner Ishe Smith to the front of the line at the L.A. tryout. Mora aced the workout, and had the right look and pro record for the show. He had to wait over a month to hear anything, but eventually he got the invite to the next phase.

The contenders for The Contender were whittled down from thousands to 50, and then to a final 25.

“That’s when they put us up at the DoubleTree Hotel and isolated us,” he remembered. “We had to see psychiatrists, we go through the medical evaluation, the mental evaluation, the physical evaluation, the sparring. And then the personality evaluation. And believe it or not, I passed all of them with flying colors — except the personality.

“They were giving these guys papers just like on American Idol. Like, if you made it out of the interview process and they wanted to cast you, they give you a paper, then you get out and you show your family, ‘Yeah, I made it!’ I didn't get a paper.”

The casting director, Michelle McNulty, was ready to send Mora home because he was holding back, playing it close to the vest, giving too many one-word answers — basically, acting like a normal person, not a reality-TV character.

“I remember she said something to me when I was walking out the door. She said, ‘Alright, Sergio, nice meeting you. You can go back to East L.A. to your lowriders and your vato music.’ And I turned around. I go, ‘Oh, I see what you want,’ and I closed the door and I sat back down. I go, ‘Right, so you want me to tell you that I'm gonna get in a fight with these assholes because they take my peanut butter. And I'm gonna pick fights with them because they look at me the wrong way. Well, I'm not gonna do none of that shit, but I’ll tell you what I'm gonna do.’ Then I really opened up, and that's when she gave me my paper.”

At the outset of filming, which began in August 2004, the little-known Mora was not considered one of the favorites to win. As he recalls, Smith, Manfredo, and Jesse Brinkley were the most established pros in the cast and were considered the favorites, while Mora heard he had odds of 16-to-1 to win.

As a skilled boxer with minimal power — Mora entered the show with a record of 12-0 (3 KOs) — he didn’t love his chances in scheduled 5-rounders.

So his focus out of the gate wasn’t on winning the million-dollar first-place prize. He was too busy marveling over the experience.

“In the house, they had all these supplements and they had protein shakes and they had massages, and they provided anything you needed. Some of these guys were using all that stuff, living like Roman gladiators. This is why me and Alfonso [Gomez] got along. We didn’t eat any of that stuff. We didn’t need nothing. We were like, ‘Man, can you believe it? They’re paying us $1,000 a week to train.’ For me and Alfonso, every day there was like vacation.”

A couple of weeks into the experience, Mora won his first fight, by decision over Najai Turpin (who would go on to commit suicide before the show aired — a dark story for another time). It was after Mora’s quarterfinal fight that a switch flipped and he began to envision himself winning the tournament.

“Everyone knew that Ishe was the favorite, and nobody wanted to fight him, believe it or not,” Mora said. “They didn't want nothing to do with him. So when I beat him, all of a sudden these guys realized, ‘Oh shit, he just beat the favorite, that probably makes him the favorite now.’ They started to respect that I was coming with strategy. I wasn't just going punch for punch with all these guys — if that was the case, I wouldn't have won it. But, after I beat Ishe and got to the semifinal, I really kicked it into another gear.”

After Mora outpointed Brinkley in a 7-rounder in the semis, he had to wait eight months — time for the production team to edit the episodes and for NBC to air them — before he could take on Manfredo in the live finals.

So how did Mora like the experience of watching the edited versions of the episodes air throughout March, April, and May?

“I hated it,” he said. “There was just so much stuff that they didn’t show. The TV show, it was kind of reality, but it was also a little bit of cinema. It was a little bit of Rocky, and it was a little bit of bullshit.”

On May 24, 2005, Mora won a wide unanimous decision over Manfredo to become the Richard Hatch or Kelly Clarkson of this reality series. And then he and the rest of his castmates had to figure out how best to capitalize on their sudden fame.

They had all signed contracts before the show began to be promoted afterward by the new Tournament of Contenders promotional outfit. And as Mora explained, it was a tremendous deal for the boxers.

“They didn't seem to understand that they were overpaying all of us,” he said. “Every fighter on that show would gladly be stuck in a contract where you have a six-figure minimum for a 6- or 8-round fight. They were giving us TV money, not understanding that they were supposed to give us ballroom-boxing money.

“It was two fights a year guaranteed, and the second they weren’t honoring that, then the contract’s null and void and I can go somewhere else. But, I mean, all of us were getting title opportunities just because people wanted us to be the B-side, a popular B-side to a world champion so they can whoop our ass. [Miguel] Cotto whipped Alfonso. [Julio Cesar] Chavez Jnr beat the shit out of Manfredo. They thought Vernon [Forrest] was gonna beat the shit out of me.”

Mora went on to upset Forrest and claim a major title at 154 pounds in 2008 — but that was three years after The Contender’s first season ended, as he was in no rush initially to take tough fights, since he was guaranteed handsome purses for easier ones.

“They didn’t want to keep us active and busy,” Mora explained. “They wanted us to go straight to the big fights, where they can get their money back on their investment.”

There were ups and downs for Mora. He went from Contender to champ by beating Forrest, but lost the immediate rematch. He fought to an ugly draw with Shane Mosley. He lost twice to Brian Vera. He defeated Grzegorz Proksa. In his mid 30s, he lost twice to Daniel Jacobs. Then he narrowly defeated a faded Alfredo Angulo.

Along the way, he dabbled in other ways to make money. He played poker regularly at Commerce Casino. He made paid appearances. Around the time he hit the skids with the losses to Vera in the early-2010s, he got a call out of the blue from actor — and, for a short time, celebrity boxer — Mickey Rourke, asking Mora to train him. The Latin Snake parlayed that into offers from rich young actors and other Hollywood types who wanted to pay a famous ex-champ to teach them to box.

Mora was doing well with that and was on the verge of opening his own gym when Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions showed up, throwing money around, enabling Mora to make a much better living fighting Jacobs on PBC shows than he could running a gym in Hollywood.

After two stoppage losses to Jacobs, he outpointed Angulo in April 2018 to raise his record to 29-5-2 (9 KOs).

“That was a crucial, pivotal time in my life,” he reflected. “I was planning to fight again after Angulo, but that was a difficult fight. I felt old. I figured I only had one more fight in me after that. They were thinking of setting me up with one of the Charlo brothers, and I would have taken it. I was 37 years old and I would have been the B-side and probably would have not done well.

“But then my daughter was born.”

Mora already had a son. Now he and his wife had two kids, and his priorities were changing.

“I was thinking differently about fighting after that,” said Mora, whose son is now 10 and whose daughter is 6. “And then the very next week after my daughter was born, my phone rings from a weird number. I happened to answer it, and there was this guy who offered me this job calling fights for DAZN. So, destiny, God, faith, whatever you want to call it, I realized it was pulling me in a different direction and I decided to call it a career.”

Twenty years after The Contender, Mora is still close with Sly Stallone’s co-host, Sugar Ray Leonard. He’s also tight with two castmates he barely knew during filming in 2004, Tarick Salmaci and Jonathan Reid. And he regularly gets FaceTime calls at all hours of the night from Brinkley.

(You haven’t truly lived until you’ve heard Mora’s Brinkley impression. Snake, what are you doing, man? You know you never beat me. The scale beat me, bro.)

The FaceTimes from Brinkley are good for a laugh, but it was that one call from DAZN that set Mora on his current path — calling major fights, traveling the world, co-hosting the Boxing with Mannix and Mora podcast with DAZN colleague Chris Mannix, remaining in the public eye long after his 15 minutes seemed to have expired.

And he’s under no illusions about what made his broadcasting career possible.

“Absolutely, this never would have happened without The Contender,” he said. “I don’t have enough ignorance and pride to claim I would have done this either way. No, no matter how good you are, you still need opportunity in life. You need a lot of luck and a lot of doors to open, and I’ve had a lot of those, in my career and in my life.”

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.