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.

Jonathan “Reid Dawg” Reid is one contestant from the first season of “The Contender” who doesn’t need to be reminded that it’s been 21 years since the show was filmed and 20 since it aired.

His daughter Iyanna is a perpetual reminder of the time that has passed.

When that inaugural season of the reality show began taping, Reid’s wife, Anna, was pregnant with their fifth child. Two weeks after Reid Dawg was eliminated from the competition, while the Reids were all still living in Contender housing, Iyanna was born at a hospital in Glendale, California.

She’s 20 now. Turning 21 next month. So Reid knows exactly how much time has passed.

Oh, and Iyanna has two kids of her own. So Grandpa Jonathan has plenty of reminders that he isn’t such a young fella anymore. (He actually has four grandkids in total.)

Even back in 2004, Reid was already an old man — relatively speaking — in the Contender loft. Twelve of the 16 fighters were in their 20s. Reid was 31 at the time.

On the show, Reid stood out for his elder statesman status, for his big personality and ability to deliver one-liners and for his pregnant wife and all the kids they were trying to corral. Beyond that, even hardcore fans of the show probably don’t remember too much about Reid, because he appeared in fewer episodes than anyone else.

He wasn’t the first boxer eliminated. But he was the first boxer eliminated who wasn’t invited back into the competition. Peter Manfredo was the first to lose, Reid the second. But Manfredo got a chance at redemption after Jeff Fraza contracted chicken pox. For Reid, it was two episodes and done.

During his brief time in the loft, Reid took on a role somewhat like a player/coach for the “East” team.

“With most of those guys being younger than me, I felt like I would have to be the one to set the example,” Reid, now 52, recalled. “For instance, when Peter had his fight, he was worried about making weight. So we went in the workout room and I ran with him, next to him on one of the treadmills, to help him get the weight off. I know how hard that can be, to get the last couple of pounds off, so I got out there and did it with him.”

When it came time for Reid’s fight on the next episode, against Jesse Brinkley, Reid’s willingness to do a little extra running came back to bite him.

The “Survivor”-style team challenge that episode involved running up and down the bleachers at Rose Bowl Stadium, and Reid proved to be a team player, to his own detriment.

“I ran those bleachers more times than anybody, because one of the guys, I think it was Juan De La Rosa, I could see in his face that he was tired and he wasn’t going to make it. So I ran up there in his spot.

“Meanwhile, the other team, they got to sit someone out of the challenge because they had one more man than we did, so Jesse sat out. I knew right then that he was going to be the one fighting. And he picked me to be the one to fight, right after I ran all those bleachers.”

If he had it to do over, Reid would take a different approach in the challenge. But more significantly, he would take a different approach in his fight with Brinkley, which he lost by unanimous five-round decision.

“I was disappointed in my performance, and in my strategy,” Reid reflected. “We had five-round fights. I should have gone out there fighting like the way we used to fight as amateurs — when the bell rang, you were throwing blows until the referee says stop. You don’t try to pace yourself. By the time you pace yourself in a five-round fight, you may be down three rounds and you gotta win by knockout.”

Despite his early exit from the show, Reid developed lasting friendships with several of his castmates — some of those bonds formed while he was living in what he called the “loser house.” Eliminated fighters didn’t move into the same housing as their families; rather, they stayed in another house in Southern California with all of the other eliminated boxers. Reid, unfortunately, stayed in that house longer than anyone else (albeit with an interruption for his daughter’s birth).

During his handful of days in the main loft, Reid developed divergent opinions on the show’s two famous hosts, Sylvester Stallone and Sugar Ray Leonard.

“In my opinion, Sugar Ray was like one of the fellas,” Reid said. “Sugar Ray would hang out, tell stories, you’re laughing and giggling with him. It was natural, because he was a real fighter.

“Sylvester Stallone, I think he was just doing a lot of things for the camera. Stallone would kind of be standoffish, and then when they would come in a room where all the guys were filming, then Stallone would come to life.

“But Sugar Ray, he would talk to us on camera, off camera, shooting the breeze, and talking to us about different things that help fighters out, giving us advice.”

Long before he was rubbing elbows with celebrities in Cali, Reid grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and found himself running with the wrong crowd and then in a place he very much did not want to be.

At age 18, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He served three years.

Reid’s father, Graham E. Reid II, was a Vietnam vet and a martial arts instructor, and Jonathan took to karate as a kid and then began to think about becoming a professional kickboxer. His dad seemed open to that idea, until things took a turn.

“I graduated from high school in May of 1990, and by January 1991 I was in the back of a police car,” Reid said. “So, I did my stint in the institution. And while I was there, I was talking to my dad on the phone, and he said, ‘Well, you got two marks on your life now. You’re a black man here in the hills of North America. And, you’re a felon.’

“He says, ‘So what are you gonna do when you get out?’ I mentioned kickboxing again. He said, ‘Well, a kickboxer can have a short career if you get hit with the right martial art technique. What do you think about boxing?’ I said, ‘That sounds good. I just have to remember not to kick.’”

Reid got out of prison on Sept. 1, 1993, and the next day, he and his dad walked into a Police Athletic League boxing gym.

He made his pro debut on Dec. 3, 1996, and proceeded over the next four years to win his first 27 fights — although mostly against nondescript opposition in and around Nashville. Then came a gargantuan step up. On one week’s notice, he got the call to be a late replacement for Guillermo Jones and challenge William Joppy for a middleweight belt on the Felix Trinidad-Fernando Vargas undercard.

It went about as well as you’d expect. Joppy dropped Reid in the third round and stopped him in the fourth.

“I couldn’t look at the fight for at least about six months,” Reid said. “I eventually went back and looked at it, and you know, I saw a couple of opportunities where the result could have been different. I remember hitting Joppy, and I was like kind of like a deer in headlights. Oh my god, I hit the champ. I remember hitting him one time, and the sweat jumped off his head. It was a good right hand, but I didn’t come back with my hook. I didn’t throw the right hand and come back with the left hook immediately. If I would have done that, he would have went to sleep.”

Maybe so, maybe not. Regardless, after his first pro defeat, Reid got back to fighting six-rounders and eight-rounders against lesser opposition and won six straight before a fateful phone call came in at the gym where he was training in Nashville in 2004.

Reid happened to answer the phone, and a voice on the other end asked him, “Have you heard of The Contender?” Reid answered in the affirmative, and said it was his understanding that the show was looking for amateur boxers. The voice on the other end set him straight and said the show was looking for pros, and informed him a tryout was coming up in Tunica, Mississippi, about a four-hour drive from Nashville.

Reid made the drive along with his friend Vinroy Barrett — a slightly smaller boxer who ended up cast on the ESPN-televised second season of The Contender — and the colorful Reid Dawg made the cut.

Following the high of being selected for the show, it was pretty much all downhill for Reid as a professional boxer. He lost to Brinkley on the second episode. He lost to Miguel Espino on the undercard of the Sergio Mora-Manfredo rematch. Reid then proceeded to go 2-16 over the remainder of a career that lasted another decade, finally retiring in 2015 with a record of 35-19 (19 KOs).

“I believe that most of those losses came from not having the drive to want to fight anymore,” he said. “After The Contender, I lost my motivation. When I got in the ring, I was just going through the motions.”

It was a June 20, 2015 fight against Scott Sigmon — when Reid was 42 — that convinced him to stop going through those motions.

“I remember I went down off a jab. It wasn’t that the jab hurt. It was like, my footwork was wrong and then when I got hit with the jab, I’m like, ‘What the hell? Did I just get knocked down with a damn jab?’ I was actually saying that, I was down and I was talking to a friend in the crowd, and he was like, ‘Man, get up!’ I saw the referee counting, and I was thinking, he just knocked me down with a jab. I said, OK, that’s it — that's enough. Time for me to get out of this stuff so I can still have a decent conversation when people are talking to me.”

Reid most definitely can still have a decent conversation.

He works these days in the UPS hub in Nashville (when I asked what he does for a living, Reid immediately responded, “What can Brown do for you?”), and specifically does not drive a truck for UPS … because the hours could potentially conflict with his bowling league schedule.

“If I’m not working, I’m in the bowling alley,” Reid said.

The exact dialogue is not entirely suitable for print, but if you want a laugh, and a sense of Reid’s ability to indeed still carry a conversation, ask him to tell you about the pick-up lines he uses at the bowling alley, complete with suggestions of a game of strip bowling.

Oh, about the fact that he’s using pick-up lines: Yep, Reid is long divorced from Anna. Iyanna was their last child together, then Reid remarried and had one more daughter, but divorced again a few years later.

He’s been through some challenging times the last few years. In 2020, Reid was diagnosed with prostate cancer — but thankfully they caught it early and he’s in good health now. But Reid’s sister died that same year at just 43 years of age, and in 2023, Reid’s father, who was suffering from dementia, died. Reid has since moved back into his childhood home with his mother, not wanting her to live there by herself.

A lot has changed in Reid’s life since his brief stint on The Contender, and he isn’t involved in boxing much anymore, but he does still keep an eye on the sport. In our first text message exchange arranging the interview for this article, Reid wrote, “Before you ask, my answer is Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford wins by unanimous decision.’

Also included in that exchange, after I suggested either a Saturday or Sunday interview: Reid’s strong preference for a Saturday convo, because “I’ve got a bowling tournament Sunday.”

Reid went from a reality TV star two decades ago who was trying to knock down other men and living with his wife and 4½ kids, to now a single guy trying to knock down pins and living with his aging mom.

It’s a different sort of life, but hey, a lot can change in 20 years — as Reid is reminded every time he plays with those grandkids whose mom wasn’t even born yet when he was on The Contender.

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.