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Reality television with real poignance


Najai Turpin, the Philadelphia boxer who died by suicide on Feb. 14, steps up to fight in the next episode of NBC's The Contender, the reality show in which 16 middleweights compete for a $1 million prize. The show will air Sunday at 8 p.m. on Channel 10.

We've watched a preview tape and won't reveal how the fight turns out, but the episode is the most intense of the four so far.

Taped in September in Pasadena, Calif., the episode is a tearjerker. Turpin, who died at age 23, talks about his pain and aspirations. He plays with his 2-year-old daughter, Anyae. Glimmers of joy burst through his wary reserve.

"Naj is the contender that most confuses me," Jackie Kallen, the show's on-screen "den mother," says during the episode. "He's a sweet guy. He's just very distrustful of people. He reminds me so much of a little animal that has been mistreated."

By phone yesterday, Kallen described Turpin as having been funny but filled with emotional turmoil. Some nights during taping, he slept on the floor in his closet, she said.

Sylvester Stallone, co-executive producer of the show with reality TV guru Mark Burnett, has delivered what he promised - Rocky-like drama in which struggles in the ring are a metaphor for lives outside it. The difference between The Contender and such shows as Fear Factor is that it is partly documentary despite the extent to which events might have been staged and edited.

Turpin, who was 13-1 as a pro before starting on the show, grew up in a housing project in the Mantua section of Philadelphia. His mother died when he was 18.

"When I close my eyes and I think about her, I can feel her giving me a hug," Turpin said in the show.

Besides his daughter and a girlfriend, Turpin took care of a younger brother and sister. He worked multiple jobs.

Friends have said that Turpin's suicide wasn't related to his participation in the show.

"Inside, I've got a whole lot of pain, and I'm going to bring it when I fight," he said in the show.

Turpin is matched in the episode against Sergio Mora, a talkative fighter from Los Angeles who enters the bout with a 12-0 record. The self-educated Mora talks about reading Emerson, Thoreau and Nietzsche.

In an epilogue, cohost Sugar Ray Leonard describes a trust fund the show has established for Anyae, with donations accepted at www.contender.yahoo.com.

One can imagine the finale of The Contender being a huge event in May. But the show's ratings have not been huge so far. The March 7 premiere drew a Nielsen-estimated 8.1 million viewers in a time slot where NBC's Medium was averaging 15.1 million. A second preview, in ER's slot last Thursday, drew an estimated 8.9 million viewers, around half of ER's typical rating. Sunday's episode attracted an estimated 6.7 million viewers, putting NBC fourth among the networks in that slot.

Numbers aside, Turpin would have been a local celebrity next week.