Knocked Out 76 Seconds Into the Biggest Fight of His Life, Brooklyn's Dmitriy Salita Has Picked Himself Off the Mat
Seventy-six seconds. That's how long it lasted.
On Dec. 5, 2009, Dmitriy Salita, a Brooklyn native, faced Amir Khan, the WBA light welterweight champion, at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle, England.
It was the first genuine title fight of Salita's career; an opportunity to silence the doubters who griped about the mediocre tin cans who littered his 30-0-1 record and the critics who said his hands were too slow and his skills too pedestrian.
The matchup also pitted a Muslim (Khan) vs. a Jew (Salita), prompting the New York Post (among other outlets) to call it a "Brawl that is holy."
"I have tremendous respect for Khan," Salita said beforehand. "The only reason I am going to kick his butt is because he has my belt."
The first knockdown came 17 seconds in—a right hook to the head that sent Salita sprawling to the canvas.
The second knockdown arrived 27 seconds later—another right dropping Salita to his knees.
Finally, 76 seconds after the opening bell, Khan nailed Salita with a vicious left to the nose.
Game over.
In the 1½ years that have passed, Salita has devoted a good amount of thought to the night. There is the part of him—oddly requisite in all fighters—that believes things could have been different ("If only...); there's another part that acknowledges Khan's greatness ("He's an amazing fighter...). Mostly, however, there's a determination to move forward; to recover.
Which—when your dream is deflated in 76 seconds—isn't nearly as easy as it might seem.
"It was very tough," says Salita. "I'm human, just like everyone else. After the fight I locked myself in the locker room for a half hour...maybe an hour. I sat there, all alone, and tried to get it together. How could that happen? Honestly, I was in a state of disbelief."
Once, in the days, weeks and years before the Khan debacle, Salita symbolized something of a quirky novelty in a sport layered with quirky novelties. A devout Jew who wears a yarmulke (all places but in the ring), refuses to fight on the Sabbath and attends Shul daily, he was profiled everywhere from Sports Illustrated to the Washington Post to New York Magazine to Jewish Week.
The stories almost always carried the same theme: Check this out—a Jewish kid in the boxing gloves! Heck, Salita even nicknamed himself "The Star of David" and was occasionally led into the ring by Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae musician. In other words, Salita was in on the whole thing.
With the loss, however, an element of Salita—a serious-minded 29-year-old with a wife and baby daughter—seems to have snapped. Generally speaking, a novelty is only novel because we choose not look beneath the surface. But here, under the yarmulke, was a bruised soul, exposed and somewhat lost. Salita never considered quitting boxing, but immediately after the fight he visited Israel for the first time, spending three weeks roaming the country, looking for...something. "It was incredibly inspiring," he says. "It also gave me time to think and reflect; to consider what I want my life to be."
Toward the end of the trip, Salita took a tour of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based Holocaust museum. Before leaving the facility, he gazed out the large window that overlooks the city. Salita stood there, motionless, staring...staring. "It was like a light at the end of the tunnel," he says. "From destruction comes great redemption. You have to work for that redemption, but it's attainable. It's out there."
Upon returning home to Brooklyn, Salita set out on reclaiming his career. He got in touch with Emanuel Steward, one of the world's most renowned trainers, who invited Salita to Detroit to work with him at the famed Kronk Gym. Salita went for two weeks, then returned multiple times.
"In all my years in boxing, I'd never met anyone more determined," Steward says. "He was embarrassed by what happened, and pretty demoralized. But he has so many more skills than he displayed that night. I put him in the ring with some great fighters in Detroit, and he earned a lot of respect. He's gifted—he truly is. There's a lot there. I'll be shocked if he doesn't win a championship."
Salita moved up in weight class, from welterweight to junior welterweight, and returned to the ring on Sept. 1, 2010, beating a journeyman named Franklin Gonzalez in a lopsided decision in Oceana, Brooklyn.
He followed that up with two more victories. "One thing Emanuel has told me is that to get back to the world-class level, I have to stay busy," says Salita. "So I'm staying busy."
He's also moving forward. Frustrated by the oft-shady, oft-unpredictable business of boxing, he decided to start his own company, Salita Promotions, to organize various fight cards and events.
Based out of Queens, the company employs four people and, Salita says, looks to do boxing the right way. "There's no reason fighters have to be treated so poorly," he says. "This can be an honorable sport."
This, Salita hopes, can also be a sport of rebirth.
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