Mohamad Mardenli is a late starter in the ring. But that doesn’t stop the former model from tackling his professional boxing goals with great zeal and unorthodox methods. BOXSPORT visited the Berlin light heavyweight on the streets of Neukölln.
The air is stagnant, every breath is difficult, the shirt sticks to the upper body, soaked with sweat. On this hot and humid Wednesday afternoon in August, in the middle of a dense crowd of people at Berlin-Neukölln intersection station. Well, everyone complains about the weather, always; but today it’s extremely disgusting, the author agrees. So be it. The day still has something nice in store: a date with a leading actor, an underdog story from the boxing circus. And not just any story.
Mohamad Mardenli knows that his story stands out from those of so many pugilists who cavort in the lower-class professional boxing business. The protagonist leads BOXSPORT across the tough Neukölln pavement. Small business follows small business. Every corner of a building seems to be used for business. Barber stores, kebab stores, gambling establishments, one-euro crime stores – and a shisha bar on the corner with seating almost right up to the edge of the street. Mardenli wants to go straight past it and turn left. “There’s not so much hustle and bustle back there.” That’s right. We are in Körner Park, laid out almost 110 years ago on an area of around two and a half hectares. A shady, densely overgrown oasis with an orangery and café, from where we have a view of the park with water stairs.
In demand as a model
Take a deep breath. Mardenli begins to talk. He was born in Beirut, right in the middle of the late civil war turmoil. The family left the Lebanese capital and were stranded in West Berlin a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Mohamad was four years old. The usual odyssey for new arrivals followed: Refugee shelters, house hunting, putting down roots in new surroundings. Visually, phenotypically, Mohamad does not look like a “foreigner”. “But I always remained Mohamad, my first name ‘betrayed’ me,” he recalls bitterly. Especially at school. When classmates were rewarded with a small sweet after a lesson or before recess, the eight- or nine-year-old kid from Lebanon got just that: a slap behind the ears, literally. “I could never please my teacher, no matter how hard I tried.” Experiences that leave their mark.
What’s more, Mardenli never just “got” anything, he had to fight his way through. In other words, he had to fight his way through. Even after school as an adult. But he had one bonus: his looks. Like something out of a catalog. Maybe from a mail order company for men’s jackets, maybe from a cosmetics company for luxury perfumes, maybe from a fast food chain for veggie burgers. In short, a “poster boy”, a versatile advertising figure. And that’s how it turned out. Mardenli modeled for years, catwalks and photo studios were his professional home. But at some point …
Text by Oliver Rast
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