When Ishe Smith finally became Las Vegas’ first homegrown world champion in 2013, he stood in the ring with tears running down his face, shouting: “Thirteen years! Thirteen years!” He had scratched and clawed his way there, and the belt was proof of everything he had given.
That night was the peak of a career built on struggle and sacrifice. But the most testing fight of his life came years later, far beyond the ring.
A Father Pushed to the Edge
Smith’s childhood sweetheart, Latoya Woolen, was there from the start. She was part of his story. On The Contender, she said: “When he gets in that ring, he’s not fighting for him. He’s fighting for our family.”
But when their marriage broke apart, Smith nearly broke with it. Speaking to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he admitted:
“The gun was right there on the table before me, loaded. I was one moment away from pulling the trigger. I was so depressed and so sad. My childhood sweetheart was leaving me and taking my kids. I was so close.”
The only thing that stopped him was fatherhood. “The only thing that stopped me was thinking about growing up without a father. And I was like, ‘This is selfish. I can’t do them the way my dad did me.’ And I didn’t.”
He held on. He remarried, had another son, and even adopted two more kids. He kept building a family.
The Murder That Changed Everything
In 2017, Latoya was murdered — shot in the back of the head near UNLV. She left behind three of Smith’s children.
“When you grow up with somebody like that, you share that many memories with somebody, to have them senselessly murdered like that was hard for me to deal with,” he said. “That was a hard point in my career. It made me refocus, really. I realized that now I’m fighting a different type of fight.”
The ring didn’t matter the same way anymore.
After one brutal loss, his son begged him to stop. “I told him, ‘All right, I will never fight again.’” And that was it. Smith walked away.
Today, at 47, he works as a mailman in Las Vegas. “At least when I go to this job, it’s an honorable job. A hard day’s work rewards you with a hard day’s pay,” he said.
Ishe Smith’s story stopped being about belts a long time ago. He lost the mother of his kids, went through hell most of us can’t even imagine, and somehow still stood up and kept going for them. He fought in the ring, sure, but the fight he took on for his family was even bigger. He didn’t fold. He became the kind of father and man his kids could look at and say, that’s my hero.
👉 Full story: Ex-boxing champ now punching clock as Las Vegas mailman