Ibrahim Ali puts bullying and Iraqi war behind him to become SA amateur boxing title winner
He shares a surname with a boxing legend, has survived bloodshed in the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul and experienced racial taunts in Australia. Now Ibrahim Ali is aiming for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after winning a state amateur title.
With a surname like his, you would think Ibrahim Ali was born to be a boxer.
But Ali only turned to pugilism because he was bullied at primary school after arriving in Australia from the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Racial taunts such as ‘go back to your own country’ and ‘you don’t belong here’ were directed at the youngster, whose family had fled a place where they regularly heard AK47 gunfire, trod on bullet casings and saw blood on the streets.
After Ali came home crying from being teased, his older brother and father figure Shemal encouraged him to join Para Hills Amateur Boxing Club, originally to learn self-defence.
Two years later, Ali boxed — and won — his first fight.
Now, aged 17, he is a state amateur champion after winning the open youth 81kg class challenge belt at the Dom Polski Centre last month.
“There’s not many people out there who’ve been through what I’ve been through,” says Ali, who is the second-youngest of six siblings and idolises boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
“I didn’t have anything growing up in Mosul.
“When you walked around the streets, you’d step on bullet casings — luckily we survived.
“Coming to Australia, I didn’t seem to fit in (at primary school).
“They’d say ‘go back to your own country’ but I didn’t even know English so I didn’t even know what they were saying.
“At some stages, I was getting beaten up as well.
“I didn’t want to be the kid that gets bullied, I wanted to stand up for myself.
“(Winning the state title) was an amazing feeling.”
But Ali’s celebrations have been short-lived.
A fortnight after his state title win, doctors told him he had a low-grade mucoepidermoid carcinoma, a salivary gland cancer.
Ali had felt a lump at the roof of his mouth since he was 11 but did not think it was an issue so did not get it checked until late last year.
Last month he had the lump surgically removed and was later diagnosed with cancer.
“As soon as the doctor told me, I won’t lie, I cried a little bit because I started to picture my whole boxing career,” he says.
“I was shocked because I can still do everything perfectly — I’m a healthy guy and I didn’t feel like it affected me.”
Ali will have another check-up this month to make sure the cancer has been fully removed and doctors have told him to take the rest of the year off boxing.
It is a blow but he considers the diagnosis just another challenge to overcome, an additional motivation.
“This will be one of my strengths,” he says.
Ali says the same thing about making it out of Mosul in 2006.
He had lived there in a “big house filled with 10 different families” — his would all sleep in the same bedroom — and they rarely ventured far from the home.
The only “sport” they played was throwing rocks at each other and the children did not go to school.
Ali’s mum, Delven, had deemed it too unsafe after one of his brother’s best friends died in a school bombing.
“It’s a dangerous city — that’s why we left,” he says of Mosul, which has made headlines in recent years for becoming an ISIS stronghold.
“I remember the gunshots and the blood on the streets as a young kid — there was a lot of bad things there.
“Bombings were a normal thing.
“There was no law there, no nothing, it was just all war.”
After fleeing Iraq, Ali’s family lived in the Victorian town of Cobram and Renmark before settling in Mawson Lakes.
He is now completing year 12 at Roma Mitchell Secondary College, which he loves and where he has no problems with bullies.
“I’m friends with everyone,” he says.
Friends have also “evolved to become family” at the Para Hills boxing gym.
Before his diagnosis, he was training there six days a week, lifting weights, shadow boxing, and whacking punching bags next to a large poster of Muhammad Ali.
“He’s my idol and not just because of his surname — he’s everybody’s idol,” he says.
“All the time I watch videos of him.
“I loved his style, his footwork, his speed, hands.”
Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, made his name by winning a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Rome Olympics.
This new Ali is aiming to rise to prominence at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
And he cannot wait to get back in the ring in January.
“What I’ve been through, it just makes me hungrier,” he says.