Najai Turbin was a great fighter, an even better father and a great man. We watched and said goodbye to all three sides of him Sunday night on ‘The Contender’.

‘The Contender’ is a great addition to the reality world. It provides the most telling and truthful insight into the human spirit yet. Sunday night, some of that spirit was broken. I have a page of notes praising its accomplishments and mocking its lighter side. But they're going to have to wait another week because today we take a look at the life of Najai Turbin, the boxer who took his own life after getting knocked out of contention.

Immediately, we get a window straight into his depression, straight into the soul of someone who perceives himself as one man against the world with no one to trust. He wears a hooded sweatshirt low over his eyes and says few words to the promoter. When asked a simple question that you would think has only one answer, we hear language that sounds like a lost soul on an island of depression, “Do you have friends?”

He responds rather matter-of-fact, “I don’t hold people close like that because they’ll cross you.” He feels that his daughter is the only person he can trust.

I found myself looking for signs that were possibly missed. I was studying him trying to find tells that maybe he wasn’t prepared to go back to his hardened world without the promise of a better life. Believe me, they weren’t hard to find.

He laments, “My family, if I die today or tomorrow, they have nothing.” There are a lot of scary things about that notion. The worst of which is that a 23-year-old is giving any consideration to his own death albeit theoretical.

The indicators continue. When he is summonsing the much bigger Sergio to the line, he pledges “I want to make them feel the way I feel, inside me I got a whole lot of pain and I’m going to bring it to whoever I fight.” When placed directly in front of Sergio, he stares straight at the floor. He says he doesn’t look a boxer in the eye until fight time because the eyes tell the truth.

As that moment of truth looms and the anticipation builds, Najai frames his existence, “God blessed me to be a fighter. I’m a fighter. This is what I know. This is what I am. This is what he made me. So…here I go.” It was painful to hear him mouth words that were filled with promise and excitement for a future that we know now would never exist. For someone as jaded and scarred by the world as Najai, the hardships run together. Bloodshed begets more bloodshed and it all comes to a head in a parked car in the streets of Philly. This was just round one.

When the bell rings, I immediately plunge into a state of denial and start to believe he has an actual chance. At the outset, the problems I anticipated Najai having become a reality. The much taller Sergio has a reach advantage and he exploits it. In the second, Najai pins Sergio against the ropes and throws a flurry of punches for what seemed like the whole round fueling my denial.

In the third, Sergio caught his second wind late and tried to steal the round. He never looked back. He dominated the fourth to tie up the match. During the break, Najai’s trainer tried to motivate his fighter, “Your kid is out there looking at you.” In hindsight, maybe a life defining sentiment at a time like that was inappropriate. But maybe I’m just over thinking it. Sergio continued his attack in the fifth to take the match.

When the results were announced, there was devastation in Najai’s eyes. The desolation, the isolation and the dreams shattered all lay in ruin in his eyes.

And the eyes tell the truth.

There’s been a lot of speculation as to the role the show played in his decision to terminate his own life. I try to believe the show was a small piece in a large, complex maze of a man trying to determine his place in the world. I want to believe it had nothing to do with the show at all quite honestly.

But again, it’s hard to watch him cry on his daughter's shoulder pleading to an invisible world through a camera lens that the hardest part is that he can’t keep his word to his family that their lives would soon be better. His girlfriend assures him that their daughter didn’t know the difference and neither did she. But I think his daughter understood and cared more then she was letting on. So did his girlfriend.

For some reason, I feel an element of shame in him. Maybe it’s the hooded sweatshirt worn low as if to hide something but there’s something there that’s distressing. Maybe it’s the absence in his eyes. As he put it, the eyes don’t lie. Maybe that’s the reason he avoids eye-contact, because it helps fester some unseen guilt.

I personally can’t write off his suicide as a domestic dispute about his daughter’s custody either. Although, it did have support from some of his thoughts about his daughter’s birth, “It was like having my mother all over again. I had someone I could trust, someone I could love.”

I still think it was much more than that. There must have been signs and symptoms along the way. Unfortunately, maybe because of the way he was forced to live his life, there was no one there to recognize them.

I didn’t know Najia Turpin. I wish I had. But from what it sounds, nobody really knew him. He seemed like much more than just a nice guy at the core. At the end of the day, he didn’t look terribly unhappy. There were some muddled issues there but I wish they were more clearly defined.

We come from the same hometown but from much different worlds. Philly can be a tough place. We moved to the suburbs when I was young so I was never hardened or scarred like Najai. And let’s face it, boxing is not a sport known for its trust worthy cast of characters. So there were clear-cut forces working against him, stripping him of his trust, his innocence. The forces collide in him post-fight as sums up his feelings, “It’s agony. It just hurts. The feeling is overwhelming.”

As he lunges up refreshed to play with his daughter, his final sentiment was a positive one but I couldn’t help but see that maybe, just maybe somewhere down the line he thought those same words and took them another way, “There’s no reason for me to feel the agony. There’s no reason for me to feel like this.”

I hope those kinds of words weren’t going through his mind when he was breaching the point of no return. Of course, at the moment when an articulate, good-looking guy with his whole life ahead of him succumbed to a moment of weakness, I can’t imagine any thoughts I hope he was having. I don’t think anybody can.