By Tris Dixon

MUHAMMAD ALI and Mike Tyson have historically jostled for position.

Classic boxing fans will always point to ‘The Greatest’ as the shining example of what a fighter should look like, svelte, athletic, honed, poised and strong.

Fans who grew up in the ‘80s will perhaps relate more to the bulldozing, squat, intimidating menace of the man who gave the ‘Iron’ in his nickname an even harder quality than the metal itself. Do you prefer poetry or violence?

These two historical mastheads, recognised the world over, have done big business long after their title reigns have ended. And now they are the two boxers who have helped build a burgeoning fashion franchise, Roots of Fight, which is booming across the worlds of sport and celebrity.

Jesse Katz founded the brand in 2011, quickly building rapports with Ali and his family and Tyson and his wife, Kiki.

He did not find it hard. Ali, Tyson and many more quickly fell in love with what Katz calls a ‘passion project.’

They could see his clear vision, commitment and desire to represent, harness and cherish their fighting legacies.

“The Ali family and Muhammad,” Katz begins, “I’ve been incredibly honoured to work with them and to have gotten to know the family very well. They’ve supported me. I grew up a massive Muhammad Ali fan and, I think, across the board, everyone we work with they all bow to Muhammad. So everyone acknowledges his greatness, maybe except for Floyd Mayweather.”

More on that later.

Once Ali agreed to work with Katz, and once Bruce Lee’s family were also on board ¬– opening up the possibilities for Katz to work with MMA icons – it made it easier to approach other legends.

Yet until Tyson, he’d done everything by the book. However, when he wound up with the phone number of the youngest heavyweight champion in history, he made the call.

“We had just started Roots of Fight, and a friend of mine’s girlfriend was close friends with Kiki, who is Mike Tyson’s wife,” he continues. “I don’t do any cold calling, we have built this organically through introductions from person to person. I don’t have a sales team or a licensing team that goes out and tries to solicit licenses from icons. But this one time my friend said, ‘Hey, do you want Kiki’s phone number, do you want to call Mike Tyson and see if you could work with him?’ He was like, ‘I know this isn't your thing’, and I said, ‘You know what, for Mike Tyson I’ll do this’. So I called Kiki, I cold-called her, and said, ‘Hi. This is going to be a very weird call. I don’t know you. I work with the Ali family, I work with the Bruce Lee family and we would really love to pay respect and tribute to Mike.’ I ended up having a great conversation with her and she asked when I could be there and I said I could be there tomorrow, flippantly, and she said, ‘Okay, I’ll text you my address and I’ll see you at 11am.’

Katz booked a plane. A few hours later he was there, with Tyson, talking business. A little later they were flying Tyson’s pigeons together. A fortnight afterwards their agreement was formalised.

More than 60 icons have followed in Ali and Tyson’s footsteps. In boxing, Roots of Fight licensing agreements have extended to dozens of boxers and their families, including Tommy Hearns, Jake LaMotta, Joe Frazier, Lennox Lewis, Micky Ward, Arturo Gatti, Julio Cesar Chavez, George Foreman, Freddie Roach, James Braddock, Evander Holyfield and Sugar Rays Leonard and Robinson.

Yet it was only when Hollywood star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson posted a shot of him wearing a Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini T-shirt on Instagram that the fledgling company got an almighty kickstart.

Celebrity after celebrity started wearing Katz’s clobber and fighter after fighter wanted to be attached to the brand.

It’s grown astronomically. Four or five part-timers has now become a full-time team of 25 in their Vancouver, Canada HQ. It’s exploded far faster than Katz, when he was 11 years old and helping his brother doing some screen-printing on T-shirts in his mother’s garage, could have hoped. He eventually set up a business management company, working with huge sporting organisations including the NBA, the NHL and the Olympic Committee. Commercially, his company worked with giant labels including Budweiser, Miller and Heineken.

They built an impressive and significant portfolio of work so that when they approached the likes of Lee and Ali they could prove that they could handle business on the bigger stage, even though Jesse was affectively starting from scratch.

Roots of Fight has subsequently grown so big there are now other categories, expanding to Roots of Baseball, Roots of Basketball, Roots of Wrestling… And Katz reckons it will continue to grow. Roots of Comedy and Roots of Music are just two other future ‘verticals’.

But it was boxing that ignited Katz’s passion. He could see a gap in the market for a smart brand of clothing that paid homage to cultural icons and fighting legends. He’d been captivated by Marvin Hagler, Leonard, Hearns and Duran growing up, then Tyson hauled him in deeper further still. After Lennox and Hoyfield settled their rivalry, Katz admits he became a more casual observer but the fire still burned. He “reconnected” seven or eight years ago and now gets to more fights than ever. He’s got friends in the fight game, too, including Liverpool’s heavyweight contender Tony Bellew, another Roots fan. “He is a friend of ours and incredibly supportive,” Katz goes on. “I love watching him.”  

A while ago, there was dialogue with Oscar De La Hoya, but that fizzled out.

“We talked a little bit and he just didn’t seem enthused by it,” Katz says. “He initially said that he wanted to be in it and then he dropped off. I don’t have time to chase, somebody has to really want to be in it and then, you know, we all engage. But if they’re not engaged from the get go we don’t push.”

Of course, Ali and Tyson remain the headliners of the Roots brand. They engaged from the beginning. They pushed. And then the Roots began to grow.

The three most popular names associated with Roots of Fight include those two and Bruce Lee.

“And, you know,” Katz smiles, “Muhammad and Tyson kind of jockey back and forth.”

They always have.