Sometimes you remember the atmosphere surrounding a fight more than the fight itself. At the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan on April 23, 2002, the atmosphere was intense, to say the least.

Bob Duffy, a staple of the New York boxing scene for decades, had gotten into promoting, and one of the first shows under the Ring Promotions’ banner was scheduled to feature some of the best local talent from the area, including future world champions Paulie Malignaggi and Yuri Foreman, National Golden Gloves winner Ann Marie Saccurato, and promising light heavyweight Elvir Muriqi.

By the time fight night came around, as is the case with boxing, Malignaggi, Foreman and Saccurato were off the card. The Teddy Atlas-trained Muriqi, then 22-1 with 11 knockouts, remained as the headliner and, apparently, that was all Duffy needed to secure a sellout.

And it was packed to the gills in this hotel ballroom, and with a balcony not just overlooking but standing perilously close to the ring, all I thought as I saw the diehard Albanian fans of Muriqi roaring from the first fight to the last was, “If Muriqi loses to Mike Coker, there’s gonna be a riot.”

Muriqi didn’t lose. Instead, he stopped Coker in the first round, a result he would repeat less than a year later.

At that point, as Tuesday turned to Wednesday, cooler heads prevailed in NYC, the “good guy” won, and the fans went home happy. They were even pleased to see another Albanian prospect, welterweight Kemal Kolenovic, enter the ring for the ninth time as a pro against Israel Felix. Kolenovic, a native of Montenegro now living in New York, was 23 years old with a record of 6-1-1. Felix, 1-2 with 1 NC, was coming off a stoppage loss to Foreman three months earlier, and more of the same was expected when he faced Kolenovic.

Boxing doesn’t care about numbers, odds, or how a fight looks on paper, and on this night, two judges scored the fight for each of the combatants, with the third rendering a 38-38 score. It was a draw. The Albanian fans weren’t happy, but they were happy with their guy’s effort. It was a trait among the people from the nation. If you show up to fight, fight. The result matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters as long as you leave it all in the ring.

UFC lightweight Dennis Buzukja has fought his entire career with that attitude, and the local fans love him for it.

“We're just hardheaded,” Buzukja told me. “If we set a goal, if I say I'm going to break this brick wall with my head, I'll break it with my head. That's just how we are. It's either our way or no way. And sometimes it's bad and we need to calm down a little bit. But when we put it into the work ethic, I think that's a positive for us. We are stubborn with what we say, and we believe in ourselves, and I take that with me into the Octagon and with fighting. It's in the blood. The people have suffered for so long, and I think it's just genetic at this point. We're just stubborn and proud and hard-headed people, and I'm proud of that in a way.”

Kemal Kolenovic, from all accounts, was hardheaded, but in a good way. He showed up to Gleason’s Gym and to the ring to work, and despite the draw against Felix, he wasn’t going to stop working, whether it was as a boxer or in his day jobs in construction and in restaurants. And one day, he hoped that he would be able to focus his manual labor on becoming a world champion.

He never got that chance. A little over four years after the Felix bout, Kolenovic was dead. He was only 28, run down outside the Moonlight Bar in the Bronx in December of 2006 after an argument between the suspected murderer and a group of men. According to his uncle, Tony Mujovit, Kolenovic was doing his best to intervene and diffuse the situation. His back was turned when he was struck by a car allegedly driven by Ahmet Gashi.

Earlier this month, Gashi was arrested in Kosovo and sent to the U.S. to face justice – 18 years later. It’s how I remembered Kolenovic, when the ticker on the local ABC station read that the cold case of a boxer’s death was finally solved. I watched the newscast and remembered the name and remembered his fight at the Park Central Hotel. I shot a message to Malignaggi, who was 8-0 at the time of Kolenovic’s bout with Felix. He was a rising star, a former amateur standout making waves as a pro, but he was as entrenched in the Big Apple boxing community as anyone. So it wasn’t a surprise when he answered back with, “I used to spar with him actually.”

Malignaggi then asked why, and I told him that they finally arrested the man allegedly behind the wheel that New Year’s Eve in the Bronx.

“I personally liked Kemal,” said Malignaggi. “I found him to be very real.”

That’s the beauty of boxing. There’s no hiding. A fighter can put up any front to the world, but in the ring – whether sparring or fighting – your true self is revealed. Ray Mancini said it best, that after one of his memorable wars, he knew his opponent better than their mother, wife or anybody else because he saw what they had on the inside.

Malignaggi knew what Kolenovic had on the inside.

“Kemal deserves a lot of recognition,” he said. “He played an essential role as a fighter and always showed up and gave his best, both in the gym and fight night.”

At the time of his tragic murder, Kolenovic was 10-6-2 with five knockouts. He beat the opponents he was supposed to beat, but when the level was stepped up and he faced prospects like Carlos Quintana, Russell Jordan, Matthew Strode and Walter Wright, he fell short. Some of those losses were a result of him being the B-side, but two weeks before his death, he scored a first-round stoppage of Ronny Glover on a card headlined by popular local heavyweight Vinny Maddalone.

Maybe his career was on the upswing, but we’ll never know.

So how should boxing fans remember Kolenovic? By remembering him. Not everyone who steps between the ropes will be a world champion or a contender or someone who can even make a full-time living doing this. But they all deserve respect. Most don’t get it, though.

On the opening fight of that Ring Promotions card, Ubaldo Olivencia evened up his record at 2-2-1 with a shutout decision win over debuting Rodrigo Pastor. Four years later, he was in Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, losing to one of Miguel Cotto’s proteges, unbeaten Jesus Rojas. By then, the Brooklynite was firmly in “opponent” mode, forced to battle the A-side night in and night out, and he had the 5-10-2 record to prove it.

I wasn’t working deadline for the doubleheader, which featured Cotto against Carlos Quintana and a bout between Antonio Margarito and Joshua Clottey, so when the Olivencia fight was over, I asked one of the PR folks to take me to the locker room to talk to him.

“Who do you want to talk to?”

“Olivencia.”

“The guy who lost?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because no one else does.”

He brought me backstage, and I had a nice chat with Olivencia. He was 32 in a junior featherweight division historically brutal to those over 30, he had the losing record, and a wife and two daughters to support. Boxing wasn’t doing that alone, so he worked for a movie distributor, and despite a dislocated shoulder suffered against Rojas, he was going to be back at the day job on Monday. Despite all the odds stacked against him, he believed that one day, if the phone rang with the right opportunity against the right opponent, he could pull off a miracle.

“The dream is always there,” Olivencia told me. “All I need is a break and the right training time and I can hang with anybody.”

He never fought again, and eventually went on to become a corrections officer.

But I never forgot him, and I won’t forget Kemal Kolenovic. You shouldn’t, either.