Jarrell Miller and a viral toupee-fueled comeback

The toupee guy, a local New York City barber, works for an hour or so. Miller can see the broad outline of what he is doing up on the roof. But when the piece is unveiled in all its glory, Miller is quite impressed.

"It looks great," Miller says. "But how will you make sure it stays on?"

"I'm going to glue it and tape it," the barber says. "I'll give you double reinforcement. No way it moves."

Nobody notices the next day. And for two violent rounds on Saturday, the rug doesn't budge. But Miller has a bigger problem: he is losing the fight.

His career has been plagued by stops and starts already, and now, he's coming off an 18-month layover, and it shows. He has always been an action fighter, throwing and landing twice as many shots as his opponent for most of his career. Ibeh clearly wins the first round, though, and is cruising in the second when he lands a nasty uppercut under Miller's chin.

Miller feels the punch. But he also feels something else: a draft of air.

HUMILITY IS A BEAUTIFUL CONCEPT. It's the right-sizing of pride and ego, to the point where we know we are enough -- not too important, and not unimportant, either.

But in reality, most of us slip on ice outside the grocery store and immediately consider leaving town. So, imagine what it must feel like to try to rebuild your career and have your toupee punched off in front of 10,000 people, with millions more online reveling in that embarrassment forever.

At the tail end of the second round, Miller feels air on his scalp and then hears a weird murmur from the crowd. At the time, Miller is confused. It's a sound he has never heard before. It was a large audience of befuddled people making "Uh, is that what I think it is?" noises in unison.

In his corner, Miller tries to interpret the crowd's reaction while also digesting that this incredibly important moment of his fighting life is slipping away. Ibeh is doing just enough to fend off Miller's constant march forward, and Miller can feel that his gas tank isn't what it normally is. He's rusty. He's getting tired. And he's losing.

Miller gets instructions from his team just as the jumbotron replays the moment that stunned the crowd. He looks up at the giant screen, too, and realizes what the gasps are all about. When he was hit with an uppercut, his toupee popped up in the air, then plopped back down on his scalp. Miller's stomach drops. He knows a viral moment when he sees it.

"You're getting your ass whooped," his cornerman tells him. "And you're losing your hair."

As the third round is about to start, though, Miller is struck by something else. He stands at the ropes and looks out at the crowd, and so many people are smiling. He has led a tough life, bouncing all over the place as a kid trying to fit in. So, he has developed a wide grin and a wider sense of humor. That includes laughing at himself when he needs to, and right now, he needs to.

He reaches his gloved hand up and tugs at his piece. Then Miller does what all of us probably wish we could do when people are laughing at us -- he leans into it. He laughs, too, sticking out his tongue as he grips his glove around the bird's nest on his head. He grabs the toupee, rips it off, and tosses it into the crowd, where it flutters out into the night like a floppy frisbee.

"The minute I tore it off, I didn't give a f--- any more," he says. "I said, 'Let's go fight and have fun, then we'll go viral.' I was liberated."

What lies beneath is a horror show. Miller's head is bloody where the barber had glued and taped the hair on, and he ends up with a thin strip of hair along the outskirts of the top of his head, as if aliens had left a crop circle on his noggin.

The crowd roars for Miller. He raises his hands into the air as the bell rings for the beginning of the third round. There's a sense of freedom in him as he walks forward toward Ibeh. Five minutes earlier, he had felt wind on his head. Now, he feels wind somewhere else -- at his back.

WHEN HE WAS A KID, Miller got jumped once -- and only once. In that fight, he hated how he would hold his own for short stretches before the number of kids coming at him from all sides eventually backed him up and overwhelmed him. He vowed to learn how to fight and to fight in a way that he could never be cornered. Always move forward. Be a storm. Throw so much that the other guy has to try to weather you.

His life story reflects the broader truth of what that philosophy meant for him, as a kickboxer, boxer and as a man. His parents divorced when he was a toddler, so he had a turbulent upbringing during which he bounced all over New York City, then to relatives in British Columbia for a few years. His mom is from Belize and his dad is Haitian, so he spent time in both of those places, too. He was constantly the new kid at a new school, with new bullies picking on the big kid who had just moved into the area. To this day, he's not sure if he has ever lived somewhere for five straight years.

Once he got to adulthood, he launched a 15-year boxing career that is as craggy as the man himself. Ignored callouts of bigger-name boxers. Earnings of about $10 million, but nonstop promoter feuds, lawsuits and bankruptcy. Constant weight issues, ballooning as high as 375 pounds at one point. A flunked PED test for what he claims was a bad mixture of sexual enhancement pills. An arrest for carjacking without a weapon (charges were later dropped). And one hairpiece gone amok.

He has lived mostly in full-send mode, measuring once and cutting twice. That's a downside to humility -- Miller is so relaxed about the world that he can bounce back from a bad decision or three and not swim in the swamp of consequences. He treats most of the mistakes in his life like that toupee: He rips them off, lobs them into the crowd, and moves on. They will not corner him, just like those kids from 30 years ago.

"It is what it is," Miller often says.

So, there is a peace to losing his piece that night at MSG. Miller begins to morph back into himself. He powers forward, working over Ibeh's body, shot after shot. Miller isn't a one-punch knockout kind of fighter; he is aggression by attrition, chopping down his opponents in an unrelenting torrent of shots. Ibeh makes it to the final bell, but Miller secures a decisive 10-round unanimous decision win. After the fight, bald Big Baby Miller gets his hand raised while assuming he is about to be seen by more people than ever before.

He is right, even if he underestimates the mayhem he is about to go through. Over the next week, the clip is seen by millions on social media, shown at the NAACP Image Awards, and gets him invited on "The Breakfast Club," "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" and countless other places where he'll have to trot out his new catchphrase on an endless loop.

"It doesn't matter if you win by a hair -- or a mile," he says.

By mid-February, Miller is the most famous he has ever been, for a reason that nobody would choose. He's back in Miami, where he lives most of the year these days. He visits friends and family in Belize on a regular basis, also traveling frequently to New York City to see his mom, as well as his 15-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter.

"I'm a household name right now," he says. "I think it's because I laughed about the toupee. If I had been sitting there complaining about it, I don't think people would have reacted the same way.

"I'm gonna ride that wave, baby."

On this day, Miller begins light workouts at his ritzy gym, BOXR. He pulls his truck up out front in a parking spot that isn't really a spot, then comes inside. He is an enormous man but walks like someone much smaller, with a smoothness that he attributes at least partially to getting into the local salsa scene in recent years.

Inside the gym, he gives off mayor vibes, with pretty much everybody who walks by saying hello and smiling. Quite a few stare and make positive comments about the way his hair is growing back.

His hair is indeed looking good. His story of accidental chemical poisoning reeked of B.S. as he told it on the late-night circuit. He's telling the truth, though: He's thinning a bit, for sure, but he is doing just fine up top. "I'm not bald," he says. "Seriously."

Miami is a good fit for him. He is a breezy, warm person, and time is a loose suggestion on him the same way it seems to be in this corner of the country. So a 9 p.m. dinner can mean any time with a 9 at the front of it. He likes cigar bars in the area, and he can rattle off Mel Kiper-level scouting reports for the local gentlemen's clubs. "That one has the best wings," he says at one point.

He definitely benefits from guardrails. His publicist, Alvina Alston, is the ultimate Big Baby herder for pinning him down. Miller is one of those guys who has enough self-awareness to accept that he is a better version of himself if he has people who are willing to boss him around. "I love Jarrell with all my heart because he is a wonderful man who deserves everything happening right now," Alston says. "But I'm the one who has to crack the whip with him."

For his upcoming fight, against Lenier Pero (13-0) on April 25, Miller brought back trainer Derek "Bozy" Ennis. Bozy, as he is affectionately known in boxing circles, is a 70-year-old Philly-based trainer who stopped caring about what other people think of him a few decades ago. He likes Miller. He thinks Miller has all the boxing skills to be a champion. But he is not his friend. In fact, he was at the MSG show in the crowd when Miller lost his hair, yelling at him the entire fight.

"You ain't doing anything!" he kept shouting. "You look like doo-doo."

Bozy later followed up with Miller: "When you train with me, you look great. When you train yourself, you don't." He refuses to pull his punches with Miller. He tells him the truth, whether he is on the payroll or not, and it says something about Miller's humility that he doesn't avoid the constructive criticism. "Sometimes staying out of the way is the best thing to do," he says. "I need to be doing that."

Miller primarily trains in Philadelphia, prepping for one last push at a heavyweight title. The Pero fight will serve as the WBA title eliminator fight. The winner would become the mandatory challenger to face champ Oleksandr Usyk, who is ESPN's No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter and the best heavyweight by a sizeable distance. This is a strange moment in boxing's most glamorous division, where it is Usyk all alone at the top, then a tier of unknown but good fighters. The division's biggest draws -- Joshua, Tyson Fury, Deontay Wilder -- are all older fringe contenders but move the needle with their name recognition. Miller is on the outskirts of that tier.

If Miller wins and gets a Usyk fight, or a fight against one of the OG guys, he would instantly land the biggest bout and payday of his career. He should probably have a Bozy in every corner of his life right now to keep himself on track.

"He does need some adult supervision," Bozy says. "He's a good guy, and he's a good boxer when he lets people push him."

MOST PEOPLE sigh when they say, "It is what it is." They are typically trying to choke down something that life threw at them. Miller's version has an optimistic twang. He says it with oomph, like whatever unfun circumstance he's discussing is the beginning of a new start, rather than a grudging acknowledgement.

He has had plenty of "It is what it is" moments in his life. Many are at least partially his fault. His 2023 arrest for carjacking his own truck back from a dealer was a pretty bad idea. Same with taking sexual enhancement pills before the biggest fight of his life, and mixing hair chemicals a few days before the second-biggest fight of his life. "Mistakes have been made," he admits now.

But the universe deserves some blame, too. He spent the mid-2010s rising as a dangerous contender, with a skill set of nonstop forward movement that none of the big boys really wanted to deal with. At one point, he was 23-0-1 with 20 knockouts. The Joshua fight debacle should have probably been a brief hiatus, and instead, Miller wound up boxing in Siberia ever since.

That's what makes his reaction to this stretch of his life such an interesting window into humility. Who wouldn't be at least a little bit mad that it took a flailing toupee to get to the place they always wanted to get? Who wouldn't bristle when the umpteenth tweet or TikTok goofs on you? He should probably be broken by the boxing business at this point, and instead, he's smiling. He's right when he talks about how all you can do is shrug your shoulders sometimes and try to build on whatever unplanned mess drops from the sky.

"People respect you more when you can admit mistakes," he says. "Nobody has ever gotten life completely right the first time. The main thing is, you can't quit."

As he works out in Miami, he's both excited about the future and also dealing with the recent past. Miller is doing some dumbbell curls when a couple, a young man and woman in their mid-20s, walk up and stand behind him. They wait for him to get done with his set, then she puts her arms out for a hug, and the guy goes for a handshake. They all know each other from the gym, and they haven't seen him since he went viral.

They exchange pleasantries as the woman takes a purposeful step back. This has been happening a lot lately for Miller -- she is surveying his hair situation like a golfer might step back from a putt to get a second look.

"Wow," she says. "It's coming back in nice. It really is."

In this moment, Miller probably would have rather heard about his comeback win or what is ahead in his boxing career. But she's focused on his hair, and that's OK with Miller.

"I know," he says. "It is coming back in. It is."

He looks over and winks. Then, he looks back at her and says, "It is what it is."