Johnny McClain’s older brother, Marc, died from COVID complications on December 27, 2021. Six days later, on January 2, 2022, his mother, Nisaa Seifullah, died the same way. About a week after that, a casting request reached him for a film called Creed III.
He almost turned it down. His mother had taken him to a boxing gym for the first time when he was ten years old, and thinking of her is what made him record himself reading the part on his phone instead of letting the request sit. He got the role.
McClain, who now goes by Yahya McClain, is best known for a five year stretch of his life: his marriage to boxer Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali, and the fight he built around her career in 2001, Ali Frazier IV. That much is true. It also covers a small piece of a career that has run more than three decades, through boxing, concert promotion, a gym he still runs in Atlanta, and film.
Table of Contents
Early Life and Boxing Career
McClain was born in 1967. He started boxing at ten years old, then moved to Las Vegas, where he turned professional in 1990, fighting under his birth name, Johnny McClain III. That same year, he founded his first company, Yahya Worldwide, which promoted jazz concerts in Atlanta and Las Vegas for artists including Najee, Jon B and Aaron Hall.
Five years into his professional run, in June 1995, he won the WBC Continental Americas Light Heavyweight Championship. He later moved up in weight and won the WBU Cruiserweight World title twice. He has also identified himself publicly as a Marine.
Meeting Laila Ali and the Ali Frazier IV Fight
In March 1999, McClain began training and advising Laila Ali as she launched her professional boxing career. He also managed her, negotiating endorsement deals with Adidas, Ford and Soft Sheen Carson. On August 27, 2000, the two married.
The following year, McClain’s company, Absoloot Entertainment, built and promoted Ali Frazier IV, a fight between Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier Lyde, daughter of Joe Frazier. It took place on June 8, 2001, at the Turning Stone Casino Resort in Verona, New York, closing out International Boxing Hall of Fame induction weekend that year.
By the numbers:
- The venue’s usual capacity was 1,000 people. McClain had an outdoor tent built to hold 8,000.
- The event sold out completely, with fans still lined up outside.
- Promoters had projected 30,000 to 40,000 pay per view buys. The fight brought in more than 100,000.
Ali Frazier IV became the first women’s boxing match to headline a pay per view card. Afterward, McClain told The Sweet Science, a boxing publication that covered the event, that his wife planned to face new opponents rather than fight Frazier Lyde again, describing it as going after “fresh meat.” The rematch never happened.
McClain and Laila Ali divorced in 2005, five years after they married.
What McClain Built After Boxing
McClain opened Absoloot Boxing and Fitness in Atlanta in 2002. The gym became home to the Absoloot Awareness Foundation, a program aimed at reducing youth obesity through boxing, education and mentoring.
In 2009, he helped produce the feature film Heroes. The following year, he co-created the reality show Comedy Camp with comedian Shawty and founded his own production company, YES Filmworks Inc. Its first project was C.I.G.A.R., a crime drama whose title stood for Corruption, Intellect, Greed, And Robbery. The film earned nominations at the San Diego Black Film Festival, and the response pushed McClain to enroll full time at the Art Institute of Atlanta, at age 47, to study filmmaking.
In 2013, he launched a publishing company, Ansars Publishing, and released a memoir, And Still: The Memoirography of Yahya McClain. The book describes growing up without a father in New York City housing projects before building a career in boxing, entertainment and business.
The Creed III Role
By 2023, when the Creed III audition arrived, McClain was already a working actor with union membership. He was cast as the trainer for Damian Anderson, the character played by Jonathan Majors, under the direction of the film’s star, Michael B. Jordan. It was not his first appearance in the Rocky franchise. In 2006, he had a brief role in Rocky Balboa, where his character is knocked out by Antonio Tarver’s Mason “The Line” Dixon.
He later told HuffPost why he chose to audition so soon after burying his brother and mother: “My mother would be really mad at me if I didn’t at least try.”
He has also described the trainer who shaped his own boxing career decades earlier. Roger Mayweather, uncle of Floyd Mayweather Jr., trained McClain as a young fighter. In one early fight, McClain broke his right hand two weeks before the bout, then broke his left hand in the second round. Mayweather told him from the corner to keep fighting anyway.
Since Creed III, McClain has taken roles on the Starz series BMF and the ALLBLK film Lola 2.
Still Running the Gym in Atlanta
McClain still runs Absoloot Boxing and Fitness in Atlanta, where the youth training program he started in 2002 continues to operate. He also remains active in film and television through YES Filmworks.
The gym he opened more than two decades ago is still open. Kids walk through its doors now for the same reason he once did, at ten years old, when his own mother brought him through one for the first time. He has been on the other side of that door ever since.
