Watching Dwight Muhammad Qawi fight was watching perpetual motion. His feet always moving forward, his torso rotating and rolling as his head peaked in every direction looking to avoid the punch coming at him and for the space he’d like to throw three or four of his own.

The only thing that remained static in a Qawi fight was the sight of the pearly white mouthpiece. The wrinkles under his eyes and scrunched nose pried open his mouth and produced a look that could have been interpreted as pure joy or absolute mania.

“It's kind of a cross between a grimace and a smile,” Qawi told Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum in 1982. “If it's confusing to you, it's also confusing to my opponent."

That grin — or was it a frown? — encapsulated the dichotomy of Qawi, who died earlier this week at 72, as a fighter and a human being, and his own battle against public perception. A man who was at once one of the most persistent pressure fighters of his generation and one who lamented comparisons to Joe Frazier at times, taking great pride in his defensive acumen. “Nothing against Joe Frazier, but I don't take 10 punches to deliver one. I'm a busy fighter, not a one-punch fighter, but I'm a strategical fighter. I don't lead with my face,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Qawi’s fighting career began in prison, where he served more than five years for armed robbery, and he spent the last 35-plus years of his life working with at-risk youth and people dealing with addiction.

"People never gave me a chance for anything," Qawi told McCallum. "They forgot that I had been fighting all my life — in the street because I loved it — and in prison just to survive, to get respect. They count me out and then I just go out and do my job."

Qawi’s career, and perhaps everything else, may not have happened at all if not for judge, Peter J. Coruzzi, refusing to count him out. Not long after Qawi (then known as Dwight Braxton prior to his conversion to Islam) was released after serving his robbery sentence, he was in Superior Court facing 15 years for assault and battery.

“I remember him standing in front of me, tears streaming down his cheeks, and you know how tough he is. I saw something in him. Fighters, judges, robbers, we're all human. Perhaps we should all take a deeper look at our fellow man,” said Coruzzi in 1982, speaking with SI's Pat Putnam.

Just a few years later, Coruzzi would be in attendance with tears streaming down his own face as Qawi became light heavyweight champion in defeating Matthew Saad Muhammad. Although Qawi only made $50,000, he now knew bigger paydays were coming, and could step away from one of his side gigs, cleaning bedpans at a local retirement home.

Though Qawi was able to outrun the demons of his incarcerated past, the specter of addiction would continue to haunt him from every angle. In 1980, his brother Tony was spiraling out of control with heroin use, so Qawi threatened to tell the state commission about it after giving him money to purchase it one final time. The death of his brother Charles at 35 haunted him, a death Qawi attributed to electroshock therapy he received in drug treatment. Qawi fought, at least in part, in his honor, donning the moniker “Ice Cream” on his attire in his rematch against Miracle Matt in 1982, an ode to the nickname Charles gave him for being sweet enough to help him emotionally and financially before his untimely passing.

As the wins and the corresponding money and attention flowed in, so did a dependency on alcohol. Trainer Wesley Mouzon would remark that Qawi “drank lots of beer,” but never categorized it as problematic. Rather, Mouzon was more concerned with his “unquenchable thirst” for water that made cutting weight — to 175 and later to 200 — problematic. Perhaps it was naïveté, perhaps it was protecting his fighter’s reputation, but the true issue became Qawi’s unquenchable thirst for alcohol, for its ability to create a celebration, an escape or both.

“I got into a habit where I was always celebrating,” Qawi told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1992. “Liquor started out as my friend, but then it became my enemy. I couldn’t stop drinking. And then my father died in 1984, he was 62, we were close, and yes, I started doing drugs. My life became unmanageable, I couldn’t control myself.”

Qawi’s brother Lawrence was sentenced to 20 years after killing their father with a three-foot pipe in his home, adding unthinkable trauma to the weight already on the shoulder of his 5-foot-6 1/2 frame. When the lights were the brightest upon him, his private an internal life was at its darkest. As he prepared for his historically significant battles with Evander Holyfield in particular, Qawi described himself as being in a full-blown depression and drinking every day. By the time he fought George Foreman in 1988, he would say he was drinking a fifth of whiskey every night.

“I was at the peak of my insanity,” Qawi would say. “I would drink at night and then get up to run it off. I was so sure I could knock Holyfield out. What a joke.”

The loss to Foreman was essentially Qawi’s exit from mainstream boxing attention, but it was also the off-ramp to new beginnings and the chapter he would ultimately want to be remembered for. The sight of a 222-pound Qawi stuck at the end of Foreman’s thudding blows elicited sadness, and the 15 subsequent bouts, the last being in 1998, looked on the surface to be another tragic slog for a down-on-his-luck fighter through the seedy underbelly of the sport on his way out.

But Qawi seemed to view a good chunk of that period differently. On April 30, 1990, four days after a 10-round loss to Mike Hunter, Qawi entered rehab and got sober.

“I had to learn all over again to be a decent human being,” Qawi said in 1992. “I wanted [sons Dwight and Thomas] back. The greatest blessing in my life is that I accomplished that. Now they have a clean father, a sober father, a father that will show them the straight way.”

Qawi said that he “couldn’t live with himself” if he didn’t make a comeback, one he would make a second time in 1997 a few months before he was to be inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame. Although Qawi said off the cuff once in that period that he would “fight anybody,” he never campaigned for huge fights or to fight the big money heavyweights of the era. On his own accounts, he seemed to do it simply for himself.

Aside from his quiet and personal comeback, his life became focused on service to others. He spent time working with the New Jersey schoolboard, as part of its School Based Youth Services Program, often specifically receiving the children most at-risk and with the most difficulties to work with — in other words, taking the toughest fights. He would take the kids roller skating, to play basketball, and of course, teach them how to box. Later, he would become a drug and alcohol counselor, working in the same kind of facility that changed his life in 1990.

When I last talked to Qawi in 2014 at the International Boxing Hall of Fame, 10 years after his own induction, he was standing off to the side of the main festivities under the awning in the courtyard. He stood near the Spinks family, the brothers whom he’d battled decades prior. Perhaps because he’d mostly been out of the spotlight for two decades by then and wasn’t recognizable to many of the patrons, or maybe it was just the general unfairness that a fighter as great as him wasn’t even more heralded, Qawi lingered mostly unbothered. He was delighted to talk about the old times, the ESPN tournament, the fight against James Scott in the very prison they used to spar together in, but he didn’t seek any attention. Rather, he leaned on his cane observing like a Boxing Yoda, a wise man with a look on his face that could no longer be misinterpreted.

It was a warm smile, one that a person wears when they have found peace, found God and found happiness.

"I've been lucky," he told Sports Illustrated in 2003, "to be able to do the two things I love most: Box and help people going through tough times to launch their own comebacks."