It's a knock-out

Sylvester Stallone invited 16 men to box their way to million-dollar glory on his reality show, The Contender. Fourteen have hung up their gloves - and one is dead. Ed Caesar joins Sly and the gang, ringside in Las Vegas

It's fight night at Caesar's Palace. Spotlights swirl around the arena, music pumps from bungalow-sized speakers, and the crowd chants the boxers' names. The fighters enter, bouncing past their families and the celebrities who've flown in for this $1m title-fight. Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, Cuba Gooding Jr, Eddie Murphy and Hulk Hogan are all here, and they are as whipped up as the rabble.

It's fight night at Caesar's Palace. Spotlights swirl around the arena, music pumps from bungalow-sized speakers, and the crowd chants the boxers' names. The fighters enter, bouncing past their families and the celebrities who've flown in for this $1m title-fight. Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, Cuba Gooding Jr, Eddie Murphy and Hulk Hogan are all here, and they are as whipped up as the rabble.

In the 10,000 crowd is a young man from the same east Los Angeles ghetto as the 24-year-old fighter Sergio "The Latin Snake" Mora. He's paid for his flight, accommodation and a $300 ticket to see his friend's big night. His sunglasses are slung backwards behind his ears in the same style as Mora's. He's almost too nervous to speak. "East LA to Caesar's Palace, baby," he says. "I gotta say it a few times for it to become real. You don't know how we grew up."

If Mora and his opponent Peter Manfredo Jnr are nervous, they don't show it. They raise their hands to supporters as if they've already won the fight. And then? This being prime-time American TV, there's a five-minute anticlimax of a commercial break, when the boxers are forced to kill time talking in their corner.

This is no ordinary fight, but the final of NBC's The Contender, a boxing reality-TV show in which 16 professional middleweights have slugged it out for the million-dollar prize. Costing $26m (£14m) for three episodes, it is the most expensive reality-TV ever made. It could also be a glorious launch-pad for the winning pugilist.

In prime position on his ringside stool is Sylvester Stallone, The Contender's presenter and executive producer. He has, with the legendary boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, been coach, guru and mentor to his 16 young charges through all the vicissitudes of their boxing journey.

Through what strange conflation of fantasy and reality is Stallone a boxing expert? Here's a man whose only connection to the sport is through his movie role as Rocky. At a training session earlier, he'd defended his credentials. "Yeah, well, I did a lot of boxing training for those movies," slurred Sly, now 58, his lopsided grin struggling to shake off the ravages of the surgeon's knife. "Especially Rocky IV. But yeah, as a young man I had a bit of flair for it, at a very amateur level. It's why I wrote Rocky, I guess. I had to make the most of my qualities.

"Seeing these guys going at it has kind of got me back on a training tip again. I keep thinking I gotta keep in shape now. Age, man, it's so stupid. It's like this obsequious weasel that creeps up on you."

The Contender, of course, is not Rocky. Real people are involved, although the boxers have, in general, followed the script. There have been surprise results, great fights and machismo all round.

And the final contest could not have been written better. Two fighters with different stories and conflicting styles meeting in a winner-takes-all battle - Peter Manfredo, the amiable Rhode Islander with a flat nose and flatter vowels, and Sergio Mora, who is, in Stallone's words, "a PhD in the body of a boxer". It's the stuff of motion pictures.

But the producers realised that to make anyone care, we had to know why they were fighting. And for that, they needed families, many of whom are here tonight. Lori, Manfredo's mother is, naturally, a little anxious. "I don't think Peter gets affected by the lights or the cameras or the hoopla. He's a real quiet, focused guy. But I honestly feel like I'm in dreamland. It's me who gets nervous."

Lori has always been around boxing - her husband Peter Manfredo Sr was a pro - and she carries herself with the agitated demeanour of someone who has spent years witnessing the men in her life crash fists. But when the fans in Caesar's Palace start chanting Manfredo's name, she leaps up to join in.

The cameras zoom in on her. She's been her son's co-star throughout the series. "You see your boy go in there, and you're proud," Lori says, "but obviously you don't want to see him get hurt. But, after all, I know he just wants to look after his family. That's why he goes in there. He's a good man."

Involving the families has not always provided the right storyline. Earlier, there had been a palpable fall in temperature when the eliminated Las Vegan boxer, Ishe Smith, asked everyone to remember "our brother Najai".

Najai Turpin, eliminated in an earlier round, shot himself on Valentine's Day. He was 23. Naturally, questions were asked about whether The Contender was in any way to blame. Given its stance on looking after the boxers' families, the programme-makers knew they had certain responsibilities. Perhaps that's why they paid for the boxer's funeral. Or perhaps they were nervous that the extensive psychological testing of all the contestants had fallen tragically short in Turpin's case (unknown to them, the boxer had tried to take his own life once before, after the death of his mother in 2000, using 47 painkillers and a bottle of vodka).

Stallone looked shaken when Turpin's name was mentioned. "He was very quiet," the star recalled. "Couldn't relax. I used to say that his fight name should be Mystery Turpin. Here was a guy who, in his own words, had been burnt by life, who didn't trust anybody. But I found the suicide hard to deal with. The irony of it was, here was a guy who was right on the edge of a profound life-change.

"Even though he wasn't going to win this thing outright, he had made it on to TV, and was, at the very least, a neighbourhood hero. And he takes his own life? That's a hard thing to get your head around. I came to the conclusion that he was not affected by losing fights. He had a real emotional quandary in his private life, which he could not resolve."

Mark Burnett, Stallone's fellow executive producer and the brains behind huge reality-TV hits such as The Apprentice, said: "It was made more of in the press than anything. It was five months after the series had been shot, and anyone who knew anything could join the dots. The guy kills himself in front of his girlfriend on Valentine's Day. He's been sitting in his car outside her house for a day. It was totally unrelated to boxing."

Boxing, though, played a part. Turpin was out of the competition but still locked into The Contender's contract, under which he was banned from fighting until after the show's live finale. As a professional boxer, it was a blow.

The venerated boxing writer Thomas Hauser, a strong opponent of The Contender, recalled what Turpin's girlfriend Angela told him after the suicide. "After Najai got back," Angela had said, "he started drinking. That wasn't like him. And he started going to the gym less because he wasn't allowed to fight. The Contender was still controlling his life."

If one needed proof that TV controlled the lives of these boxers, it came at the finale's rehearsal. Stallone and Leonard moved their protein-rich frames around the ring, with armies of crew and flunkies following them, practising, blow for blow, what their parts would be. They even practised their commentary. How did they know what would happen? The truth was, one of only two things could happen, and the only difference was to swap a name in the winner's column.

"These fighters - we're going to look after them," Stallone told me. "They're all offered contracts, and the top eight are offered a minimum of two fights a year. We're only taking 15 per cent; some promoters take 45."

What Stallone didn't say was that, under the contracts, NBC in effect owns the boxers until 2009. It's a formula that might lead some of the less successful fighters to feel as if they are enslaved in a promotional programme where they aren't the stars. One thinks of Smith, the pre-show favourite, whose protests at his narrow defeat by Mora on a decision were cut from the edited shows.

Burnett bats away these concerns. "We're legally promoters now, and as a promoter, you have to ask: how do I make money going forward? That means more fights. I can see rematches, I can see middleweight fights in the UK. This show is only the launch pad. The big thing for me, Katz [Jeffrey Katzenberg], Sly and Sugar Ray is what happens next. We're in the boxing business now. It's a billion-dollar business."

Every boxer I spoke to felt they were looked after well financially during the show. But the gusto with which the producers are launching their promoting careers must in part be due to the fact that NBC hasn't picked up The Contender for a second series.

"Eight million [viewers] a week, that's good ratings," says a writer on the show. "It's up there with Will and Grace. But this thing cost $26m. You gotta have stratospheric ratings to pull that off." And some episodes rated only five million. Had the show not had such high-profile producers, it would probably have been pulled long before the finale.

Still, The Contender has brought boxing back into living rooms all over the world. Millions in North America and Europe watched a strangely familiar story of ambition and disappointment repeated episode by episode.

But, as thousands in the Caesar's Palace arena watch the two fighters pulverise each other for seven rounds under the sweating lights, one is reminded that there is only one story the public is interested in - that of the winner.

At the post-fight press conference, the victorious boxer wipes blood from a cut above his eye. The loser wipes away a tear. "You see that," drawls Stallone. "Really real. Really real."

But only the winner walks away with the very real sum of $1m. "I went from insufficient funds to being a millionaire. I still haven't taken it in yet," he murmurs. The loser breaks down. It's not the end for him, but it must feel like it. "I let everyone down," he says.

In their hearts, most of these boxers understand that this prime-time TV opportunity was probably as good as it gets. Three of the contestants outside the top two quietly express an interest to me in moving into television and commercials. They know they've already been the stars of the biggest commercial in town.

Both finalists, at least, have serious boxing careers ahead of them. The rest know they had their shot - and that is all a fighter asks.

'The Contender Final' is broadcast on Monday at 9pm on ITV2