Sadam Ali (born September 26, 1988) is an American professional boxer who held the WBO junior middleweight title from 2017 to 2018. He also challenged once for the WBO welterweight title in 2016. Early life Ali was born in 1988 in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised there by his Yemeni-immigrant parents, and has four sisters and a brother. Ali began boxing at the Bed-Stuy Boxing Club in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant at the age of eight, after being inspired by Yemeni-British boxer "Prince" Naseem Hamed. Amateur career Ali is a Junior Olympic National Champion, a PAL National Champion, a U-19 National Champion, and a two-time New York City Golden Gloves champion. In 2006, Ali won the National Golden Glove Championship in the featherweight division in 2006 at the age of 17. Ali then represented the United States at the 2006 World Junior Championships, where he won a bronze medal after losing in the semifinal round to eventual gold medalist Yordan Frometa of Cuba by a score of 41-39, in a bout in which two points were deducted from Ali because he was weaving too low. In 2007, Ali moved up to lightweight and again won the National Golden Glove Championship in his new division. Ali is only the second boxer to win it in two different weight classes in consecutive years in New York. Later that year, he was upset by Jerry Belemontes of Corpus Christi, Texas 13-12 in the quarterfinal round of the U.S. Boxing Championships. However, in August 2007, Ali defeated Belemontes and finished in first place in the lightweight division at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Houston, becoming the first boxer from the five boroughs of New York City to win at the trials since Riddick Bowe in 1988. While this did not immediately qualify him to represent the United States in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, he became the sole American lightweight permitted to compete in three Olympic qualification tournaments to be held over the ensuing eight months, for one of the six berths allocated to lightweights from the Americas. Ali was the first Arab-American to represent the United States in the Olympics. The first of the three Olympic qualification tournaments was the World Amateur Boxing Championship, which was held in Chicago in the fall of 2007. Ali was eliminated in a competitive second round match by Armenia's Hrachik Javakhyan. As only one lightweight