He was found wandering the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia as a small child, left there by relatives who could not feed a second mouth. Catholic Social Services took him in and named him Matthew Franklin — Matthew for what he seemed to be saying, Franklin for the street. A Portuguese family in South Philadelphia adopted him. Gang trouble and reform school followed. A counselor there suggested boxing, and the same kid who'd once been left on a sidewalk started building the thing nobody had given him: a record of people choosing to stay in his corner.
He turned pro in 1974 as Matt Franklin, a raw, aggressive contender who took losses to good opposition early and kept coming. He was known for absorbing a beating that should have ended most careers and finding another gear anyway — down on the cards, cut over both eyes, and still walking forward. That trait is the whole reason the nickname stuck: Miracle Matthew. Not a puncher's name. A survivor's.
On April 22, 1979, in Marvin Johnson's own Indianapolis, he won the WBC light heavyweight title by eighth-round stoppage, bleeding from cuts above both eyes. The round was named Ring Magazine's Round of the Year. He converted to Islam shortly after and became Matthew Saad Muhammad — Saad meaning bright future, Muhammad meaning worthy of praise. He picked that name himself. Nobody had ever gotten to pick anything for him before.
He made eight defenses. Historians of the division still call the run from 1977 to 1981 one of the greatest stretches by an action fighter the light heavyweights have ever produced. The second fight with Yaqui Lopez, July 1980, was named Fight of the Year — an eighth round still shown as one of the most brutal, and most triumphant, three minutes in the sport's history. In 1981, flush and famous, he put up ten thousand dollars and hired a private investigator to find the family that had left him on that Philadelphia street twenty-some years earlier. The investigator found them. He got his real name, Maxwell Antonio Loach, and the answer to a question he'd carried since before he could remember. He got to close the loop himself.
He lost the title in 1981, fought on longer than he needed to, and lost the money the way a lot of fighters from that era did. By 2010 he was staying in a Philadelphia shelter run by an organization called Resources for Human Development — and true to form, he didn't stay down. He went back to work for that same organization as an advocate, using his own story to help the next person off the street. "You know all those Rocky movies," he said near the end, "about the fighter from Philadelphia who never quits? I was the real Rocky. I lived that story."
The International Boxing Hall of Fame inducted him in 1998, his first year of eligibility — the kid nobody wanted to feed, in the Hall, on the first try.