`A GREAT ONE'

''I consider Shannon to be a great one'' of the '90s, says Michael Marley, a longtime New York Post boxing writer and author of the Boxing Confidential blog.

Marley scoffs at critics who say Briggs' opponents weren't tough enough.

``Aside from him there were just a few like [Lennox] Lewis, [Vitali] Klitschko, [Mike] Tyson. And anyone who knows boxing knows that it can be more difficult to get two contenders in the ring together than it can to get together the presidents of warring countries. The lawyers, the contracts, the wrangling. It's a mess. So you fight who you can get. That's what Shannon did. Nothing wrong with that.''

It was a good time for Briggs. He met Alana Wilson, an aspiring singer and model, on a blind date in 1994. They've been a couple ever since and have two children.

''He was passionate about life, and that impressed me,'' says Wilson, 35. ``I don't just mean how physically imposing he is and the boxing. I mean the fact that he has bad asthma and he doesn't complain. He gets treatment. He deals with it. But it is a fight.''

In Hollywood the story might end happily here, but those body blows kept coming. His mother died in 1996, on his birthday, succumbing to the drug addiction he had tried mightily to help her overcome. He lost a 1998 World Boxing Council title fight to Lewis.

''There was a lot happening in my life,'' he says. His asthma flared up. His mother's death weighed on him.

``But you know what? I couldn't talk about that stuff because the critics would have said I was making excuses. So I sat on it and got bitter again and lost focus.''

Briggs kept fighting but started losing to lesser opponents. Training in South Florida, he began slacking off at the gym and partying. He was arrested in the fall of 2001 for aggravated battery in a South Beach nightclub brawl with University of Miami football players.

''It was a low point, another fight,'' Briggs says.

His comeback began in 2001 after he met his current manager, Herman Caicedo, who had trained mixed martial arts champions. Caicedo had started working with traditional boxers and was grooming a heavyweight.

''I had been a fan of Shannon's for years, and I'd heard that Shannon was in South Florida,'' the trainer says. ``So I managed to get his phone number and called him one day out of the blue and wanted him to fight my guy.''

Briggs showed up one morning after a night of partying to spar with Caicedo's boxer.

''He practically beat him with one eye closed and one hand behind his back,'' the trainer says with a laugh. ``We repeated that scenario several times, and Shannon won every time.''

NONCOMMITTAL

For weeks afterward, Caicedo pushed Briggs to train with him, but the boxer wouldn't commit. Then, late one night, he woke the trainer with a phone call, asking if he was serious.

'I told him, `Let's do it,' and that I'd be at his house at 6 a.m. so we could get started,'' Caicedo says.

When he showed up, a buddy of Briggs' met him at the door and said the boxer was still asleep. Undeterred, the trainer went around the house pounding on windows until he roused the fighter.

Both men laugh about that scene now, but it was the beginning of a winning partnership.

In 2006, Briggs defeated Sergei Liakhovic to take the World Boxing Organization title, only to lose it in 2007 to Sultan Ibragimov. He fought the match with pneumonia, but didn't acknowledge it.

''You don't want to feed the flames,'' Briggs says. ``And to admit that diagnosis would have been to make an excuse.''

A REAL CONTENDER

And that, says Marley, the boxing analyst, is what has always made Briggs a serious contender.

``He had to fight himself, his health, the critics, and in the end, if you think about it, the stereotypes. Those things all affect you physically and emotionally. He beat them all, in a complete way. Look at him now.''

Briggs trains twice daily at Caicedo's gym. In between, he and Wilson work the phones with lawyers and boxing promoters, trying to solidify that comeback fight. They devote time to their fledgling foundation, Fight to Breathe, with hopes of supporting asthma research, and Briggs has dabbled in acting (he had small roles in Bad Boys II and Transporter 2).

But the undisputed center of his life are sons Chan, 11, and Caden, 3. When school's in, he picks them up. When one of them has a soccer match, he is not just the biggest parent on the sideline, he's also the loudest. When the boys have homework, he's on the living-room floor next to them, supervising every pencil stroke.

''Losing to Sultan was tough,'' he says. ``But it allowed me to complete that life fight, and accept that I'm in a good place. Being a family man and a dad is good.

``I'll be back in the ring, but this living a normal life? I've already won that one.''

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