Boxing -- `Kosovo Kid' Muriqi Wants To Fight For His Homeland

NEW YORK - The war was on the phone last week. His father was calling from somewhere in Kosovo. The son never knows when to expect the next call to the Bronx, or a message to telephone a number somewhere in the ethnic Albanian province of Yugoslavia. That's where the son wants to be, with his father, with his uncle, with his people.

His father doesn't want to talk about the war. The son knows that the family's $350,000 seven-bedroom house in the town of Peja, long ago looted of every stick of furniture by the Serbs, was burned to the ground by Slobodan Milosevic's forces after NATO began the bombing.

Never mind. There was no news of the father's driver, taken prisoner, presumably killed. The father wanted to know, instead, about the four-round fight Wednesday at Yonkers Raceway. Elvir Muriqi, a 1998 New York Daily News Golden Gloves champion, 5-0 in his young pro career, couldn't tell his father the opponent.

"I want to fight for my country. I'd die for my country," said the light-heavyweight boxer, still four weeks shy of his 20th birthday.

"Your job," Ramiz Muriqi of the Kosovo Liberation Army reminded his son, "is to become a world champion and have Albanian flags waving in Madison Square Garden."

"I never argue with my father. My job," said the Kosovo Kid, as the fight posters bill Elvir Muriqi, "is to publicize our situation."

"If you don't get a gun and go over there," said Muriqi's trainer, Teddy Atlas, "you do what he's doing."

Atlas does not like the TV cameras from CNN and ESPN, or the guy from New York magazine who did a story on Muriqi and was told by Hollywood to forget mysteries and "give us a treatment on this kid's story."

"He hasn't earned the right to be publicized," said Atlas, worried about distractions. "And just because your country is in a war and your father is in a war doesn't mean you have an excuse to falter in a fight. The press doesn't make you a fighter."

Muriqi - pronounced "more-EE-chee" - arrived in this country May 13, 1996. He said life was good back home until the '80s. In Tito's Yugoslavia, Croatians could speak Croatian, Bosnians could have their culture and in Kosovo, Albanians could be Albanians, too. Ten years ago, he said, the Albanian school he attended was made exclusively Serb.

Muriqi and his fellow students would take turns hiding in each other's cellars to continue their education.

"When they found us, they beat us," he said. "The Serbs want all of Yugoslavia to be Serb."

Ramiz Muriqi, a businessman (fruits and vegetables, plus a restaurant-cafe), had received asylum here seven years ago and settled in the Pelham Parkway area, which has become part of what the boxer calls "outer Albania." Ramiz went home to fight seven months ago. Elvir Muriqi found Atlas, who had given up training for two years. Atlas' wife, Elaine, was born in Pristina, the Kosovar capital, after her family fled from then-Communist Albania.

"This is good," Muriqi decided, "maybe he (Atlas) likes Albanians."

When they can punch with either hand and are still quick enough to land combinations. After hiring Atlas, Muriqi had some ligaments repaired in his right hand. As soon as the cast came off, Atlas had him in the gym, working with his left hand.