Larry Goldberg looks like the sheepish guy at the deli, off to the side of the counter, summoning up the courage to complain about the lack of mustard on his pastrami sandwich. But, in reality, he just may be one of the bravest souls in boxing.
You see, Goldberg is a club boxing promoter working a steady stream of fight dates in the notoriously difficult, highly-regulated New York/New Jersey territories at a time where the US fight scene isn’t exactly in tip-top form.
This Tuesday, Goldberg stages the thirteenth show of his 2-year-old Boxing Insider Promotions operation. “Holiday Fight Night 3” at Sony Hall in Times Square, Manhattan (and broadcast live on DAZN) will feature a slew of local NY-area talent in moving-up-the-ranks bouts.
Club boxing shows, like Tuesday’s, remain the grassroots lifeblood of boxing and the place where, historically, casual fans are converted into hardcore fanatics.
For promoters, though, there’s not a whole lot of money in these shows and, in many cases, there’s the back-of-head knowledge that all of the fighters on their cards, if they have a real future in fighting, will leave them behind, moving on to bigger promoters with deeper pockets.
These shows can also be goddamn maddening to put together and keep together.
“Just from a club promoter’s standpoint, you gotta get insurance, you gotta make sure the ring gets there,” Goldberg told FightHype.com. “You gotta make sure the announcer, the camera crew [get there]...You got seven fights, you gotta make sure that, however they’re booked, that everybody's coming in and taken care of...you got a state athletic commission that is very thorough. We deal with New York and New Jersey, which are two very highly-regulated states-- and everyone is very particular-- you have to have the stuff done properly on forms and it can be very tedious at times.
“And you’re dealing with volatile personalities...Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong...There’s just so many moving parts to these events...Everything is fine and easy, it’s a one-man little operation, I put all this together, we do all the regulatory stuff and then, boom, it’s 5:30 and you, like, need a staff of 600 people.”
Deep breath.
“What do you do when a guy is showing up to fight one of your main event guys and you get a phone call on Wednesday night-- the fight’s on Saturday-- ‘oh, hey, the guy got arrested at the airport, yeah, customs had a warrant out for him?’ And then you gotta find another opponent,” Goldberg added. “What do you do when a guy shows up and he’s 12 pounds overweight? What do you do when a guy shows up with his medicals and he has an eye exam that worked in Pennsylvania, but wasn’t good in New York? What do you do when the venue security guards get into a [dispute amongst themselves]?What do you do when the doctor doesn’t want to pass a fighter? Or a fighter’s trainer gets kicked out of the venue because he’s drunk before the fight and now you’re scrambling to have one of the backstage licensed trainers [brought in]?”
Deep breath.
“Any crazy thing that you can imagine [can happen] in club boxing. We’re all nuts, we all love the business.
“I love it and I hate it and I love it.”
“Love” is the operative word in all things boxing, especially for the 99.9% of participants who aren’t rolling around on piles of crisp Benjamin Franklins for their efforts. A boxing old timer once described working in the business as something akin to falling in love with a hooker-- you love deeply, with full knowledge that drama, heartbreak, doom, and gloom, may be around every corner.
Boxing almost always takes more than it gives. But, still, there’s that love…
“You just really have to love boxing,” Goldberg sighed. “You have to love the venue and the people you’re dealing with because at the end of the day this is a labor of love.
“The feeling the day after [an event] is ‘when is the next one’ because, for all the ups and all the downs, this is the greatest privilege in the world, to get to do this kind of stuff and to be able to work with some of the people we’ve worked with the last couple of years.”
Goldberg came into his boxing promotion business organically. First as a fan, then as the owner of what he refers to as a “b-level website.” From there, came the opportunity to help organize and promote a Heather Hardy card. The rest is history, albeit history Goldberg self-effacingly refers to as “small-time” and “minor league.”
“I have no idea what the end goal is,” he says, somewhat wistfully. “My joke is I want to be old man Larry doing these little club fights with the up and comers at 90 years old, at one of the casinos at Atlantic City, and just be part of the scene...I don’t look at this is as, ‘ooh I’m the next Top Rank.’ I’m Larry. I had a bad website that I had to figure out something to do with...I learned how to promote boxing at club level, at a nuts and bolts level. I don’t think I’m a promotion, am I? I have a license, I’ve been doing this, but, am I promotion?”
In a sport where everything is a cash grab and picking pockets has become culture, it’s important to know that some of the people working behind the scenes love that sport just as much as the fans who are constantly being disregarded and asked to pay more and more for the privilege of being fans. That love will always carry boxing through tough days and its annoying penchant for being its own worst enemy.
If boxing is a constant, non-stop whirling world of conflict, guys like Goldberg are the ground troops on the front line, the unsung grunts incurring casualties for the sake of winning the war.
And that war is boxing, or perhaps more accurately, the health and well-being of boxing.
Someone’s got to fight for what they love, even when, sometimes, it feels like the people at the top threw in the towel long ago.
“Is it worth it?...I don’t know,” Goldberg wonders aloud. “I hope so. I’m trying...I hope so.”
Boxing Insider Promotions’ “Holiday Fight Night 3” takes place this Tuesday, December 17 at Sony Hall in Times Square, Manhattan and will be broadcast live on DAZN.
Got something for Magno? Send it here: paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com