Ali Benjamin, preparing for his first professional boxing card, is learning that being a promoter isn’t the same as being a business owner.
Benjamin, along with business partner Juan Sanchez, will hold their first card May 24 at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California, with 10 bouts on the card. The card will be the first endeavor of upstart Elite Underdog Promotions.
Benjamin, a former amateur fighter, owns Benjamin’s Boxing in San Ramon, California. After getting into trouble as a young adult and drifting away from boxing, he returned to the sport at age 28 as a coach. In time, he started his gym, and now he has built up 100,000 followers on Instagram. His efforts to promote his professional show after years of promoting amateur events has been a Herculean endeavor.
“Recently, I got interested in promoting professional shows after a lot of my amateur fighters from the gym were turning professional,” Benjamin told BoxingScene. “It seemed that there was a need to get them opportunities that didn’t currently exist. I wanted to get into the promotional and matchmaking game, and that's where I'm at.”
Benjamin’s father, Roysie Francis Benjamin, had a short run as a professional fighter, so he has old-school boxing roots. But Ali took a modern approach to business when he built his gym. He focused on his social media presence with @BenjaminsBoxing on Instagram. “I focused on making that Instagram the priority when I was building my business by investing money and getting professionals to help me build the Instagram,” he said.
Benjamin went viral for some of his motivational speeches in the gym. Those viral moments create upticks in followers, which led to his growth and persona growing on the internet. That took time, but he stayed at it. Now, with a professional show, he has to get everything right (or as right as it can be) for one night only.
“The difference between building the gym and promoting my first pro show is that everything has to come together in one night,” Benjamin said. “With the event, it's a lot more pressure, and there's a lot less room for error, because if you miss things here and there, it can affect your bottom line significantly. It’s trying to mitigate situations as much as possible, and learning from the mistakes you're making and not making those mistakes again.”
One mistake was the boxing ring they were going to use.
“We thought, let's save some money and buy a boxing ring, and then we're going to rent the boxing ring to people who need it,” Benjamin said. “It was supposed to arrive on May 1. We thought 24 days was enough time, shit can't go wrong. Well, shit went completely wrong. Something happened with the boat. It's stuck in the middle of the ocean. It's not going to arrive til the 22nd, and then the port takes two to three days to process. So there’s a 90 percent chance we will not have the ring. Now we have to rent the ring, and we're out this big expense that we can't come back from, and we're just going to need to bite that bullet.”
Then there is the matchmaking component. On top of taking on the burden of promoting the event, Benjamin ambitiously took on the role of matchmaker.
“It has been challenging, but it's been just one thing at a time. It's hard to match these fights,” Benjamin said. “You've got to find the perfect balance of competitive, great fights and money-making fights. So you have to make sure that you have fighters who want to lay it on the line and who can sell tickets. Then you also need to make sure that you have entertaining fights, because at Elite Underdog Promotions, we want to make real fights that the fans want, that are two guys that are coming to win and putting their all out there.”
Benjamin has learned from his first promotional effort: “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong,” he said. But he’s also committed to the vision and is encouraged by what Elite Underdog Promotions has the potential to bring to the fans. Case in point: a bout between Michael Portales, 3-3-1 (1 KO), of Hayward, California, against Alton Wiggins, 1-1-1, of Modesto, California. The bout is an evenly matched fight at a club level against fighters hoping to regain momentum after some struggles when facing up-and-comers signed by major promoters.
“I am excited to see Mikey ‘The Bull’ versus Alton Wiggins. I think that's the most 50-50 fight on the card,” said Benjamin, who co-trains Portales. “Both guys are coming off losses. Both guys are willing to fight at any moment. Both guys have a good fan base coming to the show. It's going to be a 50-50 crowd. One guy is a pressure fighter, one guy is more of a slick guy boxing on the outside, and it's just a great contrast of styles.”
Lucas Ketelle is the author of “Inside the Ropes of Boxing,” a guide for young fighters, a writer for BoxingScene and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Find him on X at .