John Sheppard has shepherded BoxRec from a part-time operation into the most visited boxing website on the planet?
Two million fights. It?s almost inconceivable. From its modest beginnings in 2000 to its current place of prominence in the boxing firmament, BoxRec.com is the essential website for those who are entrenched in the fight game. TV execs, fighters, promoters, matchmakers, boxing writers, and fans with a hankering for research turn to BoxRec, often several times a day, to glean from a single (and singular) website what in the past would have required a small library of RING record books to achieve.
John Sheppard has shepherded BoxRec from a part-time operation into the most visited boxing website on the planet.
In an interview with Thomas Hauser, Sheppard recalled attending his first fight card in 1995, headlined by Naseem Hamed, which was the seed from which BoxRec grew.
?It was the first time I?d been to a fight,? said Sheppard, ?and my reaction to it was that the entire spectacle was barbaric and degrading. I sat there watching people punch each other in the head, wondering why they were doing it. It went on and on interminably for hours. I was sprayed with blood, getting more and more miserable, telling myself, ?I don?t want to be here.? And then, during Naseem?s fight, something clicked in my head. The subtlety of what he was doing, the genius of it all, became obvious to me. It wasn?t a disgusting spectacle anymore. It was art, and I found myself cheering.?
The cheering has not stopped.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Sheppard has enhanced the service provided by BoxRec by enabling their customers to view premium reports via direct links to the Pod Index, which analyzes performances of judges and fighters, using data-driven metrics.
There are a few must-read boxing websites, too few in the opinion of some, but BoxRec is indispensable.
