Without the benefit of television money, and most of the time without the support of a casino, there are still shows being presented on a regular basis across the country. To make a profit – or just break even – those who put on these cards are dependent on hustling tickets and selling their own sponsorships in a building they rent out.
They sink or swim on their own.
These guys are the truest definition of ‘promoter’.
“I respect what the big promoters do, the Golden Boys and Bob Arum and Main Events and Goossen-Tutor and so forth, but when you consistently, year in and year out, do your shows at casinos and get casino money, really all you’re doing then is booking a show and being a syndicator,” says Roy Englebrecht, who for over two decades has put on the ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ series at the Irvine Marriott in Southern California.
“You really have no risk,” he continued. “You’re not selling tickets, you’re not creating the advertising, you’re not hiring the operations staff, you’re not hiring the ring card girls, the ushers and so forth, as a lot of club promoters have to do.
“But in their defense, I think Bob at one time and Don King at one time, Dan Goossen, all did what I do, year in and year out, which is rent a building, put the seats down, number the seats. But there are a lot of promoters at the higher level that haven’t really ‘promoted’ for years. They just get somebody else’s money and put their profit in and walk away.”
And his shows are not subsidized by television license fees.
“If we don’t sell the tickets and sell the sponsorships, I can lose $10,000, $15,000 on a night,” Englebrecht says. Many promoters nowadays will sell a show to a casino, which at that point relieves the need for them to put asses in the seats or to even really promote the event. When there is television money added to it, the impetus to put asses in the seats is lessened that much more.
Englebrecht’s acumen at running a successful boxing program is so strong that he created ‘Fight Promoter University’, where he teaches prospective individuals who may want to get into promoting boxing shows the correct way to do so.
But why would Englebrecht teach his trade secrets and perhaps groom future competitors?
“I’m a firm believer that a rising tide raises all boats,” he would explain. “Bad promoters or bad promotions hurt good promoters and good promotions. And I had stood in front of the California State Athletic Commission for a number of years saying, ‘Guys, if somebody has $1,000 and a fingerprint card and their heart is beating, you give them a promoter’s license, which gives them the right to go and lose $25,000 on one night. There’s no prerequisite or anything. What you’re doing is you’re licensing people to lose money. That can’t be good for the sport. You can’t buy an NBA team just by showing up with your checkbook. You have to jump through a lot of hoops. You have to be selected, interviewed and so forth.'”
“In boxing, you can just pay your money and you can get a license. So I said, ‘If the state won’t regulate new promoters or won’t try to have a criteria before you can be issued a license, hey, I’m going to have a school and teach them the basics of being a promoter.’ So that if you really want to do this, if you’re passionate for the sport and you’re going to do it, at least you’re going to have the tools that you learned at Fight Promoter University to decrease your chances of losing money and not knowing what you’re doing.”
The veteran promoter, who between 2000-2003 was the COO of Golden Boy Promotions, believes he has a formula that – when executed correctly – can work for other promoters.
“There is a template that I’ve created over the years, 23 years at the Irvine Marriott, we know it works,” he states. “But you have to stick to the template. What’s interesting is that I had a graduate of Fight Promoter University I, here in Los Angeles, he did his first show at a nightclub in Cudahy and he was emailing me and I saw him about two weeks after and I had known how it had gone. I said, ‘How’d it go?’ He says, ‘Roy, I didn’t listen to you in about five areas and I made a mistake. I tried to do it on my own, I thought I knew more.’ He’s now come back saying, ‘I’m going to do everything that I learned at Fight Promoter University.’ He’s now done two shows at the Maywood Activity Center and almost sold-out both shows. So there is a way to do professional boxing shows or now, MMA, and do it right. But you have to follow this template.”
Englebrecht runs a bi-monthly show. For him, consistency is essential. And those getting into this business should be prepared to be in it for the long haul.
“The boxing fan is a very loyal fan, loves the sport, loves to go to live shows. Word of mouth is very important. So if you don’t have deep enough pockets – and that happens a lot – some of these promoters, they just get their promoters license, they don’t have the financial backing, they work a full-time job, they do their first show and they lose 10-grand and they couldn’t afford to lose 10-grand, so you never see them again.
“As opposed to saying, ‘I’m going to do a show every other month and come back,’ because if you do it right you will see growth. So many promoters just don’t have the staying power financially to keep it going.”
The ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ program is about the fights, not house fighters that need to be fed a string of wins to build up to bigger and better things. Here, the fight is the thing.
“We have never signed a fighter in all the years at the Marriott,” he says. “Because it doesn’t make any sense. Again, that’s the problem that promoters – and I say at the first session of Fight Promoter University – you have to leave your ego at the door. So many new promoters want a 10-round main event on a club show because they think they’re not promoters if they don’t have one. It kills their show, it kills their budget. And it doesn’t sell a ticket. And it could be the most boring fight of the night. There has to be some consistency in what you’re doing each and every show.”
His program has had some future champions perform on his cards. But never as featured performers, just young boxers plying their trade in smokers like everybody else. The program overrides any individual prospect.
With this continuity, they have developed a loyal following that knows what they are getting.
“We have 1,400 seats, approximately, at the Marriott and 800 are season seat holders,” Englebrecht explains. “So I only have 600 seats to sell. And my regulars and fighters buy around 200, so I only have 200 to sell and they’re pretty much gone through our website. Because it’s consistent, they know we’re the only show in town. It’s a full house all the time. People want to be there. They want to entertain their clients, they’re taken to Angel games, they’re taken to Duck games, this is something unique and new and that’s what we sell.”
Englebrecht has resisted overtures to telecast from his venue for fear of alienating long-time ticket buyers.
“I think over the 23 years at the Marriott, I’ve had ESPN call and we had other promoters have Telefutura dates and because my ballroom has 1,400 seats and it’s very compact and people are right in front of the ring, I didn’t want a cameraman standing in the corner and having a season ticket holder who’s been with me for ten years yelling at me.
“Because money can’t be the end-all in this business. So I have said, ‘No, thank you.’ Ego-wise, would I have liked to have the ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ on TV? Absolutely, but not at that sacrifice because they’re going to come once and be gone. I’ve got to live with these season ticket holders. I want to renew them year in and year out.”
Englebrecht has held three Fight Promoter University sessions. This five day seminar costs $1,995 (for more information- www.fightpromoteruniversity.com). Plans are for FPU IV to take place sometime in the fall.
“What has been interesting over the three is we’ve had an increase in the number of people who wanted to be MMA promoters and a decrease for boxing. Where the first Fight Promoter University, we had about 75-percent who wanted to be boxing promoters and 25-percent wanted to be MMA promoters,” he points out. “Fight Promoter University III, 14 months later, was about 75-percent MMA. So it did show there’s the MMA craze.”
In the past, such luminaries as Richard Schaefer, Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward were guest speakers.
“It’s not just people telling war stories,” Englebrecht is quick to say. “Each speaker talks about a specific area, whether it’s ticket selling, sponsorships, operations and so forth. And it’s a very intense five days.”
What caps off the curriculum is that each participant of FPU will then work on a ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ promotion. Students will help set up the room, configure seats, take tickets, be ushers, be ring-card attendants or any other role that can be played the night of a show.
“How do you become a promoter and teach your staff if you’ve never done it?” asks Englebrecht rhetorically. “So that is what has really made this experience unique.”
He is particularly pleased to find out that Paul Delgado, a graduate of FPU, will not only be promoting a show, but will be its main event participant. Talk about a real fight promoter.
But he warns, while the formula works, like any other business, it’s all about location, location, location.
“The template or the formula for ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ or ‘Fight Night’, a Thursday night show, can be replicated any place, except a few things have to be in place before you do that. I tell people, ‘Don’t come to the Irvine Marriott and say, ‘My goodness, another sell-out crowd. I’m going to go back home and do this.’ Because they have to realize that you better have a market the size that can support it.”
Through his own experiences, Engelbrecht has found out that a place like Tallahassee, Florida, while it does have some boxing fans, its very Florida State Seminole-centric. And he says that a city like Brawley, California, with a population of around 35,000, is simply too small.
His most recent edition of ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ took place on May 24th.
“We sold-out again, it was our 16th straight sell-out,” he would say proudly. “Had a great five bouts, they threw money into the ring after two of the five bouts. The fans were on their feet.”
And those bouts featured boxers with records of 1-2 going up against opponents with ledgers of 1-4.
“We sold 1,292 tickets. I mean, people don’t realize to sell 1,292 tickets to a club show – we did almost a $50,000 gate, which we do consistently – is really unique. But we worked hard for 23 years to keep that level.”
MMA?
Like other boxing promoters, Englebrecht has gone into the MMA realm.
“I think it’s going to run, as a businessman I’m going to take advantage of it,” he admits freely. “I’m going to do five MMA shows this year. I don’t know how long the legs of MMA are. I think they could cannibalize themselves. In my estimation, the UFC can’t be buying PRIDE and have their fighters fight each other. You’re going to have another WWE. The two fighters getting paid by the same company, is that really good? It’s really incestuous.
“When the Yankees come to play the Dodgers, they don’t like each other, they want to win because they have two different owners and they have tradition.”
But what MMA does have is a younger generation of fans. Englebrecht’s first MMA show in April, “Sold out the Marriott,” he says. But what piqued his interest was just who was sitting in his seats.
“I was really interested in looking at the crowd,” he said. “I know what my boxing crowd is – and the ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ crowd is a very unique crowd because it’s a bunch of upscale businessmen – but it was a very good looking crowd, skewed younger. Boxing’s going to be here forever, it is the dominant sport, it’s just that the sport of boxing has no marquee names.”
The next ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ takes place July 19th, according to Englebrecht, who just shakes his head when he sees situations where tickets for the March fight between Rafael Marquez and Israel Vazquez bout at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California, were put on sale just 16 days before the bout.
“When I saw that I thought they had messed up on the date,” he says. “Because I’m reading it and saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is in two weeks?!?!’ Again, maybe the tail is wagging the dog a little bit. The TV says they need a date right here, we gotta have a fight and what does a promoter care if he’s going to get $750,000 from TV? And he’s going to pay the fighters $150,000 each. He’s going to make his $200-300,000 – so the gate is secondary. What it doesn’t do though, it doesn’t grow the fans in the local market, Los Angeles, to see a great fight because people have to know about it.”
He adds: “We’re not broken, but we just do things so squirrelly in this sport.”.
