Most fighters come from hardscrabble backgrounds, looking to earn enough money and perhaps learn enough along the way that, when their career is over, they can take care of whatever money they have earned and maybe build themselves a nice postfight career.
Then there’s Mike Lee.
You won’t be seeing Lee, a light heavyweight who’s 2-0, on Saturday’s HBO PPV broadcast (but you can check him out on the E3 stream beginning at 7:30 p.m. ET), but if the guy can fight half a lick, he’s a potential star in the making. He has a natural, easy, well-spoken charisma, which is perhaps to be expected given that he graduated top of his class from Notre Dame in 2009 with a degree in finance.
But at the age of 16, the Chicago native was taken to a boxing gym.
“I fell in love with it. I remember getting my license and going to the gym by myself almost every day. I think once I started sparring, and once I got my first knockout and that adrenaline rush, it was game over. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”
Unlike a lot of boxers, Lee had options, and went to college in pursuit of a degree. It had been his dream, he said, to attend Notre Dame, but he admitted that his high school grades weren’t all they could have been, so he wound up attending Missouri, before improving his grades sufficiently to earn a transfer.
Even as he kept his nose buried in the books, he continued boxing, and wound up being a three-time winner of Notre Dame’s Bengal Bouts tournament, started 80 years ago by Knute Rockne to raise money for Bangladesh. The most recent tournament, Lee believes, raised $75,000, and adding to the Hallmark perfection of his early image, he even visited the country in 2008.
After graduating, he was offered jobs on Wall Street, but instead elected to pursue his boxing dream, winning the Chicago Golden Gloves and being signed by Top Rank.
He has since moved to Houston, where he trains under Ronnie Shields, who soon taught him the difference between being a successful amateur and a newly minted professional.
“They put me through the hardest workout the second day I was there. After working out, I remember throwing up, right after the workout. But I went over to my Dad and said, ‘This is what I want to do.'”
So far, he admits, he’s still a little star struck at times. A Kelly Pavlik fan, he was thrilled to find himself in Youngstown taking advice from the former middleweight champion in his gym. The other day, Manny Pacquiao called him to wish him good luck. But he keeps his eye on the financial world he has temporarily left behind.
“I relax by watching CNBC, and I like to read the Wall Street Journal,” he says.
And for now, despite the surrounding trappings of perhaps the biggest fight event of the year, he knows exactly where he stands and what he has to do.
“I just have to worry about my fight. I’ve trained for seven weeks — that’s a long time for four rounds — and I’m ready to do it.”
