Victory Favors the Fearless: How to Defeat the 7 Fears That Hold You Back (Sports for the Soul Book 5) by Donnelly Darrin

Author:Donnelly, Darrin [Donnelly, Darrin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shamrock New Media, Inc.
Published: 2019-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

THE FEAR OF MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING BETTER

THREE YEARS EARLIER…

By the time I turned 28, a young fighter from the U.K. named Bruno Patterson had seemingly come out of nowhere to captivate the boxing world. He was steamrolling his way through the heavyweight division and unifying the belts with knockout after knockout.

Meanwhile, I was now ranked No. 13 with a record of 26-3-1. Over the previous two years, I had fought in nationally-televised fights four times and won all four. In fact, I had not lost a fight since Andre had become my trainer.

Despite improving my record and moving up in the rankings, I was still working three nights a week as a bartender. I hadn’t “made it” as a pro boxer. And with a wife and (now) two kids at home, I was anxious to start earning a living from the sport.

Whenever you see fighters on TV, you might assume they are earning big bucks and living off their earnings in the ring. In most cases, you’d be wrong.

The purse you see doesn’t all go to the fighter. It breaks down like this. For my first nationally-televised fight against Brutka, I was on ESPN’s undercard and received a purse of $15,000. But, that doesn’t all go to me—far from it. I also have to pay my training fees (gym time, sparring partners, equipment fees, and so on) for roughly eight weeks of training. Getting to train in Andre’s barn-turned-gym made these fees minimal for me, but we had started training some at local gyms in the city for sparring and other specific reasons. I was luckier than most fighters when it came to training costs, but they still ran close to a grand for two months of training. After fees, you have to pay your trainer, which is typically ten percent of the purse, and then your manager, which is one-third of the purse. Because Andre was both my trainer and manager, that meant he earned about $6,500 for my ESPN fight—and he earned every penny of that. Up to that point, Andre had spent nearly four years training and managing me without a dime to show for it.

After paying those fees, I was left with about $7,500 before taxes for my fight against Brutka. And that fight was by far the biggest payday of my career at the time. For the local club fights I usually fought in, I was lucky to earn $1,000, which meant I usually came out in the red after training fees for those fights.

My point of revealing all this is to make it clear how hard it is to earn good money in pro boxing. Only the elite-level fighters are able to make a living in this sport.

Most fans don’t know this, which is why I would run into people who couldn’t understand why I was bartending two nights after fighting on national TV.

So, you can imagine my excitement when a guy from Fox Sports named Jay Wilson called me up and asked if I’d be interested in doing some TV work.

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