French philosopher and author Albert Camus once said, “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”
Eric Bottjer does not go so far as to use the word “soulless” to describe his job as a boxing matchmaker. But after more than 30 years with this as his chosen career, which has seen him work with many of boxing's major promoters, most if not all of the satisfaction it once brought to his soul is gone.
“It’s gone from being less enjoyable as a job, to not enjoyable at all, and then, currently, miserable,” Bottjer, 61, explained over the Labor Day holiday weekend. “And I’m not the only one going through this. We all are. Matchmakers as a group, we all get along pretty well, because we’re down rolling in the bottom of the ship, so it’s like, we all understand the job and the uniqueness of it, the difficulty of it. So we matchmakers try to help each other. And we’re all going through it.
“When things go correctly on a show now, as a matchmaker, the biggest emotion I felt in the last couple of years, if everything went correctly, was relief. And if that’s the best emotion you feel while you’re doing your job, you’re not doing the right job.”
So Bottjer, as he revealed publicly on the August 24 episode of the In This Corner podcast, is changing careers. Save for a couple of boxing cards he’s already committed to making matches for, he’s finished with that part of the business.
And he’s taking a headfirst leap into a pool that I can tell him from experience is a shallow one, at least as far as being able to make a comfortable full-time living in it: boxing media.
Actually, Bottjer doesn’t need to draw on my experience. He has his own. Before he became a boxing matchmaker, he was a writer.
Bottjer, a serious fight fan since age 12, graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism and started a job as a police reporter in Gilroy, California, and used his media credentials to essentially sneak into boxing cards in the region in the late ’80s. He soon started doing some boxing freelance writing – but he couldn’t latch on anywhere full-time.
In 1990, he met colorful matchmaker Johnny Bos, who convinced the twentysomething he was in the wrong part of the boxing business if he wanted to make any money. Soon enough, Bottjer was finished producing bylines and instead filling fighters’ line-by-lines.
Over the next three-plus decades, Bottjer was a matchmaker for Don King Productions, Cedric Kushner Promotions, DiBella Entertainment, America Presents, Banner Promotions, Matchroom Boxing, Roy Jones Jr. Promotions, Triller, Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions and countless others.
But at the outset of 2025, he told MVP he was out, and aside from two remaining shows he promised Larry Goldberg he would book for Boxing Insider Promotions, Bottjer is finished with matchmaking.
Thirty years is a long time to do anything. It would be understandable if Bottjer had changed so much as a person over that time frame that he had evolved past matchmaking rather than matchmaking evolving past him. But he insists that isn’t the case.
“It’s not that my enthusiasm for boxing has waned. It hasn’t at all,” he said. “It’s just the job itself has become different.
“Three-quarters of my time used to be making fights, and now three-quarters of my time is everything but making fights – just dealing with increased paperwork and medicals. Which I’m not complaining about; I’m glad to see fighters get medicals. But the states all have different rules and different forms, and it’s literally like starting over with each fighter. No matter how many times they’ve fought, if they fight in a different state, it’s just a different process. There’s not a lot of overlap with the commissions as far as medicals go, as far as licensing goes, as far as forms go. So the commissions have made the job more difficult – maybe unintentionally for the most part, but still, more difficult.
“And there are significantly less fighters. There’s also less shows and there’s less money, so there’s less incentive for fighters to go to the gym and train, for trainers to go to the gym and train fighters – that’s all gone downhill gradually for a generation, quite frankly.
“And what that means for the matchmaker is, now the bane of our existence is losing a fight the week of a show. When that used to happen, I used to get excited. I’m like, ‘All right, here we go, I’m gonna solve this problem.’ Because I knew I would solve the problem. Now I can’t solve the problem sometimes, and it’s really frustrating.”
And Bottjer says it’s not just the quantity of boxers that has diminished. He says quality is down too – not necessarily of the fighters themselves, but of the people around them.
“They’re less professional,” Bottjer said. “Most of the managers that I deal with really aren’t professional managers. They don’t know what they’re doing. All they are is money providers, for the most part, and they think because of the money that they have, they know better than you. They think they know the job better than the promoter, they know the PR guy’s job better than the PR guy. So, you know, I’ve gone from working for companies where I build fighters and make really terrific fights to being dictated to by people that don’t know what the hell they're doing – simply because they have money.”
For the last three years or so, since his full-time gig with Triller ended, Bottjer has been an independent contractor, and there are only a handful of U.S. promoters now that employ salaried matchmakers.
He emphasizes, though, that it’s not a lack of full-time job security, or any other financial concern, that has driven him out.
“Look, [MVP] paid me good money, but I was just like, I don’t like this. I don’t like what I’m doing. I don’t like, bluntly, who I’m doing it for, and I’m at an age now where if I’m not enjoying myself, I don’t care what the money is.
“I mean, obviously if they’re going to give me a stupid amount of money, I’ll bite the bullet. But this is not about the money for me. This is about, am I actually contributing something here? I still have that quality in me where I get enjoyment out of a working relationship where you’re helping each other out and you’re achieving something. You want to feel useful.”
Changing careers is not a spur-of-the-moment, emotional decision for Bottjer – it’s something he’s been thinking about for the last three or four years, and he finally reached a point where his job made him so unhappy he had to act.
That doesn’t mean, however, that he has all the details figured out for his next career move.
“I’m jumping off this cliff without a parachute right now,” he said of his move back into journalism/media, “which is exciting. I mean, it’s scary. But it’s exciting.”
Bottjer is planning to leap into all lanes – video, audio, the written word.
The best money in sports media is in TV work, and to that end, Bottjer has some ongoing experience, as in addition to matchmaking for Goldberg, he’s done commentary on his shows and plans to continue with that.
“I’m not going to make a living just from those shows,” Bottjer said. “But will it lead to something? Who knows. I’m 61 years old. There’s not too many people out there shopping for 61-year-old commentators. But at the same time, I think I’m pretty good at it, and I’m just starting, so I think I’m going to get better.”
Bottjer is also in the process of launching his own boxing podcast, going the dual video/audio route. He doesn’t have the format of his show entirely nailed down yet, but he has confidence that his perspective, experience and deep boxing knowledge will bring something different to the vertical.
“The reason I want to do a podcast, other than that it’s fun and I like telling stories, is I see what’s out there now, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s not being told, not being revealed. I’ve been in this business a long time, and it always impresses me when I read something or I hear something on a podcast and I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And I think I can make people react that way.”
When will Bottjer’s podcast debut? When he’s 100% sure it’s ready for the world to see and hear it. He’s going to record several practice episodes and keep on practicing until he’s sure that the premiere episode will feel like a polished product, not a work-in-progress.
He also intends to start flexing his writing muscles again, though he doesn’t have a print/web publisher lined up. He figures he may write some for Goldberg’s site, Boxing Insider, pitch other ideas to various boxing outlets and perhaps post on a personal platform, all depending on the subject matter and the degree of timeliness.
(For what it’s worth, I edited Bottjer once – about 25 years ago, he wrote a first-person piece for one of the London Publishing magazines telling the story of a full fight card from the matchmaker’s perspective – and I recall his writing being outstanding.)
I asked him if he’s considered compiling all his stories from a life in the boxing business into a book.
“Nobody would read my book. And they should be flagged if they do,” he said, semi-seriously.
He actually is close to publishing a book, but it’s not about his life as a matchmaker. It’s about a topic proven to sell books: Muhammad Ali.
“I know it’s so cliché to write an Ali book,” Bottjer said, “but what I did over many years was I interviewed the men who fought him. I did a lot of research on all the fights, and I got a lot of information in there that I’ve never seen published. It’s called Muhammad Ali: The Fights of His Life. It’s finished; it’s in the midst of a final edit. I looked at it the other day and I’m like, man, I’m not somebody who finishes a lot of tasks, so I’m really proud of this.”
Will Bottjer become a best-selling author, a successful podcaster, the next high-profile TV fight analyst? Time will tell.
Obviously, he hopes to find success in the media realm, but as the father of a 12-year-old daughter, his priorities aren’t the same as they were a little over 30 years ago, when he first became a matchmaker.
“Of course it’s scary to make a change like this,” he said, “but, as a parent, really the only thing that would scare us is if something happened to our children. So as long as my daughter is healthy and as long as I’m doing something that I enjoy, my life is perfect.”
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
