Adam Maca is holding court in a seafront restaurant in Brighton and Hove. It’s a beautiful day on the south coast of England and to his left, out through huge open windows, the waves dance to the beating sun, creating the illusion that spotlights are bobbing along the surface.
Maca, 1-0 (1 KO), speaks fondly about the water. He will swim in the sea most mornings after completing his strength training, and the day before while out in his canoe, he even caught a fish.
“To be fair it was just luck,” he tells BoxingScene. “It was only a little one. It somehow ended up on the hook and I just threw it back out.”
Though there is humility about his fishing skills, there is little of the sort when he discusses his ability to box. Maca, every inch the confident 18-year-old hotshot, recently declared after winning his professional debut that he would become an undisputed champion within five years.
Was that just the adrenalin talking, or does he really believe it?
“I meant it,” he says before admitting that Sam Jones, his advisor, has warned him about making too many grandiose statements at today’s media luncheon. “But I’ve thought from when I was a six-year-old boy that no one could beat me. I feel exactly the same now. I say the same to my mum at home. I do believe it will happen.”
Enviably carefree, Maca lives approximately three miles west with his family, in the nearby town of Shoreham-by-sea. He boasts about the number of tickets he’s sold for the September 9 show in Houghton-le-Spring, which is around 290 miles north. He relives his debut, a second-round stoppage of the overmatched Rafael Castillo inside Madison Square Garden, like a world champion would talk about winning their biggest fight.
Maca is right to be proud of the progress he’s making, yet, given so few make it as high as he is planning to fly, one naturally watches on and wonders what will become of him in the future when he encounters his first hard fight, when he’s hurt badly, when the boxing business inevitably shows its true colors. For now, the teenager is content that such a day is a long way off – or might not even come at all.
“Technically, you might have someone who’s got a better jab than me, who’s got better feet than me, who’s got better head movement than me, but I’ve never looked at someone and thought they could beat me,” he tells me with complete sincerity. “Maybe it’s been proven that people can out-jab me for a round, but I will catch up with you, I will take over.”
He regularly took over in the vested code when, losing after two rounds in major international tournaments, he won the third so emphatically he nicked a victory. “I still went out and got the job done. It happened a lot. I feel like my style is far better suited to the pros, the longer rounds, more time. I’ll thrive – and I thrived as an amateur even after losing the first and second rounds.”
Maca, a prospect of exceptionally high regard, owes a lot to his parents. His father, Vlad Maca, moved to Italy and then Brighton from Albania when a teenager, hiking to Greece for seven long and gruelling days at the start of his journey. Today, he drives Adam to Dan Woledge’s gym in Kent every day. Before that, after Maca has emerged from his dip in the ocean, his mum will bring food of his choosing to the gym he uses in Brighton.
Though his confidence is real, the fact he is here, the center of attention in this restaurant he used to visit as child before it was refurbished, still feels a little strange.
“Someone asked me for a photo when I was just in Brighton,” Maca explains about his newfound stardom. “I just think of myself as Adam, so I find it a surreal experience, getting all these things when, in my own head, I haven’t changed from when I was 13, just boxing in the amateurs in a pub somewhere.”
The bantamweight’s plans are simple: Build his name in the UK, rise through the weights, claim all the belts, turn Brighton into a hotspot of boxing activity, then head to Albania where he yearns to headline, and spread the word of Adam Maca worldwide. “I’m only at the start of my journey and it is only going to keep getting better from here,” he says. “I can’t wait to show the world what everyone says about me and that the hype is real.”
Matt Christie, a lifelong fight fan, has worked in boxing for more than 20 years. He left Boxing News in 2024 after 14 years, nine of which were spent as editor-in-chief. Before that, he was the producer of weekly boxing show “KOTV.” Now the co-host of ”The Opening Bell” podcast and regularly used by Sky Sports in the UK as a pundit, Matt was named as the Specialist Correspondent of the Year at the prestigious Sports Journalism Awards in 2021, which was the seventh SJA Award he accepted during his stint in the hot seat at Boxing News. The following year, he was inducted into the British Boxing Hall of Fame. He is a member of the BWAA and has been honored several times in their annual writing awards.
