By Thomas Gerbasi
Throughout boxing history, promoters have been characterized in various ways, many unprintable on a family website, but as soon as a casual conversation revealed that Tampa-based promoter Joey Orduna actually took time off from the sweet science to drive (yes, drive) his mother to Las Vegas, that’s all that was really needed to establish his character as a decent individual.
He laughs when I tell him this, but for him, it’s just part of the gig. If you’re a son, you have to be good to your mom.
“That’s the way I grew up, I’ll never change, and maybe nowadays it’s not the norm, but that’s just the way I was raised,” he said.
And while mom is undoubtedly proud of her son, it was the 48-year-old’s late father who instilled a love of boxing into a kid who eventually grew up to form Mad Integrity Fight Sports, which puts on its fourth event this Saturday at the Florida Orange Event Center in Lakeland, Florida.
“I love the sport,” Orduna said. “My dad was a big fight fan and he always had friends come over and watch the (Muhammad) Ali fights. He was a big Ali fan. That was my first attraction to the fights, and back then it was the glory days, so it was more of a mainstream sport, and it continued to be so throughout my younger years as a teenager and through college.”
Orduna never lost his connection to the sport, even when it fell off the front pages and into the background of American sporting culture. But when he moved to Tampa a few years back and began working out at the Fight Factory gym, he was about to move from fan to active participant, just without gloves on.
“I met a lot of the local fighters and went to all the shows and got to know most of the promoters,” he said. “But after Terry Trekas kind of left the business, there was a big lull as far as putting on shows period, let alone good shows. And a lot of the fighters that I thought were good talents and had a good future in the sport in Tampa weren’t getting any fights and were sitting on the shelf too long. It was hard for me to see with me being with them in the gym, and at that level they weren’t getting paid much anyway, but when they weren’t getting fights, they weren’t getting any money, and they were getting dejected.”
Most would have found a comforting word or an encouraging pat on the back to suffice. Orduna decided he was going to get his buddies some fights.
“It’s something where I thought I would enjoy the challenge,” he said, and the fact that he’s putting on his fourth event means that he hasn’t been soured on the sport yet. But it hasn’t been a smooth ride, and that’s no reflection on Orduna as a promoter; it’s that every show in a boxing promoter’s run is full of bumps in the road. Orduna was – and still is - a courageous sort though.
“I wanted to do my own thing, and I separated myself from the venues that all the other promoters would have used or had been using,” he said of the days leading up to his first show in June of 2013. “So I went to some of the hotels that hadn’t been used in a long time. I just walked in and had never done a show before, so it was a hard sell. It’s hard for a catering director to rent a ballroom that would seat 1,500 people to a guy that’s never done it before. (Laughs) So it was not easy, but there were two or three hotels that would give me a shot and I did my first two shows at the Bayfront Hilton in St. Petersburg, and the first show was phenomenal, but it is not an easy thing to pull off.”
They may be hard to find, but there are some people who believe fight promotion is a simple enough thing. Just get a bunch of folks who want to fight each other, get them to sign contracts, find a room to hold the event in, and you’re all set. That’s the easy part. It’s everything else that can make grown men cry, from medicals, to fighter withdrawals, to marketing, commission requirements, and so on and so on. And while Orduna had an assist on the fighter and medical side from Roy Cruz of One Punch Boxing, the rest was on the shoulders of the newcomer.
“The first time, you don’t know the roadblocks you would run into, and it is taxing on a person – it’s taxing on you physically and mentally going through a fight promotion,” he said. “There are so many issues and so many variables that could sway the card one way or another and it takes a strong mentality to weather the storm.”
And that’s just to get to fight night. Once there, you hope somebody’s going to show up.
“There are a lot of emotions evolved,” laughs Orduna, knowing that he’ll go through all those emotions leading up to Saturday’s event, which is headlined by a bout between recent Lou DiBella signee Radivoje “Hot Rod” Kalajdzic and Brazil’s Gilberto Domingos. But when he knows the tickets are sold, the fighters are ready and the commission is happy, he does get a moment to exhale.
“The weigh-in is over, the ring is set up, the commission approves everything, the EMTs show up and you’re like ‘whew, at least it’s happening,’” he laughs. “That’s an accomplishment in itself. But in the long run, I have bigger goals. Any business you start out, if you’re doing a venture on your own, you’re going to incur a loss, and this is definitely the same thing. But the plus we’ve had is the rapport with the fighters and the rapport with the fans. The fighters knew I was an honest person, even before I started promoting, and hopefully we’ll be able to do more shows per year and do bigger and better things in association with some of the bigger promotions.”
Orduna and Mad Integrity Fight Sports aren’t in a rush. He’s taking it fight by fight and event by event. And that’s just fine with him.
“Gradually you come up the ladder,” he said. “It’s not an overnight thing. It’s like being a fighter yourself. You don’t automatically become a champion. You learn the fundamentals, develop them, you take a few falls and a few hits and you continue to progress.”
