Boxxer’s Ben Shalom: ‘I sacrificed my twenties, I sacrificed absolutely everything’
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Exclusive interview: The 30-year-old on becoming Britain’s youngest licensed promoter, and making a name with Boxxer. Ben Shalom knows what you’re thinking. “Where’s this guy come from? Where the f*** has he come from?”. It is the same question that arises when fans come across the 30-year-old’s company, Boxxer, which has emerged as one of the sport’s leading promotions since its inception as Ultimate Boxxer in 2018.
![[Shalom became Britain’s youngest licensed promoter at 23]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2022/07/27/10/Shalom3.jpeg)
Back then, Shalom was just 23, the youngest licensed promoter in Britain. So, where did this guy come from?. Where the f*** did he come from?. The Mancunian recalls Amir Khan’s outings at the 2004 Athens Olympics as having generated his first memories of boxing, before the “ITV nights” that followed for Khan deepened Shalom’s intrigue in the sport. They were bouts that drew “seven or eight million viewers”, and though Shalom, the 11-year-old boxing fan, could probably not recount those figures at the time, it is telling that Shalom, at 30, does so now. Ricky Hatton vs Floyd Mayweather in 2007 and David Haye vs Nikolai Valuev in 2009 were also impactful for Shalom, the latter fight leaving him “obsessed” with the sport.
![[Claressa Shields (left) and Savannah Marshall are both on Boxxer’s roster]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2022/07/05/15/newFile-10.jpg)
The entrepreneurial spirit that would give life to Boxxer first shone at university, where Shalom studied law but was “always trying to find a way not to do law”. He would organise club nights and concerts and sell fast food, and that proclivity for business later combined with boxing in part due to Shalom’s friendships back in Manchester. There, a number of his friends boxed – some professionally.
