SF Venture

SF Chronicle Article On My First Fight

The San Francisco Chronicle did a story about boxing and my career.  Here is a link:  VENTURE PUGULIST KEEPS ON HIS TOES

Venture pugilst keeps on his toes
A little fight club adrenaline can serve its purpose in the Financial District 
- Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 25, 2005

Sweat streaming off his body, his nose red and puffy, Keith Benjamin squinted at his friends and said, for the third time, "I can't remember what just happened."

Benjamin, a managing director in San Francisco venture capital firm Levensohn Venture Partners, had just stepped out of the boxing ring after realizing his dream of competing in an amateur match. 

During the three brief rounds, Benjamin took more punishment than his opponent, even with protective headgear, a mouth guard and a groin protector.

An initial hard jab to his face rocked him back and forth like, well, an inflatable punching doll. In the second round, he lost his balance and fell. In the third round, the judges ended the fight because he was getting pummeled. 

At 46, Benjamin was older by almost two decades than his opponent, although the two were roughly the same size (Benjamin is 5 feet 11, 165 pounds). 

Their match was among several that night at the Third Street Gym in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood, conducted to the blare of hip-hop music and the cheers of a crowd of 50 or so. 

Ordinarily focused and driven, Benjamin is not the kind of guy who suffers from memory lapses. His living depends on his mental acuity. 

But now Benjamin stood looking dazed. "I've never had my mind go as blank as it is now," he said in slow wonderment. 

His trainer, Seamus McDonagh, himself a veteran of boxing matches with the likes of Evander Holyfield, looked worried. He approached the staff at the Third Street Gym to ask if there was a doctor on site. There wasn't, so he convinced Benjamin to head for the emergency room at California Pacific Medical Center, where a CAT scan showed that he had a mild concussion, as well as a bruised rib.

Why would someone subject themselves to such punishment? 

Benjamin, a trim man with a crew cut and unassuming, buttoned-down manner, said half-apologetically that he couldn't discuss it without lapsing into cliches. 

"I wanted to face an intense fear I've always had. I wanted to know I could defend myself," he said. "When I first boxed, I can't describe the adrenaline. Getting in the ring was terrifying. The fear was worse than the actual result. Being able to face that fear, get that adrenaline rush, train myself to feel in control is very rewarding."

Analogies between the worlds of sports and business are common. Boxing, with its high-stakes potential for injury, need for lightning-fast reflexes and reliance on preparation, particularly lends itself to the comparison.

"The fact that I like boxing reflects the business challenges I've chosen to undertake," Benjamin said. He writes a blog at www.sfventure.com that goes into some of the nuts and bolts of the VC world, but it is his entries on boxing that draw the most responses.

A third-generation Wall Streeter (his grandfather ran the retail arm of a brokerage and his father was a money manager), Benjamin was a research analyst for 16 years, including six at Robertson Stephens & Co. Then he opened the San Francisco office of Highland Capital Partners, a Boston VC firm, for which he helped take public AskJeeves, eToys and MapQuest. Three years ago, he joined LVP, whose portfolio companies include BigFix, Informative and Radiance.

Benjamin can readily draw some correlations between his career and his attraction to boxing.

"As a public market analyst, I had to prepare to take risks, be aggressive and contrarian and deal with the psychological implications of being wrong," he said. "The hits aren't as bloody, but psychologically, they're painful.

"In the venture world, the challenges are different. You're making long-term bets. Sometimes you have to make decisions quicker than you'd like  --  about the right product, people, business model."

Benjamin said he has seen venture capitalists and management people alike who were frozen in fear of making tough decisions. 

That brings up the most basic similarity between boxing and business: "You can't let fear stop you from anything. If you don't move quickly, you're knocked out. You've got to take the punches and make the decisions."

Benjamin has a history of immersing himself in challenging sports. As a boy, he was a long-distance swimmer, spending hours every day in the water, sometimes in the ocean off Long Island. His high school didn't have a pool, so he switched to running. After college  --  he has a bachelor's degree in economics and management and a master's of business administration, both from New York University  --  he ran three marathons. Next, he got the mountaineering bug and spent several years climbing.

His final climb was on Mount Rainier on a week where five others died during bad weather. His daughter was about to be born, so he decided that was enough.

He'd always done some cross-training. As part of that a couple of years ago, he met McDonagh, who'd been a boxer since his boyhood in Ireland and now works with some private clients. 

"We did an hour of basic punching," Benjamin said. "It was one of the toughest things I've ever done. I was hooked."

He started training with McDonagh once or twice a week.

"Literally for one year, about all I did was throw a left jab. I know that sounds like 'Karate Kid.' " 

Of course, he soon realized there was a lot more to it. 

Punching requires speed and balance, so he continued running a couple of days a week.

Then there's flexibility  --  his stunk, Benjamin said. So he stopped lifting weights, which he'd been doing for 10 years, because it made him too tight, and took up Pilates and yoga instead.

Then there was something even more basic. "It's easy to get tense and stop breathing." 

His routine is 90 percent training and maybe 10 percent sparring. 

Sparring matches are different from real fights. "Basically, you are more trying to polish your technique than you are trying to kill the other person. You're definitely holding your punches back. Each person is trying to help the other practice different techniques."

He hopes that his children, Bruce, 6, and Peri, 2, will be inspired to take up boxing, both for self-defense and increased confidence.

This year, he joined the Third Street Gym's "Boxing Boot Camp," a six-week program that met for 90 minutes every morning at 6. Benjamin was the oldest in the class by about a decade. It culminated in  the "Friday Night Boxing" fights. The judges declared Benjamin's opponent the winner of his match, but Benjamin still felt a sense of victory.

"I faced the fear. I got in the ring; I did it. I feel good about it."

My First Fight

Last Friday, September 9th, I had my first amateur bout.  It represented my graduation from a Boxing Boot Camp run by the Third Street Gym.  It was advertised as six weeks of training for six minutes in the ring.  After my weekly workouts with Seamus McDonagh, I wanted a more intensive and serious course.  For six weeks starting in August, I joined two dozen relative newcomers to boxing from 6am to 7:30am, Monday through Friday.  The workout was tougher than anything I can remember since wrestling in high school. 

Each day we started with 10-15 minutes of jumping rope.  I am not a natural rope skipper and struggled to get past calf cramps.  After 6 weeks, I got into a rhythm.  The workouts varied after that.  Some days we’d go running in different areas of the city.  I almost viewed these as rest days as I’m in pretty good running shape.  We had a nice run up Twin Peaks.   The sprinting on the beach wasn’t easy.  Running was broken up by calisthenics.  On other days, we stayed in the gym for extreme calisthenics.  We’d do sets of 4-6 exercises with 10-40 repetitions for 30-45 minutes.  This included squats, jumping jacks, push-ups and crunches.  Many of these traditional exercises included punches.  By the time we finished the calisthenics, I was typically drenched in sweat.  Then we’d get the wraps and gloves on for 30-45 minutes of bag work and sparing.

As I’ve said in prior posts, punching is exhausting.  The initial challenge is to keep your arms up, punching and retracting your arms quickly to protect your head.  Keeping your arms above your heart is inherently taxing.  The more complex challenge is to learn technique.  Speed and accuracy are more important than strength.   You need to ground your movements and put your body efficiently behind each punch.  There are times my hands feel fast and hard, but I don’t find that it comes naturally. 

We practiced various punch combinations.  Seamus had always taught me to start and end with the left jab.  The double jab is particularly effective, because even if your opponent blocks the first, the second can drive your opponent’s glove into his own face.  I’ve gained some confidence with my jab.  I’ve tried to focus on a basic combination of a double left jab, right cross, left hook, ending with another jab.  After each punch, it’s critical to get your guard back up, duck or move.  Key is to keep changing patterns to surprise your opponent. 

I sparred more in Boot Camp than I had before.  Near the end of many sessions we’d spar for 15-30 minutes.  We started with defensive drills, learning to catch/deflect punches with gloves and slip away from punches.  We quickly moved into back-and-forth drills.  I tried to spar with the half dozen people in the class near my weight.  I started to get a bit more relaxed in the ring.  I traded a few good shots while sparring, but nothing that hard.  I started out sparring with so much tension that I held my breadth. 

As part of the calisthenics discipline, the gym owners Paul Wade and Simon Redmond ran the classes and would have us shout out counts, forcing us to breath with every movement.  The lesson is to breadth with every punch.   

I’d practiced often with my mouth guard in place to get used to breathing with it.  I’d asked my dentist if he could make one and he’d been pretty excited about the idea.  He’d done sports guards, but not boxing guards.  He designed one with holes in between the teeth for breathing.  He used new material that was supposed to be strong and flexible.  It actually felt great.  Every visit, he’d have me bring it back to clean it.  The subject of boxing is definitely one people I meet want to talk about.  In fact, I get more comments on my boxing-related blogs than my venture-related blogs. 

I would not have made a good career boxer.  Learning from Seamus, it was a difficult life for him.  Paul and Simon are impressive fighters.  They did a great job demonstrating what fighting looks like when the movements come together. 

Graduation was a formally organized fight last Friday.  For our last workout, we jumped into the Bay off a pier new Pac Bell Park.  The fights were scheduled to start at 7pm.   Of the two dozen people who started the course, 18 remained at the end to be matched up.  We were not told of our opponents until after 6pm.  I didn’t appreciate the suspense, but I was so struck by fear that it would not have made much difference knowing a day or week before. 

At 6pm, I was shocked to hear that I was scheduled to fight twice, for the 2nd and 5th bouts out of 10.  One of the fighters had dropped out at the last minute. My first match was with a 28 year-old named Juan.  I’d sparred with him briefly before.  I’d observed him to be quiet and serious.  I believed I was in better physical condition for running and calisthenics.  He was about my weight and height.  I weigh 165 pounds and am 5’ 11” tall.  The difference, which I didn’t appreciate until the fight, was that Juan was left handed.  My second match was slated with Robert.  Because he weighed 190 pounds, I hadn’t expected to be matched with him and had not sparred with him. 

I was mentally prepared for one fight.  The prospect of two fights was not good.  Seamus me in the gym around 6:30pm and forced me to focus on the first fight.  If he didn’t want to fight the second, that was my choice. 

I had not invited anybody to the match.  Two friends and my partners had insisted, which I very much appreciated.  I told my wife not to come so she wouldn’t feel guilty about staying home. 

I’ve never been more afraid of doing anything than stepping into that ring.  My stomach had been queasy all day.  I felt almost empty inside.  I had hints from training and sparring, but didn’t know what to expect in a real right.  How would the punches feel?  Could I hit a moving target?  Would I get knocked out?  Would I do my best? 

The first fight started at about 7:15pm.  I saw the first round, with two of the girls trading punches, but didn’t want to watch the second.  There were 3 rounds, each 2 minutes long with a 1 minute break. 

I was ushered into the ring around 7:30pm.  There was a crowd of some 40-50 people.  I vaguely remember hearing the announcer say Benjamin as I crawled through the ropes.  I had on headgear, a mouth guard and a groin protector.  They had 18 ounce gloves ready. 

Finally getting in the ring was almost a relief.  Seamus has frequently lectured me about the need to be totally present for the fight.  I’d often find myself distracted in the gym and take my eyes off the bag during a workout.  I found it naturally easy to jump totally into the moment of the fight.  I barely heard to crowd or even the advice Seamus was shouting.  It was all about hitting Juan’s head and blocking his punches. 

Seamus had given me a plan.  Start by standing my ground and quickly land my double jab.  I quickly realized I was used to right-handed fighters.  He was in the wrong place.  I was able to land a few jabs, but Seamus said I had to focus more on following up with my right.  In the first round, I was able to land a few of both.  Juan landed about the same number, but his left felt stronger than my right.  Fortunately, his punches didn’t hurt as much as I’d feared, but I had trouble seeing and blocking his punches.  By the end of the first round, he seemed a bit tired.  My energy was high, but I was frustrated trying to land more punches. 

Juan started out aggressively in the second round.  He hit me with a hook that knocked me down.  I was able to get up quickly, but was a bit off balance.  I landed a few more left jabs, but he hit me with two or three solid punches and I felt the referee grab me.  At this point, they stopped the fight.  I literally don’t remember what happened from that point until about 10-15 minutes after the fight.  I’m told I talked to my friends and others, saying I felt fine and that I was ready to keep going, but the first fight was over and there would be no second fight. 

Seamus suspected I’d had a concussion and suggested we take a trip to the ER.  That’s the point I can now remember.  The ER experience was almost pleasant.  First, I was out of the ring.  Second, every staff member was pleasantly fascinated about what I’d done to get there.  I was still in my boxing shorts and shoes.  It took each a while to believe I had actually just been in a boxing match.  The doctor said he’d boxed in college and when he heard that I couldn’t remember what happened after the fight, he quickly diagnosed a mild concussion and a bruised rib.  He suggested, given my age, that I should have a CAT scan, which fortunately showed no internal bleeding.  I was home around 10:30pm. 

As I keep replaying the fight in my mind, it feels very short, particularly after all the work and anticipation.  I also watched it on a video taken by one of friends.  I feel good about what I saw.  It didn't look like they needed to stop the fight, but in hindsight it was the right decision. 

I sense it has changed me in ways I don’t appreciate yet.  One friend said I was refreshingly less sarcastic after the fight.

I’m less afraid of fighting now.   I would have liked to win the fight.  I’d need more experience in the ring to get fully past the fear and build confidence in my fighting skills.  However, I don’t think it’s worth the risk of more concussions at my age.  I was surprised how easy it was to get dazed.  Still, I’m looking forward to getting back to the gym to take what I experienced in the ring and use it to improve my techniques with bag work and sparring.