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."

Comments

[tribeless]

I can relate! Good story.

[Amy Senk]

Hi! I saw this article and read it! What was funny was, a few days later I went to my first fight in Reno. Hope to see you soon.