Mitchell Celebrates Victory at Beltway Plaza Party; Idea Springs From Function!

This past Sunday, NABO/WBC International Heavyweight champion Seth "Mayhem" Mitchell  (center) celebrated his recent victory over Johnathon Banks with a meet and greet at Beltway Plaza Mall in Greenbelt, MD.

I am not posting this picture to promote myself or Juan Marshall (right).  This picture and this event got us to thinking and an idea started to form that we would like to discuss with you.

As you know, we have a lot of very impressive young boxers -- boxers who are very good inside the ring and good people outside of the ring.  The issue is, however, we are the only people that seem to know that.  The outside world, by and large, doesn't know.

One of the reasons that the outside world doesn't know is that our boxers tend to wait for the outside world to come to us.  Our boxers need to draw the outside world to us.  

Many of the boxers understand this.  Mitchell will be making an appearance at Prince George's Stadium during a Bowie Baysox baseball game on Friday, August 2.  Some of you chuckled at the appearances of The Peterson Brothers, Dusty Harrison and Thomas Williams, Jr. at a charity basketball game in Upper Marlboro, MD on July 20 but I can guarantee that more people who don't necessarily follow local boxing now have a better idea of who they are.  Gary Russell, Jr. has done a barbershop tour in which he visits local barbershops and signs autographs. Tori Nelson has made numerous appearances at events throughout Northern Virginia.  Of course, the many charity events and appearances that Jimmy Lange has attended over the years has been legendary.

There are two common denominators that those boxers listed have working for them:

1.  They understand the value of going out into the community and promoting themselves the RIGHT way.

2.  The boxers have people who also understand the value of the boxers going out into the community and know how to promote the boxers the RIGHT way.

For many boxers, however, self-promotion means going on a video site and doing what tend to be close to "ghetto-fabulous" videos that, unfortunately, will not endear yourselves to the community at large.  What's worse, many of the folks who are behind these boxers either don't know that the boxers are doing this, don't care that the boxers are doing this or encouraging the boxers to do this.

That will not work for the 2013 version of the boxing business.

Therefore, Juan and I along with some others are proposing this idea.  Right now this is just an idea.

We are thinking about putting together a one-day symposium primarily for young local pro boxers and their camps to understand the importance and the value of learning how to promote yourselves in the general community and the media.

Let me be very clear on this when it comes to the media -- This does not mean that I have had any issue with any boxer or any of the members of a boxer's camp.  Take me out of this equation.  I am more concerned at this stage with the mainstream media.  Of course, the general community should speak for itself.

If you or your camps are interested in participating in a symposium such as this -- do not comment here.  Contact me at my email address: beltwayboxing@hotmail.com  If we get a good group number of people to get involved, we will proceed with this idea.

Thanks for your time!