The circuitous journey of the boxing business’ ultimate multi-hyphenate, Kurt Emhoff

Kurt Emhoff has never made a full-time living in boxing. But he’s made a whole lot of part-time livings in the sport by fitting his head for numerous hats.

He’s been a boxing fan, a boxing manager, a boxing lawyer, a boxing writer, a boxing podcaster, and a boxing TV production advisor. And his career serves as an argument in favor of diversification and the trying on of hats, as it was a relatively minor pursuit in one lane that opened the door for his greatest successes in another.

As the 1990s were ending, Emhoff, then in his early 30s, was humming along as a New York-based sports and entertainment attorney and also managing some small-time boxers when he decided to dabble on the side with writing about boxing on the internet — at a time when hardly anyone was writing about boxing on the internet. He became a U.S. correspondent for the British site BoxingPress.com — “a will-write-for-credentials type of deal, no money,” Emhoff explained — which would soon give way to SecondsOut.com. And he wrote a piece, from his informed perspective as a lawyer who had direct experience in Don King’s orbit, about the pros and cons of signing with the famous/infamous promoter.

That article caught the eye of Terron Millett, who was having his struggles with King and had been controversially stripped by the IBF of his recently won 140-pound belt.

“Terron reached out to me and asked me if I could help him out, because he’d just been stripped by the IBF. I did a story on it, and he was like, ‘No, I really need a lawyer.’ So then I started representing him,” Emhoff, now 57, recalled this week. “He sued the IBF, and he eventually got named ‘champion in recess’ and he got his shot at Zab Judah.”

That fight came on Aug. 5, 2000, at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, after Millett had been inactive for 13 months due to his legal/promotional/title complications — by which time Emhoff wasn’t just his lawyer, but his manager as well.

“It was crazy,” Emhoff said. “Before that, the biggest fight I was involved in as a manager was Levan Easley in a six-rounder on an undercard of a Friday Night Fights show [on Feb. 19, 1999]. And all of a sudden, I’m with Terron in this huge main event on Showtime, and I’d just been in touch with [rapper] Nelly’s manager about trying to arrange to have him walk Terron into the ring, and I’m standing in the ring, looking out the crowd, like, Holy shit, this is the big time.”

It was a long road to that big time for Emhoff, who counts the day he fell in love with boxing among his earliest memories. Growing up in Wesleyville, Pennsylvania, a tiny borough just outside Erie in the northwest corner of the state, sports were always on his family’s TV. The youngest of three brothers — half-brother Jerry was almost 13 years older than Kurt, and full brother Mark was around the midpoint between them — Kurt, at age 4, was a huge fan of forest-fire-preventing PSA mascot Smokey the Bear. He had a Smokey doll, a Smokey sweatshirt, a Smokey hat.

And just before the Super Bowl in 1972, some guy named “Smokin’” Joe Frazier was going to be defending the heavyweight championship of the world against Terry Daniels on Kurt’s TV.

“It sounded like Smokey the Bear. That was enough to get me really excited to see Smokin’ Joe Frazier. And he didn’t disappoint,” Emhoff said. “He was exactly as I’d imagined, very aggressive, smokin’, came out and did what he had to do with Terry Daniels, knocked him out impressively. And basically, from then on, I became a big Smokin’ Joe Frazier fan, and anytime there were fights on the TV, even if it wasn’t Smokin’ Joe Frazier, I wanted to watch.”

Emhoff tried his hand(s) at boxing in his early teens, though his style in the ring was a lot more like that of his favorite fighter’s antagonist than of his favorite fighter.

“I wasn’t bad. I was a decent athlete,” said Emhoff, who never quite went so far as to have any official amateur fights. “At one point in time, I ran a 4.5 40, so I had some speed, and I took the style that at the time was very popular, like Muhammad Ali, like Sugar Ray Leonard: dance and have your hands down.

“I was a runner, OK?” he added after a pause, with the trademark Emhoff chuckle that fills any gap in a conversation. “Total runner. Because I had no power. I was thin as a rail. I was like, 5’10” and 132 pounds. I had no power, but I could move.

“And I have to say, you know, it would be chic to say that I was an Ali fan, because Ali’s the big icon, but I didn’t like Ali. I thought Ali was a loudmouth, and I didn’t like what he had to say about my guy, Frazier.”

In addition to being a Frazier fan growing up, Emhoff was also a fan of a major boxing figure of the ‘70s and ‘80s who neither gave nor took any punches.

“I was actually a huge admirer of Mike Trainer,” Emhoff said of the man who managed Ray Leonard. “I was impressed with how he kept Leonard away from the big promoters and kept him independent. I was just a huge fan of Mike Trainer, so, even though I’d decided to go to law school and become a lawyer, I was thinking I might want to manage fighters someday.

“I didn’t have any specific plan for how to do it, though. I had no idea how to get into the business. But I knew I wanted to work in sports.”

While attending Cardozo School of Law in New York, Emhoff found his point of entry. He met junior welterweight Terry Southerland around 1995, and impressed the clubfighter by rattling off various career facts about him. Realizing Emhoff knew boxing, would soon be a lawyer, and had a good brain for the business and contracts, Southerland asked Kurt to help him get into managing fighters. So Emhoff advised Southerland, looked over contracts for him, and took a small piece of Southerland as his in-ring career wound down, and soon they co-managed other boxers like Easley.

Through a chance meeting with Southerland, Emhoff had found his way into managing fighters.

“My career is as a lawyer, but it is a fact that I was a licensed boxing manager before I was a licensed attorney,” he mused.

After law school, as a paralegal at the firm of Sidley & Austin, which represented both King and Mike Tyson, Emhoff soon found himself working on major boxing cases.

He also started to build a strong managerial stable after linking up with Millett. In the early 2000s, Emhoff managed Cory Spinks, Paulie Malignaggi, Travis Simms, Derrick Gainer, Dmitriy Salita, Kermit Cintron, and Sam Soliman among others.

Emhoff can tell you off the top of his head the exact date of the high point of his career in boxing: Dec. 13, 2003. That was the night Spinks upset Ricardo Mayorga by majority decision for the lineal welterweight championship and Simms beat Alejandro Garcia to claim a 154-pound belt as part of a massive eight-title-fight King card in Atlantic City.

At many points along the way, Emhoff’s side hustle in the fight game has not added a whole lot to his bottom line. But during those years when he had multiple fighters competing on HBO and Showtime, it provided a not-insignificant addition to what he was making as an attorney.

Of course, he had to put in a whole lot of hours to collect all the different forms of income — and his fellow lawyers used to frequently ask him how he juggled the multiple pursuits.

“It was definitely easier when I was a single man,” reflected Emhoff, who married his wife Laurena in 2004. (They now live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Windsor Terrace and have two teenage daughters.) “Back then, if I needed to travel for a fight week, I’d have to use my vacation days. Once I got married and we had kids, it’s not so cool that I’m using up all my vacation days to do this boxing thing.

“Especially in the early 2000s when I had a ton of fighters, it was a big challenge to handle the main gig and the side gigs. But, I mean, boxing was my passion. So I just made it work.”

That passion drove him to do a little writing in order to get ringside credentials for fights. Around 2001, he jumped from SecondsOut to Maxboxing, but after a year or so there, with his managerial career taking off, he hit a fork in the road.

“It’s hard to be a truth-telling journalist when you’re also dealing directly with everybody on the business side,” he acknowledged.

He wrote an article panning the recently launched ShoBox series, which got him a tongue-lashing from promoter Gary Shaw. He also had a conversation in which Lou DiBella told him it was challenging to talk business with Emhoff because he wasn’t sure if something he said was going to appear in a Maxboxing column.

Add it all up, and “being a writer wasn’t worth it,” Emhoff reflected.

Many years later, though, he re-entered the media side of the sport in a different format. In 2018, Emhoff launched The Boxing Esq. Podcast.

“Most people in boxing media don’t really know how the sausage is made in terms of the boxing business,” Emhoff explained. “So I was thinking, I really like some of the podcasts that are out there, but there aren’t really any that deal with the business of boxing and talk to the people who do business in boxing. So that was the impetus for starting The Boxing Esq. Podcast.”

After a couple of years, though, Emhoff ran into a situation similar to the one that led him to curtail his boxing writing career. He became an advisor as the televised boxing series Ring City USA launched in November 2020 and once again felt the weight of conflict of interest. And it was an easy choice between “potentially major live TV boxing series” and “independent podcast.”

Ring City didn’t last long, however, and in 2024, the on-again-off-again rumors of its revival finally died down enough for Emhoff to feel like he could start podcasting again if he wanted to.

And there was something happening in the boxing business that made him decide, yes, he wanted to.

“The Saudis came around, and, I had spent so much time on my podcast talking about how we needed a boxing league and this and that, and when that New York Times article came out about the possibility of them starting a league, I was like, ‘Alright, I’m dusting the microphone off. I’m dusting the old Skype account off.’”

The Boxing Esq. Podcast relaunched last summer, giving Emhoff a vehicle to again get his voice out there in the sport he loves. He also still has boxing clients as a lawyer, though he’s not currently managing any fighters.

Emhoff has now worked in boxing, in various manners, for some 30 years. For all the highs like that night in Atlantic City with Spinks and Simms, there have also been lows — like Salita getting knocked out by Amir Khan in 76 seconds in 2009, and like learning firsthand what a dirty business this can be and that the fighters aren’t always innocent.

“I came into the business all righteous, ready to fight the powers-that-be,” he said. “I was fighting Main Events, I was fighting Don King, and I eventually learned, you can’t be fighting with everybody. You do that, and they’ll find a way to screw you.

“There have been various times when I didn’t get paid by people. I’m not going to name names. But, it leaves you asking, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I busting my ass?’ It was so discouraging for me as someone who came into the sport as such an idealist. I mean, I was going to fight for the fighters against the evil promoters who rip everybody off — and then to find out that fighters can be just as bad, that was definitely disheartening.”

But, of course, Emhoff can’t bring himself to walk away from the sport, even if it sends him to the canvas for the occasional 8-count. This brutal, inspiring, filthy, thrilling game got its hooks in him long ago. It’s a part of him. And in an assortment of roles, he’s part of it.

At age 4, Kurt Emhoff believed only he could prevent forest fires. Some 53 years later, the fire boxing lit in him is still burning.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].