By Larry Goldberg, Promoter of Record for Josh Popper vs Bruce Seldon
Thirty seconds.
A left hand from Josh Popper, and Bruce Seldon Jr. was on the canvas, and the fight every boxing person in South Jersey swore was a coin flip was over before half the room had found their seats.
Let me tell you what those thirty seconds cost, and let me tell you why I’m proud of every one of them.
A fight that doesn’t get made anymore
Here is the truth about the club level. Nobody wants to fight. Undefeated records are treasure, and at this level it isn’t the matchmakers guarding them. It’s the fighters, the managers, the coaches, and the fathers, all protecting the zero like it’s the last dollar on earth.
So look at what we were trying to do. Two undefeated heavyweights. Bruce Seldon Jr. at 8-0, Josh Popper at 7-0. Both veterans of my cards. Both with knockouts on my cards. Both out of the Atlantic City area, raised in the same fight scene, finally pointed at each other. This was a real local rivalry with real history behind it, and that is exactly the kind of fight that does not get made in 2026. The sport has been engineered so it can’t.
Eric Bottjer and I made it happen anyway.
And right up to the bell, I was scared. Thomas Hauser told me flat out he thought one of them would pull out fight week. Every press release I sent, I braced for the next one to be me eating crow. It never came.
Almost a year in the making
This started half a year ago, when Josh Popper told me he wanted Bruce Seldon. Just like that. Seldon’s manager, Jim Kurtz, was not thrilled about his guy getting called out and possibly sandbagged on Jersey soil.
Then in March, Bruce was sitting ringside at one of my shows watching Josh dispose of a heavyweight built like Butterbean, a fellow named Dillon Pumphrey. Josh called him out again, right there in the building. And this time the answer came back yes.
That should have been the easy part. It wasn’t. I asked for one simple photo of the two of them together in case we made the fight. The answer was no. One of the camps told me straight up they didn’t want to be used for clout. I did not have a single picture of these two men in the same frame until the weigh-in. Not one.
So Bottjer and I did it the hard way. We got both camps on the phone, put a real offer in front of them, and they agreed.
And then everyone became the A-side.
The corner war
If you have never promoted a fight, you cannot imagine how much grown men will fight over a color.
It wasn’t a negotiation, not in any formal sense. It was personalities running hot. Seldon’s people wanted the red corner. Popper’s people wanted the same. Every poster was a fistfight before the actual fistfight. My designer and I tried switching the billing every way you can imagine, and no matter what I did, the phone lit up. It got heated enough that I finally said it would be settled with a coin toss, with the commissioner in the present, and that would be that.
Here is the part that still makes me laugh. Josh’s trainer, Jose Guzman, made as much noise as anybody about the A-side in the build up. Then he walked up to that coin toss, looked dead at the other corner, and said “We don’t care what corner we came out of or who gets announced first. It won’t change the outcome. We are going to win,” and he walked off.
At the digital face-off, Bruce Seldon came out of his shell and was more personal and more media-savvy than I’d ever seen him. Josh had the camera presence of a seasoned broadcaster. They went right at each other. At one point they were arguing about a high school football game from seventeen years ago. Later, Seldon’s manager Jim Kurtz actually pulled up the box score to prove the point.
That’s what this was. Not a manufactured beef. Two local kids who played ball against each other, finally settling something old.
The locker room
After the fight, Jose Guzman walked into Bruce Seldon’s locker room with me. For all the bravado, all the noise in the build, in that private moment he did exactly the right thing. He shook coach Julio Sanchez’s hand. He shook Bruce’s hand. He made a point of saying it was never personal, and the respect was real and mutual.
I want to give everyone involved their due. Josh Popper’s manager Marty Hopwood went above and beyond and handled a ton of the logistics — he deserves a medal and his own reality show for the cast of characters he deals with. His trainer Jose Guzman had a clear plan and executed it. On the other side, Bruce Seldon’s manager Jim Kurtz cares deeply about his fighter, and coach Julio Sanchez had Bruce ready to be tough as nails. He just got caught with one perfect shot. Every one of these people pushed back hard on something during the build, but when it counted they all showed up, delivered a real fight, and handled the ending with class.
Josh has cleared out the local level. There’s nothing left for him to prove in this town right now, and the next level is calling. Bruce has some work ahead of him. A knockout like that means the New Jersey commission will require a neurological exam and further evaluations before he’s cleared to fight again. That’s the system working the way it should, protecting fighters.
The receipts
People only see the thirty seconds. They don’t see what it actually took to get there. One guy running the entire show — casino logistics, Athletic Commission, production, and every last detail — while certain people who were supposed to be there got stuck in traffic after working another card the night before. Throw in a Knicks Game 5 that killed the walk-up and it becomes even more impressive. We still packed the Tropicana and delivered a strong card on what was easily our biggest local fight to date.
A fight they said was impossible just got made. Two undefeated heavyweights with real local history went at it, and it was settled in one clean shot. That’s what a regional promotion can deliver when it’s run right — a finished product and a new heavyweight with marquee appeal and a left hand that ends nights. The big leagues should be paying attention. We just built one in Atlantic City.
You can plan a fight the sport said was impossible.
You can’t plan against going up against the Knicks in 5.
Boxing has a new star, and he’s a free agent.
His name is Josh Popper.
We made a fight they told me couldn’t be made. Six months of school of hard knocks promoting this fight taught me plenty. Now we start from scratch and try and go bigger next time .
