Boxing Insider Fight Night

From a news site to a promoter's licence

Boxing Insider Promotions is the promotional arm of BoxingInsider.com, one of the sport's earlier digital outlets. Its founder, Larry Goldberg, a native of Margate, New Jersey, spent years covering fights before deciding to make them, and the crossover from press row to the promoter's side of the ropes has shaped everything about how the shows are put together: small rooms, local names, and a results report filed on the company's own masthead by the following morning.

The first card ran on 13 October 2022 at Sony Hall, the basement theatre off Times Square in the Broadway district. Billed as Boxing Insider Fight Night 1, "New Beginnings", it was five fights, sold out, and by the promotion's own account packed the 500-seat room past capacity. It was sold on BXNG TV pay-per-view. Heather Hardy, a former WBO featherweight champion returning after 17 months out, headlined and took a unanimous decision over Calista Silgado across six rounds at lightweight, scored 60-54 and 58-56 twice. "Silgado is a veteran who has fought everybody," Hardy said afterwards. "I expected this kind of fight, and I prepared for it."

The rest of that opening card went the short way, which set a pattern. Andy Dominguez Velasquez stopped his opponent in the first round, Ivan Golub in the fourth and Nadim Salloum in the sixth, with Petros Ananyan also finishing inside the distance. Four stoppages from five fights in a room that size is the commercial logic of the whole series in miniature.

The Times Square residency

Sony Hall became the home venue rather than a one-off. By September 2025 the promotion had staged twelve shows there, and the card on Friday 19 September 2025 — its eighteenth overall — was used to revive Broadway Boxing, the New York club series that ran on SNY for eighteen years. Boxing Insider put it on with DiBella Entertainment and OTX Boxing and streamed it on BoxingInsider.com. Five fights again: Kurt Scoby stopped Alex Martin in the eighth at junior welterweight, George Arias upset Earl Newman on a unanimous decision, and the prospect Donte Layne knocked out Mirady Lubanzadio Zola in the second.

Goldberg has been unusually blunt about where the operation sits in the food chain. "I love being the little guy in New York City," he said around the Broadway Boxing return. "I like being the stepping stone." That is an accurate description of the function: ten- and twelve-fight prospects taking their sixth or eighth bout in front of 500 people, with regional titles rather than world honours as the ceiling. The New York State Boxing Hall of Fame named him Promoter of the Year in both 2023 and 2024.

Earlier Sony Hall nights followed the same template. A third annual Holiday Fight Night closed out December 2024, and in February 2025 Avious Griffin stopped Jose Luis Sanchez in the eighth round for the WBC USA welterweight title — the kind of belt that gives a regional card a headline without pretending to be something it is not.

The Boardwalk half of the year

The other half of the calendar sits in Atlantic City, where Goldberg brought professional boxing back to the Tropicana in May 2024 after a seven-year gap. The November 2024 card at the Tropicana Showroom showed how that room gets filled: Dominique Crowder, then 17-0 and WBA International bantamweight champion, over eight rounds on top; tickets from $48 to $203.50 through Ticketmaster; a live broadcast on DAZN; and Don Elbaum, who promoted at the Tropicana in the early 1980s, honoured during the show. Local fighters carried the undercard, among them Justin Figueroa and Bruce Seldon Jr, son of the former heavyweight champion.

Those weekends are built as more than a single night. The November 2024 card was flanked by Friday weigh-ins and followed on the Sunday by an amateur Police Athletic League show at $40 a ticket, with all proceeds going to Atlantic City youth programmes. Goldberg ran a second amateur event for the same organisation, the Battle of the Beach Amateur Showcase, in November 2025, and the Atlantic City Police Athletic League gave him its Excellence Award at the Public Safety Civilian Academy Class of 2025 graduation for supporting its boxing programme.

The 2025 run was the busiest the promotion has had: Figueroa knocked out his opponent at the Tropicana in March, the series travelled to Riverhead on Long Island in April, Andy Dominguez beat Byron Rojas for a WBC belt in July, and on 7 November Figueroa took the NABF title.

2026: a no contest, and a heavyweight derby

The twentieth show, on Saturday 7 March 2026 at the Tropicana, is the one that still defines the promotion's current year. Six fights, streamed free on the BoxingInsider YouTube channel with Randy Gordon, Eric Bottjer and Avril Mathie calling it. Figueroa, 14-0 with 11 knockouts, was controlling Luis Caraballo Ramos when the main event collapsed: he dropped straight backwards and took Ramos headfirst into the canvas in a movement the promotion's own report compared to a professional wrestling DDT. Ramos was immobilised and taken out on a stretcher. The New Jersey State Athletic Control Board ruled it an accidental foul and, with fewer than four rounds completed, declared a no contest. The crowd went home annoyed.

The rest of that card did what these cards do. John Leonardo beat Edgar Joe Cortes on a unanimous decision at 79-73, 78-74 and 77-75; Josh Popper stopped Dillon Pumphrey in 72 seconds; Indeya Rodriguez outpointed Lia Lewandowski; Julio Sanchez III stopped Christopher Williams at 2:24 of the first; and Jacob Riley Solis beat Jeremy Ramos on points.

On 13 June 2026 the promotion returned to the Tropicana for its twenty-first show since October 2022, a seven-bout card with the first bell at 7.30pm. The pitch was a South Jersey heavyweight derby between two unbeaten men: Bruce Seldon Jr of Smithville, 8-0 with six knockouts and 236lb on the scales, against Josh Popper of Egg Harbor Township, 7-0 with six knockouts, over six rounds. The undercard was drawn almost entirely from Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.

The card on sale now

The next date is Friday 13 November 2026 at the Tropicana Showroom, 2831 Boardwalk, with a 7pm start and tickets from $105 through Ticketmaster. It is billed as Atlantic City's last boxing card of the year, and the main event is the rematch the March night was denied: Figueroa against Caraballo Ramos, now 8-10-1, over eight rounds at middleweight. "These guys just did not like each other," Goldberg said of the first meeting. "It was turning into an all-out slugfest, and it never got finished."

Beneath it, John Leonardo, 13-1-1 with six knockouts, meets Kevin Nunez, 6-4, over eight rounds at 122lb, and George Arias, 19-1-1, faces Joe Jones, 16-15-2, over eight at heavyweight. Iman Lee of Yonkers, 15-0-1 and the reigning NABF super-featherweight champion, makes his Atlantic City debut after a run in the WBC Grand Prix. Pleasantville's Julio Sanchez III, 5-1, is in a four-round lightweight bout, with the Brooklyn southpaw Koby Khalil Williams, 8-1, Luigi Caniglia and the Bronx middleweight Jahanzeb Rizwan, 3-0, also announced.