Adam Maca, 18, will make his professional debut at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.\u00a0Matchroom Boxing<\/p>\n
A professional debut is always special — regardless of event, opponent or venue.<\/p>\n
But for 18-year-old junior featherweight Adam Maca, announcing himself at New York’s Madison Square Garden was literally contractual.<\/p>\n
“[Manager] Sam [Jones], he was like: ‘We’ll get the MSG debut,’ Maca told ESPN ahead of his fight against Rafael Castillo on the undercard of Richardson Hitchins’ IBF junior welterweight title defence against George Kambosos Jr.<\/p>\n
“And then we got it in our contract as well with Matchroom. When they posted on Instagram, the poster for the fight, then it become a bit real and obviously when we had our flights booked.<\/p>\n
“That’s when it properly become like, yeah, this is happening.”<\/p>\n
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Various promoters approached the highly touted Maca, but it was Matchroom’s ability to get him to the Big Apple on debut that sealed the deal.<\/p>\n
To say it has been a whirlwind week is an understatement.<\/p>\n
“Around the arena, it’s not just boxing things, it’s all sports and it’s [the] quotes of what people are saying about the arena: ‘The world’s most famous, the best arena in the world.’<\/p>\n
“So to be boxing there on my debut is massive,” Maca said.<\/p>\n
After winning various domestic titles, Maca — born in Brighton with Albanian and Yemenis heritage — had no doubt that he wanted to turn pro as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
“Since I was younger I wanted to be a pro boxer and then when I was getting closer to 18, I just kept thinking, I can’t wait to turn pro, can’t wait to be 18 so I can turn pro,” he said.<\/p>\n
“So there was sort of never any thought in my mind that I was going to do anything else.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adam Maca, 18, will make his professional debut at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.\u00a0Matchroom Boxing A professional debut…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-181927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114677845063998940","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}