The Englishman, born to a Albanian father and a British-Yemeni mother, became hooked on the sport when his mum brought him to a boxing gym aged five.<\/p>\n
“I was doing loads of sports at the time. But when I started sparring at about nine I just fell in love with it,” he says.<\/p>\n
“The first time I got punched I thought ‘I have to get him back’. I used to get angry when I’d get hit. You have to learn to take one and land two in a minute.”<\/p>\n
Maca caught the eye of Matchroom because of his remarkable amateur record. He has seven titles in the junior ranks, including five national titles.<\/p>\n
He also won a silver medal at the IBA World Junior Championships representing Albania in 2023.<\/p>\n
While he was earmarked to be a potential Olympian, he has long had his sights on linking up with Hearn – even cornering him at an event with fellow future Matchroom fighter and heavyweight Leo Atang.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t get ringside [tickets] back then,” Maca jokes. “We spoke to Eddie and said we wanted to sign with him one day. He said, ‘come to me when you’re a bit older, boys’. And now here we are.”<\/p>\n
Like Maca, Atang will make his professional bow as an 18-year-old. He fights on Jack Catterall’s undercard in Manchester in July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Englishman, born to a Albanian father and a British-Yemeni mother, became hooked on the sport when his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-183259","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\/114680695863796868","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183259","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=183259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}