Notre Dame Bengal Bouts Alum Is Now A Pro Boxer

The Atlantic:

As soon as he could drive, Mike Lee would venture from suburban Wheaton, Illinois into tough South Chicago to train at local boxing gyms. Lee's father owns one of the nation's biggest sellers of barcode devices, and by all outward appearances Lee seems like someone who should be hanging out at a suburban mall. But he loved a boxing gym's atmosphere—the buzz of the three-minute bell, the whipping of the speed bags, the melody of the jump ropes, the acrid smell of sweat—and learning the boxing trade. Lee is quiet and thoughtful and, by his own description, shy. He was a popular kid—starred as a middle linebacker on his high school team—but to him, there was nothing like the culture of boxing. "There aren't a lot of kids from my background in boxing gyms," says Lee. He felt more at home among the working class, regarding many in his peer group as "phony."

After finishing high school at Benet Academy, a private prep school, he went to the University of Missouri for a year then transferred to Notre Dame University. While he was in South Bend, he became a local boxing legend as a three-time winner of the "Bengal Bouts", an intramural boxing tournament started by Knute Rockne, which now benefits the poor of Bangladesh. (To get a better sense of where the aid was going, Lee volunteered and worked at a Bangladeshi school one summer and also set up his own foundation there.) While attending Notre Dame, he constantly traveled back and forth to Chicago gyms.

After he graduated (3.8 GPA) with a finance degree, there were job offers from Wall Street. But Lee, who also won a 2009 Golden Gloves championship, felt he really hadn't accomplished much as a boxer, and he wanted to see how far he could go in the sport. While his friends were moving onto finance careers in Chicago and New York, he had dreams of being a boxing world champion. He sought out his father for advice. An intense man who looks like an Irish cop, his dad told him to go after his real passion. So Lee called Ronnie Shields, a noted trainer based in Houston, who told Lee that he would give him an honest assessment. Shields asked him when he would arrive at the gym and Lee said he would see him the following morning. Shields laughed, but Lee took the next plane out, and there he was in the morning, going through the toughest workout of his life, throwing up in a trashcan afterwards. Lee loved it. Shields saw some skill, a passion for learning the trade, and a lot of heart.

I'm also a Bengal Bouts alum, but I fought 4 years and lost every fight.  It was a lot of fun, I met great guys and it was a great way to lose 20 to 25 pounds in the middle of winter  You have a real motivation to lose wieght when that means a smaller guy will be punching you in the melon.