In the fight world nearly 30 years, this media specialist has never had to lace up the gloves
By DAVID NAHAN
Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – If you’re a boxing fan, you get jealous quickly when you talk to Ed Keenan.
The Ocean City resident is not a fighter, but he has worked so many big-name fights that when he starts naming bouts that stretch back to 1991 with Holyfield-Foreman, your jaw drops. You need an uppercut to put it back into place.
For newer fans of the sport, Keenan has worked all of the fights of Canelo Alvarez (a four-division world champion Mexican fighter) and Triple G (Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, a Kazakhstani two-time middleweight world champion).
Most recently, he worked the heavyweight rematch between Tyson Fury, the 6’9” Brit who KO’d a previously unbeaten American knockout artist, 6’7” Deontay Wilder, in February.
But even more recently, Ed Keenan was in the spotlight himself. He was named part of the newest class of the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.
For someone who never laced up the gloves, he has been in the boxing world nearly 30 years, since 1991 when he was asked by Dave Coskey to help with the publicity for a big fight.
Keenan is a media specialist who runs his own company out of his home in Ocean City and travels all around the country to help promote big fights.
He became friends with Coskey when the two worked for the Philadelphia 76ers. Now-President Donald Trump asked Coskey to come help him promote fights in Atlantic City when he owned casinos there.
Keenan was looking for a job and was getting help on his resume where his friend worked when Coskey popped his head in, saw him, and asked him to work the fight between Evander Holyfield and George Foreman.
From there, Keenan said, “one thing led to another.”
He was working for Coskey at a company called Mediaworks when pay-per-view boxing started. They worked with promoters at HBO on monthly PPV fights. Coskey eventually left to go back to the Sixers when Ocean City’s Pat Croce bought the team, and over time Keenan started handling all the boxing business. He went out on his own in 2003 with his own PR agency, Event Marketing and Communications.
Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran.
He explained that boxing promoters such as Don King and Bob Arum hire him to coordinate their events to generate publicity. His specialty lately is having satellite media tours, where he sits down with a fighter and a cameraman so the boxer can do a dozen interviews in an hour with a dozen different TV stations.
He also coordinates press conferences and prefight weigh-ins.
“I mostly work on big fights when there is a lot of interest in them,” Keenan said, including those with Alvarez, Triple G and Top Rank’s heavyweight spectacle between Fury and Wilder.
Those big fights are exciting, he said. “When I get a guy like Canelo, and I call all the TV networks to pitch interviews, it’s a lot of fun because there’s a lot of interest in him. It’s the same thing with Wilder and Fury. That was the biggest fight in years.
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s exciting the same time.”
That excitement doesn’t mean he is the one who has to get between the fighters if things get contentious, but there was that one time …. “Remember when Lewis and Tyson got into the fight on the stage? I was in the middle of that.” That was a famous brawl in January 2002 at a news conference announcing the fight between heavyweights Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson that had both fighters rolling around and some 20 people involved. Ring Magazine named that brawl the Event of the Year. Keenan was right there.
Keenan said he loves working media days at boxing gyms and doing the “grand arrivals where there are all these TV crews there and the fighters come in through the door and walk through huge crowds. We do all the interviews with all the TV stations and then take (the fighters) to a back room where we sit down with the newspapers guys. That’s a lot of fun.”
“Probably one of the biggest things I did was the (Floyd “Money”) Mayweather-(Manny “Pac-Man”) Pacquiao red carpet to announce that fight. Credentialed for the red carpet were like 60 photographers and 85 TV crews on the red carpet. I get out there and this person gives me a list of the media and says to set it up. I put them all in order and in groups. They (the fighters) went down and did every interview.”
He walked through the whole red carpet with Pacquiao, who he has known for years, and then he had to run back because Mayweather was showing up. He also knew Mayweather, but usually from the opposing side, and didn’t know whether the boxer would do all the interviews, but he just walked ahead of Mayweather and told him where to stand. “No one even knew if he was going to do all of the interviews, but he did every one. It was wild,” Keenan said. “It was like an hour walking down the carpet. That was pretty cool.”
He enjoys the satellite media tours “because it’s basically just me and the fighter sitting there and the camera guy. I just talk to the fighter all the time on who is next on the interview, what to say, sometimes, what they’re going to ask them, and I give them fun talking points to get things rolling.”
Among the fighters he enjoys working with are Alvarez, even though he doesn’t speak English, but “they kind of communicate. He understands what I’m saying.” He became friendly with Roy Jones having worked some 26 fights with him and with former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield and now Holyfield’s son, Evan, who started boxing last year. Another Holyfield son is Elijah, a running back signed by the Philadelphia Eagles. He also enjoyed with Miguel Cotto, a multiple boxing world champion.
“I always loved working the Arturo Gatti fights in Atlantic City,” Keen said. “That was so much fun.” Gatti won championships in two weight classes during a career from 1991 to 2007 and had exciting, bloody battles in the ring.
“I worked with (former champion) Oscar de la Hoya when he first started and now he is a promoter and I work with him,” he said. “It’s funny how things come around like that.”
Asked if he ever had the desire to step in the ring, he laughed and added an emphatic, “No!” He had become friendly with heavyweight champ Lennox Lewis after working some of his fights. At a media day, when Lewis was about to do a workout in the ring, Keenan walked in front of the boxer. “I crossed his path and he gives me this love tap and I went flying across the ring. That was like the only time I got hit and I was like, ‘whoa, that was a brick wall coming at me.’”
Historically, boxing has earned a reputation of being a dirty and corrupt business, but Keenan doesn’t have issues on his end of things.
“Everybody has this horrible impression of Don King,” he said. “People are like, ‘What do you think?’ And I’m like, ‘We get along great.’ … And Bob Arum hates Don King. It’s funny they all know I work with Don King and it doesn’t bother any of them because they know I work with everybody else, which is kind of cool.”
Keenan said getting named to the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame is “a pinnacle kind of thing. I was really excited when I got the email the other day that said, ‘Congratulations for getting into the Hall of Fame.’ That email went to a lot of people and a lot of them started sending me messages and calling me, congratulating me, a lot of the media guys I work with.”
Two years ago, Keenan won an award from the Boxing Writers Association of America. He liked it more for the fact he had to share it.
The BWAA has awards such as Fighter of the Year and Manager of the year. “They also have what they call a ‘Good Guy Award,’ which a lot of times goes to PR people like me. I won that. I actually tied with (former heavyweight champion) Wladimir Klitschko. So we were the co-winners. That was cooler than winning it on my own,” he laughed.
He got to enjoy that with his family. He and his wife Jessica, have a son, Eddie, and daughter, Megan, the 2019 Miss Ocean City.
“When I won that BWAA award two years ago, Eddie and Megan came up. They got to talk to everyone. All the fighters were there and famous people. Megan likes that,” he laughed.
Keenan said his grandfather bought a house in Ocean City in 1930 and his father moved to the resort for his last two years of high school and graduated from Ocean City High School in 1949. He is from Haddon Township, but spent his summers in the resort. Like his son, Keenan is a former Ocean City Beach Patrol lifeguard.
When he finally moved to Ocean City in 1993, early in his fledgling career, he rented an apartment next door to his future wife.
He thought back to the day in 1991 when he went to get help on his resume. “If that guy Dave Coskey didn’t poke his head in that moment, none of this would have happened.”