"I'm Fighting For All The Jews Who Have No Voice"
Jews Of The Universe: Introducing Cletus Seldin
“The first thing that happens when you walk into a boxing gym is you realize nobody cares what color you are, or what religion. It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, white, Black, Asian – not one bit. It changes your mindset and your day in the gym. Because if you box from a place of pure aggression, you will be a failure in the boxing ring. You’re here to learn and teach, and these people become your family. I see these people more than I see anybody else. And you never know who’s going to show up, which is great and something most people don’t get to experience in their lives. In an office job, you can work with the same people for years on end.”
“I come from a long line of tough Jews. My grandfather Leon was in a Brooklyn motorcycle gang called the Dragons. He always carried a gun. He was a mechanic who could build or fix anything.
My father grew up in the projects of Bed-Stuy and people called him ‘Ironman Harry.’ He was arrested the day before graduating high school. So he was in jail on that Friday, graduated on Saturday, and took off with the Merchant Marines on Sunday, all on the same weekend. In the 1970s that was a regular thing: go on a ship, travel the world, come home, get married, get divorced three times.
My father operated a tow truck and in time he had his own towing business. He’s a very tough man who takes no bullshit from anyone. He wakes up every day and prays for 20 or 30 minutes in front of his kitchen window. It’s his thing, he loves it. He reads from his book that looks like it’s been through its own war. He prays in Hebrew before bed and before every meal he eats. He prays for everybody and once you’re in his Book of Life, you’re in. And once you’re out, you are out.”
“I always loved sports. I was the state champion in wrestling. I did bodybuilding. I held a New York State deadlifting record of 470 pounds when I weighed just 145. Football is my real passion, but I was just too small.
When I went to high school, there were only about 10 Jews out of around 4000 kids. I remember growing up, when somebody said something about Jews, I could never really defend myself. It wasn’t until I found boxing that I felt like I had a voice.
One of my best friends as a kid: his family was German. And I remember looking through his family photo album and seeing him at a backyard party with his folks. His hair was buzzed and there was a Nazi symbol shaved into the back of his head. As a kid of ten or eleven, I knew that was wrong but I didn’t say anything.
I could never say anything when people trash-talked Jews, when they said, Don’t act like a Jew. Don’t be cheap like a Jew. What was I gonna say? I had no one to back me or protect me. In high school, I was 97 pounds. So during that entire chapter of my life, I was silenced.”
“I didn’t have the greatest upbringing. My parents couldn’t help me with school. My mother suffers from bipolar disorder and she’s also a hoarder. And when she was growing up, no one knew what that was either, so she didn’t get any of the help she needed. She was also in a bad car accident when I was a kid, and her back was broken.
So growing up, it was very tough. I’m not in boxing because I came from a nice beautiful Jewish background. The money my father made, he gave to his brother to hold onto for him and his brother never gave it back. So in the 90s, we were living the same kind of life that my father was living as the son of immigrants in the 50s.
So anyway, I wanted to go to college and make something of myself, and I knew I had these documents from high school saying I was emotionally disturbed, and I brought them to a doctor so I could get something for that. And I got something called Adderall. And because of Adderall, I was able go to Suffolk Community College.”
“How I started boxing is: my brother got me into this MMA [mixed martial arts] school but then it closed down, and I heard about a community boxing gym three miles down the road. For only $150, you could get a yearly membership. Show up there, day one, boom, they make you spar. There’s about 30 teenagers and adults there, every color but white, and you gotta go in there and go to work with their top guys in whatever weight class you’re in.
So these guys beat the hell outta me. I don’t have my own gear at the time. You had to have your own head gear, mouthpiece, gloves. I had my mouthpiece there from the other gym, but I remember there was this jar full of mouthpieces, and all the kids wanted to box so bad that they put their hands in there and they’d grab a mouthpiece that had just been in somebody else’s mouth. This gym was in Mastic Beach, Shirley. It’s as blue-collar a neighborhood as you’ll ever find. These guys were all mechanics and plumbers and their dreams were to join the military. And once you’re in that town, you really don’t get out of it. But that’s how bad that gym was, and these kids beat the hell out of me.
I remember thinking, okay, I gotta go back home and get my own equipment – because I was working at Lowe’s and pushing shopping carts – and I got equipment, headgear, boom, and I went back. Don’t get me wrong, I was scared, I was demoralized and discouraged but I think because of the $150 I gave them, I was gonna get my money’s worth of beatdowns.
And the gym does that on purpose so they don’t waste their time. So if you go and they beat you up a little bit, and you don’t come back, then it’s not worth it for them to put years of effort into you.
So I get my own equipment and come back. And again, I’m the only white guy there. And within that year, I noticed those other guys — since they’ve been boxing all their lives since they were 7 or 8, and I started boxing at 22 — those guys only showed up 2 or 3 days a week. I started showing up 5 days a week and then 7 days a week. And then I’d show up twice a day.
I was so obsessed with becoming a better boxer and never being embarrassed, and within that year, I started beating the guys who had been there all those years. And a year after that, I was boxing with the pros and I was knocking them down. And then they started coaching me and I noticed in boxing that you don’t have to be the most talented, you’ve just got to outwork everybody else and learn the talent along the way.”
“When I was an amateur, I didn’t speak to anybody, ever. People thought I was deaf because I never spoke. I just kept to myself, put a mean face on, went to the tournaments. Everyone thought I was a deaf kid. That’s how shy I was.
When I wanted to go professional after boxing as an amateur, I met a gentleman by the name of Pete Brodsky. He used to run this gym here [the Westbury Boxing Club] and at one point, he had around 15 professional fighters in one gym. Pete Brodsky changed the lives of hundreds of people in this boxing gym alone. He used to say that boxing cost him two marriages because he was so obsessed with getting it right. His good friend was Ed Gersh. Ed was wealthy – he was the money guy. He was very popular in Huntington; he owned this out-of-this-world summer camp like in the movies.
So when I wanted to go pro, I went down to Florida to meet Pete and Ed and go through a training with them to see if I was worth their time. After the sparring sessions were over that week, I sat down with Ed – who was worth hundreds of millions at the time – and he asked me, so what do you wanna do? I told him I wanted to go to school and I wanted to box, and he said, No. You pick one or the other. You can’t do both. You want to be good at something, you gotta be all in. So I said, I want to be a boxer then.
Pete and Ed became my managers. They were so big on the Jewish heritage, and their dream was to find a Jewish boxer from the beginning, raise him up, and make him a world champion.
Pete would take me to the gym, every single day, and he would speak to me for hours and hours and hours. And I would just sit there. He would talk about boxing, his life, his wife. He would ask me how something made me feel, or what my thoughts were. So I would have to actually listen and answer. And over the years, I got more communicative.
Pete has nine lives and he has two lives left, maybe. He broke his neck twice. He got kicked down the stairs and broke his neck, then he fell off a house while power washing and broke his neck again. He would wear a fentanyl patch on his right shoulder and one time he had it on the wrong shoulder. So then he woke up in the middle of the night, in pain and still half asleep, and when he didn’t see a patch in the usual spot, he put on a second patch and overdosed. But he survived. Another time, he’s driving home from a card game, and someone runs him off the road, tries to rob him and hits him in the head with a lead pipe. The guy has nine lives. And I’ve only told you about three or four.
Pete’s as Jewish as it gets. He fought in the Maccabi Games and he was so proud of that. He wasn’t a great fighter; he was below average, but he wanted to show that Jews are tough. As a professional fighter, in his debut or second fight, the other fighter came over and said – right in front of the referee – I’m gonna kill that fuckin’ kike, and that was one of the few fights Pete won, or maybe even the only one he won. Because he came from the same kind of background I came from, where we weren’t allowed to speak up for ourselves as Jews.
My fourth fight was at Madison Square Garden on HBO Boxing and one of the announcers was a Jewish guy. I was fighting on the undercard so I go out there in the first fight of the night, and boom, I knock the other guy down, knock him out. That announcer gets excited. He goes, “That’s a Jew in the ring! That’s a Jew!” I go right up to him, fist-bump him, and I was like, okay. Let’s roll!
Then I fought in Brighton Beach, and I thought: this is my passion. On Box Record, it’ll say I’m from Brooklyn because Pete Brodsky believed I could get more fights if I was a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. So Pete and Ed, they set me up in an interview with Algemeiner; they did their job so that when people say The Hebrew Hammer, they’re not talking about a baseball player, they’re talking about me.”
“So I came back to New York and signed a contract to be a professional boxer. So now I’ve got the adult ADHD medication, Vyvanse, and I understand the importance of taking it every day, and I have the backing of these two men and I’m going to a training camp. I don’t know of too many professional fighters that start out on day one and get sent to a training camp unless they’ve been an Olympian. And I knew that I was different from everybody else; I was a Jewish kid from Long Island that could punch really hard.
So I went down there and they taught me the styles of old-school boxing: how to use my leverage and power as my strength, compared to somebody who would be speedy and more technical and dance around like Muhammad Ali. I’m a Joe Frazier type of fighter, I’m in your face, because I was always taught the closer you are, the safer you are. So everyone always sees me coming forward and they think I’m doing it out of aggression, but I’m just trying to stay safe. Other people won by scoring points; I won by knocking people out.”
“My father’s the one who lit that Jewish fire inside me. And it took me a while to see it for what it was. As a kid, I didn’t know why I was running around like a maniac on the sports field. It wasn’t until I became a professional boxer that I realized: oh, that’s what it is. The fact that I refuse to lose, I will do anything to win, and I’ll never give up no matter what it costs me. Especially being late to the sport, these guys are way more talented than you, but your fire and your tenacity and your determination is what drives you into that next realm where you can beat these national champions, you can beat these guys who have professional ranks and come from generations of boxers. Once I identified the source of that drive, I said: oh, I’m not doing this for me, I’m fighting for all the Jewish people who have no voice, who cannot speak.
The greatest thing about my sport over any other sport is: in the NFL, the NBA, the MLB, you can’t represent who you are on the field. Most of them can’t represent who they are off the field. But I have the Star of David on my trunks. I have Remember The Masada on the back of my jacket. Even at my amateur matches, they started calling me the Hebrew Hammer. I’m in there representing an entire tribe.”
“Now I haven’t won the World Championship… yet. Ed Gersh passed away in 2014; he was 97. I’ve been ranked fourth in the world, I’ve won WBC International Silver titles, I’ve won WBA International titles. I have three belts at my house. But I still want that World Championship belt. I’m 38 years old now and still showing up at the boxing gym every day. These guys who started at five, six, seven or eight years old – they’ve been hit in the head so many times that by the time they’re somewhere between 22 and 27, they’re done. But because I didn’t even start boxing until 22 -- I still have the same career length as they do, but it’s just pushed back later. I’m in the fourth quarter of my career, and I keep saying that’s when the winning happens. Right now, I’m kind of stuck between two lives. I can’t leave the boxing life yet and move on to the future me.
I’ve only lost one fight in my life. That was in Canada, at a time when I fought in 3 fights inside of 11 weeks. I fought at the end of September, November and December. One was here on Long Island, the next was at Nassau Coliseum on HBO, and then the third one was on HBO again. When they called me for that last one, they said I would be only the third person in boxing history to fight in back-to-back months on HBO. Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. were the only fighters ever to do that before me. So I said absolutely, I’m in.
I didn’t know at the time that in my second fight, I injured my elbow. When I went to train for another ten-round fight, I couldn’t do pushups. If I went for a run, I had to take a day off. If we sparred, I had to take two days off. My body was so beaten down. But because HBO called and offered me $250,000 to fight, I had no choice but to say yes. (Of course, by the time everybody — the promoter, the manager and Uncle Sam — took their cut, I only got like one quarter of that.)
When we fought, they gave us the biggest ring. It’s an Olympic-size ring. And the other fighter is one of their best Olympians of all time. And he outscores points off of me… I tell people all the time: if I had a handful of rocks, I wouldn’t’ve been able to hit him. He was just that fast, that elusive, and I was so beat up that I went from being HBO’s #1 guy one month to being the joke of the entire sport the next.
Someone wrote me an article and put me down as #10 of all-time HBO boxing fails. They said HBO put too much money into me. I tried to block all that noise out of my head because I put my life on the line, I risked everything. I should’ve never been in that fight. The mistake I made was not getting an MRI. If I got an MRI and the doctor said I shouldn’t fight, I wouldn’t’ve fought. But I didn’t.
I got knocked down the first round, the second round, the third round. I kept getting up. I tried to fight every round. I wanted to give whatever I had, and I wanted to leave standing. And at that point, honestly – if you kill me in boxing, it’s a blessing. You can’t go from something that gave you a voice, at the top of everything, to the point where I’m going to have it all taken away from me.”
“So from 2017 to 2020, I had to grind, and then in 2022, keep on grinding, and get out of a promotional contract that held me up for years. My girlfriend at the time, Jessica – who is now my wife – she knew that I needed Grant Boxing Gloves. Those are thousand-dollar gloves made by a man named Elvis Grant. They’re very protective of your hands. And they’re exclusive; you can’t really buy them. Floyd Mayweather, Mike Tyson, Jake Paul: none of those guys fight without this man’s gloves.
So Jessica messaged Elvis Grant on Instagram from my account, asking for these boxing gloves for a fight. And he said: yeah, I can get you some gloves, no problem! And hey -- how’s your career going? I remember meeting you at Nassau Coliseum when you fought on HBO.
So I told him my story. And then he asked, “What would you think about signing a managerial contract with me?”
And I was like, oh my God, this is too good to be true.
Elvis Grant wanted to manage me. I didn’t even know he was a manager and a trainer. But that meant I’d be locked into a contract with him for four years, and I just got out of a contract and that means I have to give up a certain percentage of my earnings to him for the work he’s gonna do. And I don’t want to give up anything like that, because I know what I am: I am a 26-and-1 Jewish kid from New York who can punch.
But after sitting down and getting to know him, seeing that his outfit is a small business that treats everyone like family, I was like: we are going to do this. One of the reasons I signed with him was: we had a conversation on video, and in that conversation, we talked about Ed Gersh. And Elvis pulls out a book, opens it up, and he shows me a picture of Ed Gersh in the book. And Elvis — who couldn’t’ve been more than 13 years old — is sitting right behind him. And I said: oh my God. It’s like destiny. Elvis was supposed to be in school, but he’d cut class all the time and go to Gleason’s Gym, and he’s sitting there and Ed Gersh is right in front of him.
So I came under his management and he got me a fight in Madison Square Garden and life went from being way down to being back up. Elvis changed my life; he’s my new Pete Brodsky. From that fight I had in October to the fight on March 15th, I went from being an unranked fighter to 8th in the world, and a professional boxer once again. 28-and-1, with 23 knockouts. So he brought me back from the death I was in with boxing. And hopefully I fight for the World Championship at a higher weight class later this year.”
“When I fought in October, I fought a guy just like me. Built like a tank. I’d just gotten out of a promotional contract for two years. I had to borrow money from people all over the place to pay him off. All I had left was boxing. And I fought this guy – I might have lost a year or two off my life from that fight. Because it was such a tough fight. He was built like me and he could punch and he fought very, very tough, to the point where I thought that he was on cocaine, because he would be knocked down and he kept coming back. But I was so determined, no matter how many times I got hit, to keep coming forward. I said: there is no way I’m leaving here without winning this fight.
And that’s how it’s been. I’ve never been treated like a top-tier guy. I’m always the underdog, fighting my way up, to prove myself in the sport. In that October fight, I won and you can see in that fight that I was willing to sacrifice my life for it. I went to the hospital afterwards.
That was the first fight where Elvis watched me. And he said, Well, you’re not gonna fight like that anymore. That’s not how you fight, Cletus. If you fight like that, I will not be in contract with you. Because that was a tough man’s fight: pure heart and determination. The coaching that I had from Pete Brodsky is different from the coaching I get now.
The way that Pete coached was very simple and meaningful, and when he spoke to you, it was felt. When I am working with a client in boxing, I speak to them like Pete Brodsky would speak to me. Slow. In your ear. Know that you can do it. Go out there.
He’d sit there and go: All right… deep breath… he saw your one-two this round… now show him your hook… got it, kid?... boom.
Even though I have other trainers now, I still hear Pete whispering in my ear. He comes up behind me and goes: Okay. Breathe. And relax. Get all that tension out of your arms. All right… so for the next round… you’re gonna move to your right… stay low… counter his jab with your right… breathe… you got it, kid? All right. Give him hell.
I don’t know what it is. He has this raspy, slow voice. He had to sub in for me in 2020 when I fought at the Barclays Center. Scott, my trainer here, got Covid so Pete had to fly up here. Pete hadn’t worked with me in an entire year, but when you put that man in a boxing ring, he knows what to do.
He comes in, boom, after each round he’s telling me what to do. He’s got it, and boom, we win the fight, just like that. Barclays Center, main event, took the fight on 13 days’ notice.
I talked to him yesterday and he says: Cletus! I got a letter here, from the Jewish Boxing Hall of Fame. They’re inducting you in 2025.
I say: Really? Why’d they send it to you?
He says: I don’t know, kid.”
“After winning again this past March, I proposed to Jessica in the ring at Madison Square Garden. We were married five months later. She’s a brilliant woman and with her, I have everything I want in a relationship. When she first touched me, it was like she was bringing a broken man back to life.
Her mother passed away when she was 14. I never thought I would meet a girl that came from the same background as me, so I would always have a little bit of jealousy, and I’d be like: you think you’ve had a hard life? You have no idea what it is to have a hard life. I grew up in a place way worse that that. I’d say, what are you complaining about? So they could never complain about anything.
But Jessica lost her mother at 14 years old. To cancer. And right across the street from this gym is where she’s buried. She was a preschool teacher at a Jewish school. And the first time Jessica told me that, I knew that I could never, ever tell her that she doesn’t know how life is. She lost her mother on January 4th. While all the other kids went home for winter break and then came back to school and told the other kids how great their Christmas was, Jessica had to sit there and watch her mom die. So I knew right then there was no way in hell I would ever compare my life to hers.”
“About 10 years ago, this psychic felt like she had to get in touch with me. I didn’t call her, didn’t know her, but her friend told me I had to meet with her. This friend was an acupuncturist and I ran by his office every day.
Now, the acupuncturist, I knew. I’d been going to him for over a decade.
The psychic had visions of me running past the acupuncturist’s office, and she called him and said, “I need to talk with this Cletus.” We meet at the acupuncturist’s office and this woman says: I can’t stop having thoughts of you in my head. I don’t know who you are, but you are going to become a world champion in boxing.
I ask her if this is going to be at my current weight class. She says no, it’s going to be at a higher weight class, and it’s going to be in Vegas. So I fight super lightweight and the next weight class is welterweight.
All right, now fast forward 10 years, to last month. Elvis Grant calls me up and says, “What do you think about fighting for the World Championship at 147 pounds?” He didn’t know about the psychic. So I’m thinking this is just unbelievable. Hopefully it happens. For me to get offered a shot at the World Championship while being ranked 8th in the world is not really heard of, and for it to even be a conversation is everything I could possibly dream of. The odds are going to be 100% against me, one million-to-one odds. But if it happens, I’m gonna win that fight.”
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Brilliant article! I like this New York Jew and his winning mentality. I watch boxing and am glad to see someone representing us in that sport as well as he has done. Fight on!
Incredible. Thank you for this amazing story.
As a tall skinny Akron kid, basketball was what we did. But later high school and after, Muhammad Ali galvanized the world, and me. His induction refusal motivated lots of us, and my high Draft number in The Last Draft kept me from dying in Vietnam. Back then it was pay-for-view since going was prohibitively expensive.
I met Muhammad years later, as a curator returning a lifesize painting of him borrowed for an exhibition.
Thank you.