Amer Abdallah is the President of MF Pro Boxing, the CEO of Lace Up Promotions and a boxing executive, international sports advisor, promoter, and manager who built his career as an undefeated Kickboxing champion across American boxing and the Middle East. Before any of that, Abdallah spent years in a dojo in Lockport, New York, learning the habits that would later shape how he runs his business. This piece looks at where that discipline came from, and how it still shows up in his decisions today.
Learning Discipline Before Learning the Business
Abdallah started training in traditional Japanese karate at around age eight, at Seishin Kan Karate in Lockport under instructor Ryokichi Katano. By thirteen, he was good enough to represent the United States at the World Karate Championships in Tokyo. Two years later, he won gold at the 1992 Junior Olympics.
“Karate teaches you to respect the process before you ever get to compete,” Abdallah said. “You spend years on fundamentals before anyone lets you near a tournament. That stays with you. It’s the same in boxing. Everybody wants the big fight or the big deal. Nobody wants to sit with the fundamentals long enough to earn it.”
That early training also introduced him to full-contact kickboxing, under New York champion Desmond Price, which set up the competitive path he would follow for the next two decades.
A Father’s Example
Abdallah’s father served as a Colonel in the Jordanian Armed Forces before moving the family to the United States and building a business around several McDonald’s franchises in Lockport. Abdallah has pointed to that transition, from military service to entrepreneurship, as a model for how to operate under pressure.
“My father went from a structured military career to running a business from scratch, in a new country,” Abdallah said. “He didn’t talk about it like it was remarkable. He just did the work every day and with the highest levels of integrity and pride. I didn’t understand it fully as a kid. I understand it a lot better now, running a company that depends on showing up the same way regardless of what challenges lie ahead of me.”
Crossing Borders Early
After high school, Abdallah went to Jordan attending Yarmouk University and competed as part of the first ever Jordanian national kickboxing team. That gave him international competition experience years before he turned professional.
“Many fighters get their first real look at the international side of the sport once they’re already established,” Abdallah said. “I had it in reverse. I was training and competing overseas before I had a professional record. It changed how I saw the sport. It was never just an American business to me and I saw firsthand what the international scene looked like.”
That early exposure to Jordan, and to competing outside the United States, is part of why his later work connecting American boxing with the Middle East felt less like a pivot and more like a continuation.
Building While Still Competing
When Abdallah returned to Western New York, he started teaching kickboxing out of the aerobics room of a small downtown gym, with roughly fifteen to twenty students. That grew into a larger training operation, and by 1999 he had founded Lace Up Promotions. He made his professional debut the following year, against Canadian fighter and UFC star Shawn Tompkins, and kept competing while building the promotion at the same time.
“I was the fighter, the promoter, the trainer, and the gym owner, often all at the same time,” Abdallah said. “I didn’t plan it that way. It just happened because there was work that needed doing and nobody else around to do it the way I wanted it done. Looking back, that’s probably the single biggest reason I understand this business from every angle. I didn’t learn the promotional side after I retired. I learned it while I was still in the trenches.”
What Carried Over
Abdallah retired from professional competition in 2018 with an undefeated 18-0 record and a WKA Cruiserweight World Championship. The habits from that period, discipline from karate, an international outlook from Jordan, and the practical experience of running a gym and a promotion company at once, are still visible in how he approaches his work today.
“None of it was separate,” Abdallah said. “The karate discipline is why I could sit through years of building a promotion company with small shows nobody outside Western New York ever heard of. The time in Jordan is why working internationally never felt foreign to me. My father’s example is why I don’t need the business to be comfortable before I’ll do the work.”
Asked what advice that early path gives him now, working across boxing markets in the United States and the Middle East, Abdallah kept it simple.
“Learn the fundamentals before you chase the result,” he said. “Abrahamd Lincoln said it best – ‘if I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend 4 sharpening my axe’.”
