Meet Mike Esiobu, entrepreneur, podcaster and boxer with a one-in-a-million backstory

It seems like pure fantasy to believe someone who turned pro around the age of 30 could go anywhere in boxing.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine that a wide receiver from tiny Lakeland University could get a look in the NFL.

Or even that a Nigerian-born child who grew up in Chicago and returned to Nigeria for boarding school would get to Lakeland in the first place.

So forgive Mike Esiobu for dreaming.

Little about his life has been conventional. Why should his future be?

“I don't have, like, the cocky ambitions,” said Esiobu, leaned back on a worn couch in a gritty Riverwest gym that evokes the Golden Age.

“Do I think I'm championship level right now? No. But do I think I can get there? Yeah, I think you have to be somewhat delusional, in a sense, especially in this sport, to feel like you can get there.”

Here’s the other thing, though.

Getting there really isn’t Esiobu’s goal.

Boxing was a fresh challenge for former football player Mike Esiobu

His goals when he started his boxing journey were to get himself back into shape, to give himself a physically competitive outlet, to challenge himself and to be part of a community, to help build that community – the boxing community – in Milwaukee.

Which brings us to Sunday afternoon and another throwback venue, Turner Hall. Esiobu’s second pro fight is one of five on the first card co-promoted by Otto Ohlsson, the owner of Dropout Fight Club and Esiobu’s mentor, along with Jim Boone of Badger Boxing.

Although the lineup has changed several times, as is often the case in boxing, the event includes six-rounders with Milwaukee’s two top pros, middleweight Rolando “Nano” Vargas (9-1) and super featherweight Javier Zamarron (5-0). Esiobu (1-0) is scheduled for a four-round match against an opponent to be determined after Cayman Audie (2-1) backed out this week due to injury,

Besides their relationship as teacher and student, Ohlsson and Esiobu share the goal of cultivating the sport. If it were up to Ohlsson, the center would be Dropout, the no-pretense, judgment-free gym on East Keefe Avenue he opened during the heat of the COVID pandemic.

But this is about Esiobu, the former football player, entrepreneur and podcaster with the one-in-a-million backstory.

Esiobu grew up in Chicago but considers Nigeria his homeland

“Born in Nigeria, I moved to Chicago when I was like 5, throughout Chicago elementary school, then went back to Nigeria for boarding school,” Esiobu said, summarizing the better part of two decades in two dozen words.

His father, Emmanuel, was an architecture student at the University of Chicago and would split time in Nigeria, where his three boys were born. When he gained U.S. citizenship, he brought his family to the Windy City, where they lived in subsidized housing in a “roughish” neighborhood.

“Brothers get into trouble, me getting in trouble and stuff like that in Chicago ... they wanted us to go to Nigeria,” Esiobu said of his formative years and his parents’ plans. “A lot of our friends in Chicago were getting shot or dying and stuff like that. So one, just to stay out of trouble, and to just to kind of get more root into what our culture was too.”

Esiobu has dual citizenship.

“Because I left Nigeria when I was 5 … my parents were Nigerian to the core, (but) sometimes you kind of lose thought of, like, where you're from, and like being embarrassed to be from Africa,” he continued. “So going back, the boarding school kind of gave me that like that proudness of being where I'm from.”

From Nigeria and Chicago to Lakeland to NFL training camps to business to boxing

Once back in the U.S., Esiobu went to community college for a year and then settled on Lakeland, a 3,300-student private liberal arts school 12 miles northwest of Sheboygan, where he had a chance to play football.

“Didn't really start my first two years at all and thought about quitting too, but I just was the person that if there's people working hard I want to work harder than those people,” Esiobu said. “So I just put in the work and paid attention to like the fine details of things and just never really gave up.”

As a junior Esiobu caught 33 passes for 563 yards and six touchdowns, and as a senior he had 56 catches for 792 yards and seven TDs.

Esiobu, who graduated in 2016 with a degree in business management, still isn’t sure how video got into the hands of the New York Giants, but he did get a look in ’17 and then another in ’18 with the San Francisco 49ers.

“Definitely a big jump,” Esiobu said. “Yeah, Eli Manning, Odell (Beckham Jr.) and all that stuff was crazy.…

“That whole year (after being cut) I just worked out and I got way better and went in there. I was doing really good, ended up getting hurt, but I still knew at that point I can hang with these guys that have been doing football their whole lives.

“So it's kind of the same thing with boxing where I've gone in with Nano Vargas sparring. Beat my ass for, like, four rounds straight. I knows that’s a really good boxer, but the thing (about) getting in there with people like him is being able to hang with people like him and not give up, not going down, and him even giving me words of encouragement.”

The football experience also gave Esiobu confidence outside athletics.

When his 9-to-5 business development job was eliminated, he used his severance to launch a digital marketing agency, Revine Media. Then Esiobu partnered in a clothing company, Unfinished Legacy, and subsequently the Crash Test Dummies podcast, which he said is the business that requires the most of his hands-on attention.

Embedded content: https://www.instagram.com/mike.esiobu/?hl=en

The journey is the destination in boxing for Mike Esiobu

Esiobu had some interest in boxing and mixed martial arts while growing up but didn’t have an outlet to explore them when he was younger.

After moving to Milwaukee, he became aware of Dropout through some non-sanctioned fight nights Ohlsson held and finally joined the gym. Working with Ohlsson and other coaches, he dropped 30 pounds, won his class in the state Golden Gloves competition – albeit fighting only one match – and then turned pro.

Esiobu doesn’t buy into the idea that a dangerous sport could divert his attention from his business pursuits or even put them in jeopardy. Quite the opposite.

“A lot of my job is just me being myself,” Esiobu said. “You've obviously see a lot of the rise in influencer boxing with the Jake Pauls and stuff like that. … Putting myself out there, I don't think boxing is taking away. I think it's adding on to who I am as a person as well.”

With more than 14,000 followers checking out his polished sizzle reels on Instagram as well as a sizable podcast following, Esiobu is in a position to help with Ohlsson’s goals of building the boxing community, and his gym in particular, largely by word of mouth. He’s also in a comfortable position of not needing to succeed to make a living but rather wanting to succeed because he knows he can.

“It would be cool to be a world champion one day and do all these other things, but if that doesn't happen I'm still OK with it,” Esiobu said. “And I'm still gonna go out there and try to win every fight.

“I'm still gonna try to bring more eyeballs this way. Because I do think a lot of people in Milwaukee deserve more shine and what they're doing and like, there's so much talent here.”

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mike Esiobu, entrepreneur, ex-Lakeland athlete, podcaster is pro boxer