For many Ghanaians, swapping their professional goals for a sports career can be detrimental, but Sena Agbeko found that it paid off.

Super middleweight Agbeko, who had to deal with the intensity of combining boxing with school, spent five years pursuing a four-year Bachelor of Communications degree at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), according to him, he had to give up his dream of becoming a broadcast journalist to pursue a passion he developed later in life.

“To be forthright, my first love was to become a lawyer, but at the time I was more worried about the tuition costs for that,” Agbeko told BoxingScene. “So instead of going to law school, I thought I’d just do communications because I always wanted to be a broadcast journalist.

“It’s not something you can throw away. It’s something I could continue. I can still continue if I want to, but boxing is one of those things that requires 100 percent focus and attention. And you know the nature of journalism. Yes, you have to, whether you’re doing eight hours or going to locations to record and interview people, and I can’t do that in boxing. It would be impossible and I don’t think I could have gone that far in boxing.”

Boxing was a surprise to Agbeko (28-4, 22 KOs), who was no fan of fighting growing up in Dzorwulu, a suburb of Accra. He was drawn to the sport in 2007 when he watched Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Oscar De La Hoya fight for the WBC junior middleweight championship. A year later, he watched Ghana’s boxing team, the Black Bombers, fight at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“So I think the Olympics that year ended in August and then I started boxing shortly after in 2008,” Agbeko said. “Those two events just gave me the desire to continue boxing.”

Agbeko’s first introduction to boxing was just a few minutes from his home, where he shared close quarters with Ambassador Ray Quarcoo – a boxing administrator and former president of the Ghana Amateur Boxing Federation (GABF). Quarcoo set up a boxing gym in his home, closer to where Agbeko lived.

The brave Agbeko approached Quarcoo’s house and told him he was interested in taking up the sport – a move that forced Quarcoo to prepare the ring so Agbeko and another boxer could begin training.

“It was just me and him and then he hired a coach from Bukom, Suleman Martey, who I still work with today. He’s in Ghana and he was my first coach. When he was hired, he was hired just to train us and I remember it was a long, tough six months of training and begging him to let me fight.

“He kept telling me I wasn’t ready. Then he finally got a bunch of guys from the gym to fight in the Great Accra League on Friday nights.”

Agbeko spent three years as an amateur fighter, winning 60 fights and losing nine between 2008 and 2011. His impressive record earned him a place on the Ghanaian boxing team and was part of the Junior World Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan. However, Agbeko’s hopes of competing in the championships were dashed.

“It was in 2010 and we went to the Junior World Championships in Azerbaijan. I was ready to compete, but I got diseased anyway, so I wasn’t really able to compete.”

In 2011, Agbeko was unable to represent Ghana in the Olympic qualification for the 2012 London Games. His place in the Olympic qualification was offered to a more experienced player, despite having beaten him in the justify-your-inclusion tournament.

Agbeko said Kwasi Ofori Asare, coach of the Ghanaian boxing team, preferred to utilize a fighter who had just won gold at the West African regional boxing tournament because he believed the fighter had a better chance of qualifying for the Olympics. This disappointment forced Agbeko to turn professional.

“I played in the African Gloves Championship and won a gold medal. At that time, the owner of Kpando Heart of Lions (a football club in Ghana), Victor Ahiakpor, saw me at that tournament and decided to manage me if I wanted to turn professional. So I said yes and he helped me turn professional and it’s been that way ever since.”

Agbeko made his professional debut on June 18, 2011, with a second-round technical knockout victory over Cudjoe Darah at the Lebanon House in Accra. He remained undefeated in his first 15 fights in Ghana before moving to the United States in 2014 with the lend a hand of US-based Ghanaian manager Alex Kotey.

Agbeko soon fell out with Kotey and left before making his U.S. debut in a four-round TKO loss to Raymond Gatica at a Banner Promotions event Boxing Tournament series on ESPN.

“At that time, I made a lot of very selfish decisions that affected me because as a newborn guy from Ghana, I wanted to do a lot of things quickly. And at that time, I didn’t really understand it. And I say that because I want the world to understand that Alex Kotey did nothing wrong to me.

“I was the one who wanted so much done quickly that I felt dissatisfied with his plan. So I ended up going my own way, which I later regretted and apologized to him. His plan was to get me into Top Rank. And to do that, he wanted me to fight one of their guys, but the fights weren’t coming right away either.

“And I thought I had to start fighting right away. But he wanted me to take my time, let me get in the system for a while, train really well, and then he brought me into Top Rank and saw how it went.”

Agbeko went into hibernation for three years after the Gatica loss, his inactivity due to a promotional dispute with Banner Promotions.

“I moved to Las Vegas and I was living with Joseph Agbeko (former IBF bantamweight champion). So there were a few instances where we had a lot of fights that kept falling through. People would offer fights, we would take them, and then before we knew it, the fight would get canceled for one reason or another.

“I injured my right hand while training for the fight, and when I was trying to get them to lend a hand me heal it, that’s when I realized that these people might have more sinister plans, because they wouldn’t want me to do this. So I got mad. They wanted to give me a cortisone shot so I could fight. And I thought, how are you going to give me a cortisone shot so I can fight? This is wrong. Like my hand needs real healing.”

After returning with a six-round unanimous decision victory over Timothy Hall Jr. in March 2017, Agbeko had won seven straight fights before losing to Vladimir Shishkin in February 2021. Five months later, he stopped Daniel Yocupicio Mendez in one round and recorded five more victories, including a 10-round unanimous decision over Isaiah Steen.

Agbeko landed a fight for David Morrell Jr.’s secondary WBA super middleweight title after that run last December. The fight was supposed to take place eight months earlier, but Agbeko had licensing issues that forced him to fight Bruno Romay.

Two months after knocking out Romay in the second round last October, Agbeko faced Morrell in his first world title fight, lasting only two rounds against the Cuban.

“That fight got canceled, which was devastating because I had lost so much money preparing for the Morrell fight. And in the months that followed, I was just a broken person because it’s not effortless to deal with things like that. It’s not effortless to train really tough for a fight for months and then people try to insinuate that I had a problem.

“I had to fight to prove that I was fine, when the commission gave me the license, but then it was too delayed by a week and a half because the fight had already taken place. I actually had a test that was done and presented to the commission that showed I was good, and only then did they give me the license.

“When they offered me the fight again, not only was I a broken man, but God knows what they could do. I was prepared for the fight, but the question is, what did he have up his sleeve that they didn’t want to do any drug testing? I’m not saying he cheated, but my question is, if you have nothing to hide, why don’t you want to take a drug test?”

Last week, Agbeko suffered another TKO loss to Cuba’s Osleys Igleys. Despite his ups and downs in his career, Agbeko believes he still has something to offer the sport as he drops down to 160.

“It was a good fight. I prepared as best I could and it just didn’t work out. As a result, I think the guys in the super middleweight division are a little too huge for me. That’s why I made the decision to start my campaign at 160.

“It’s my decision that I’m going to fight, hopefully at the end of this year or early next year, at my novel weight.”