For fans of combat sports, it might sound like a bucket list. For Kenyun Mazique, it’s just another day at his UCA internship. Here’s what Kenyun is doing: assisting a boxing manager who’s managed world-champion boxers, assisting his dad — Brian Mazique — as a sports media journalist, helping develop a WWE 2K video game, and creating sports-related video content for his YouTube channel, K1 The Collector.
A crown jewel of Kenyun’s internship will be a fight week he’ll be covering in December in Florida. The boxing manager he works with, Peter Kahn, will be managing Xander Zayas, a highly-rated boxing prospect fighting at the event.
“I’ll be with Peter and Xander a lot, I’ll be covering the event, helping my dad write about it. I’ll also be doing videography. I’ll probably be ringside, getting footage, getting pictures. I’ll also be interviewing fighters,” Kenyun said.
On the game development front, Kenyun is helping his dad work on WWE 2K development, a series of popular WWE wrestling video games.
“I help put data into the game, so that’s been cool because I’ve put data in and worked on it, and then I go to turn on the game and look and say, ‘I did that, I made that.’” Kenyun said, referring to a specific card-collecting part of WWE 2K called “My Faction” that he’s helped design.
The coolest thing Kenyun has done: Being around professional fighters regularly is the highlight, Kenyun said, especially as a young Black man.
The hardest thing about the internship: “The sudden sense of responsibility” has been something Kenyun’s had to acclimate to. “I have places I need to be. Freedom makes things more difficult sometimes,” he said.