Retired heavyweight great Lennox Lewis believes Wladimir Klitschko’s vast experience will prove too much for Anthony Joshua if the two meet next spring as is a strong possibility. Speaking with Sky Sports News HQ, Lewis said he favours 40-year-old Klitschko to beat 27-year-old Joshua, but only “slightly.”
“I would have to say Wladimir [wins] because of the experience,” Lewis said. “We have seen a lot of Anthony Joshua’s fights but he has knocked out everybody so what has he learned?
“Nigerian Nightmare” Sam Peter returned to the ring this week and hardly anybody noticed. Fighting in Mexico, the former WBC heavyweight champ stopped a 6-9 fighter named Juan Carlos Salas in three rounds. Now 36-3(29) Peter scaled 262-pounds.
Can former champions Juan Manuel Lopez and Wilfredo Vazquez Junior still fight? We may or may not find out tomorrow night when the two meet in a very real and very intense all-Puerto Rican rivalry/grudge-match. Both men are way past what they once were – Juanma suffering some truly X-rated KO defeats over the last two or three years – but the genuine hatred they have for one another just might allow both warriors to raise their game and give fans one final, decent performance.
Eric Molina has been the frontrunner to challenge reigning IBF heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua for a few days now and fans will not be at all surprised to see the Mexican/American in the ring with Joshua in Manchester on Dec 10. Yet so far there has still been no official confirmation from Joshua promoter Eddie Hearn.
Yet the fight is up on BoxRec and it seems we will see Molina tackling the 17-0(17) star next. What kind of a fight will it be? Molina, still judged my a number of people by the loss he suffered to Chris Arreola over four years ago, is sick of telling people he has improved since then, when he was inexperienced and it showed. Stopped in the 1st-round (after stunning Arreola himself with a good shot to the head) Molina has had a tough time making people forget about this defeat, but is Molina, 25-3(19) a different fighter today?
According to the man with all the news, Dan Rafael of ESPN.com, Terence Crawford will likely face John Molina Jnr on December 10 in the unbeaten WBC/WBO 140-pound king’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Crawford, 29-0(20) dominated Viktor Postol in his last ring outing, back in July, taking the WBC belt he now holds along with his WBO.
Molina Jnr, 29-6(23) scored a big win in his last outing, back in June, when he out-pointed Ruslan Provodnikov over 12-rounds. Crawford will enter the ring on Dec 10 as a considerable favourite, but Molina Jnr is never a warrior who can be totally written off. The big news surrounding this match-up, though, is the fact that it will pit a Top Rank fighter against an Al Haymon fighter, without the need for a purse bid.
You can add super-middleweight champ James DeGale to the list of big names who want to fight feared middleweight king Gennady Golovkin. Southpaw DeGale, like GGG a former amateur standout, is the IBF 168-pound champion – and he will next face WBC super-middleweight champ Badou Jack in a big unification fight in January – but he sees GGG moving up one day.
We’ve seen crazy, even unthinkable fights become reality in the sport of boxing, and just recently we’ve seen some shockers come off (see Canelo-Khan and Golovkin-Brook – both fights coming out of nowhere and causing genuine surprise and stun when first announced). But the recent article that appeared suggesting how promoter Bob Arum was seriously thinking about putting Manny Pacquiao in with middleweight king Gennady Golovkin has been totally discredited – by Arum himself.
Shannon “Let’s go, champ” Briggs is still talking about David Haye, although the 44-year-old appears to have lost hope of meeting him in the ring. For any fans that are still interested, Haye verbally agreed to fight Briggs if the former champ was able to get a license to box in the UK and then take a fight and win it on his May under-card. Briggs passed both tests, yet the fight never materialized.
Fans are looking forward to seeing a big welterweight unification showdown next March, thanks to the WBA/WBC unification between Keith Thurman and Danny Garcia being made official for March 4 (venue still to be determined but Barclays in New York a strong possibility) – and we could be in store for a Fight of The Year candidate. You know, the kind WBA welter champ Keith Thurman has already given us.
Thurman, 27-0(22) boxed just once this year, but he sure gave us an epic when he did fight; he and Shawn Porter giving us a thriller in June. Now, against Garcia – also unbeaten, at 32-0(18) – Thurman can be relied upon to thrill us all again. “One Time” will not have a tune-up ahead of the March clash, unlike like Garcia (who will face huge underdog Samuel Vargas in a Philly “homecoming” next month) but most people see the upcoming fight as a 50-50 affair.
Wladimir Klitschko wants it to be known that he is not finished yet, not by a long shot. Though the former heavyweight king is currently injured (a minor injury forcing his planned Dec 10 challenge of IBF ruler Anthony Joshua to be delayed until next spring some time) and has already been idle for a longer period of time than ever before in his career, Klitschko says there are “big spectacular fights left in me yet.”