Former two-division world champion Shakur Stevenson (20-0, 10 KOs) put himself in a position to challenge for a third-division belt with a sixth-round TKO of Shuichiro Yoshino (16-1, 12 KOs) in a non-competitive fight on Saturday night in a WBC lightweight title eliminator at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.
Shakur knocked Yoshino down twice in the fight and likely would have been a lot more times if the referee didn’t stop the contest.
Resembling a more entertaining version of a young Floyd Mayweather Jr, Shakur picked apart the previously unbeaten Yoshino, taking advantage of his lack of speed & athleticism.
The referee Allen Huggins decided he’d seen enough of the spectacular and stepped in and stopped the fight at 1:35 in the sixth round.
What led to the stoppage was Shakur landed a thudding left to the head of Yoshino in the sixth. The shot snapped Yoshino’s head around to the side.
With the victory, Haney is now the WBC mandatory to undisputed lightweight champion Devin Haney. It’s questionable whether Haney will bother fighting Shakur, however, because he’s got a fight on May 20th against Vasily Lomachenko.
If Haney wins that, which many feel he will, he’s already said that he wants to fight the April 22nd Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis vs. Ryan Garcia fight winner. If they don’t wish to fight Haney, he’ll likely vacate his lightweight titles and move up to 140.
Jared Anderson stops George Arias
In the chief support bout tonight, heavyweight contender Jared Anderson (14-0, 14 KOs) battered George Arias (18-1, 7 KOs) at will to get a corner stoppage at the end of the third round. The fight was as one-sided as the main event.
Anderson, 23, was throwing nonstop combinations to the head and body of Arias and seemingly oblivious to anything thrown back at him.
Indeed, Anderson was willing to take whatever shots Arias wanted to land to keep hitting him. He obviously understood that Arias had very little power and wasn’t a threat to hurting him with anything that he threw.
Anderson won’t be able to continue fighting the way he does when he goes up against heavyweights with power like Deontay Wilder and Joe Joyce.
Keyshawn Davis TKOs Anthony Yigit
Lightweight Keyshawn Davis (8-0, 5 KOs) stopped Anthony Yigit (26-3-1, 10 KOs) in the ninth round in a referee’s stoppage.
Davis abandoned his normal slow approach to his fighting by putting his foot on the gas pedal early, losing up on everything he threw to try and bang Yigit out of there.
Yigit was landing shots, but he had no power to speak of. In the ninth, the referee Benjy Estevez decided to halt thee fight after watching Yigit eat a handful of heavy shots from Davis without throwing anything back.
