The Latest Boxing News
Former IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan makes it perfectly clear that he doesn’t have even the slightest amount of interest in facing fellow Brit Kell Brook at any time in the future.
Khan sees no upside in such a fight and fears that the boxing public wouldn’t care about the fight and Brook would likely pull out of the fight with an injury excuse anyway. Khan’s main interest is in getting a big fight against WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. next year.
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is saying that former IBF/WBO super bantamweight Nonito Donaire (31-2, 20 KO’s) will be back in the ring in either October or November this year against a still to be determined opponent. It won’t be newly crowned WBC super bantamweight champion Victor Terrazas because he’ll likely be facing newly signed Top Rank fighter Vic Darchinyan.
If Darchinyan wins that fight then Arum would like to match him against Donaire in a rematch in 2014. Donaire stopped Darchinyan in the 5th round in 2007.
Former WBA heavyweight champion David Haye’s scheduled fight with #8 WBC Manuel Charr (23-1, 13 KO’s) is now off after Haye sustained an injury to his hand that will make it necessary for him to rest up so that it can heal. As for Haye’s scheduled fight against Charr on June 29th in Manchester, it’s now off. No word whether Haye wants to still fight Charr once the injury heals.
Haye said to the BBC “I apologize to Manuel Charr and everybody involved in the promotion, but most of all I want to say sorry to the thousands of fans who bought tickets to the fight.”
Haye, 32, has been out of the ring since July last year when he defeated domestic fighter Dereck Chisora by an easy 5th round TKO. The fight too easy and Haye got little out of it.
Mike Stafford, the trainer for Adrien Broner (26-0, 22 KO’s), sees Broner as being a lot stronger in moving up to 147 to face WBA welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi (32-4, 7 KO’s) next month on June 22nd in their fight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Stafford sees this as a good move for Broner, saying to Sports Illustrated “Adrien will be much stronger. Paulie is not a full-fledged 147-pounder, anyway. It would be different if we were fighting a 147-pounder who has been at that weight for years.”
If you ask IBF light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson (31-1-1, 15 KO’s) if he’s worried about what he’s going to be facing this Saturday night when he steps inside the ring to mix it up against the power punching Lucas Matthysse (33-2, 31 KO’s), he’d probably laugh because he has absolutely no fear of Mattysse at all.
Indeed, Peterson is so confident in his ability to take Matthysse’s shots and beat him that it’s hard to believe in him. Peterson looks, talks and acts like a winner.
Floyd Mayweather Jr’s team reportedly gave WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez the option to fight him at 147 lbs. on September 14th if he wants to get the biggest payday of his career. Canelo is only 22-year-old and has no pay per view history behind him to show that he’s a proven money maker.
Canelo’s not shown yet that he’s someone that can make money, and therefore he’s not position to dictate what weight the fight will take place on. Some of Canelo’s fans think Mayweather is ducking the fight with him by asking him to come down to 147 instead of accommodating the 22-year-old by moving up to 154, so that Canelo can make weight and rehydrate to 170+ the night of the fight and enjoy a 20-25 pound weight advantage over Mayweather. When it gets down to it, Canelo’s only chance of beating Mayweather is to use his light heavyweight-sized weight to crush him.
Promoter Eddie Hearn is interested in matching his very lucky fighter WBO lightweight champion Ricky Burns (36-2, 11 KO’s) against former lightweight contender Gavin Rees (37-2-1, 18 KO’s) this coming September. Rees is coming off of a 5th round knockout loss to WBC lightweight champion Adrien Broner last February in a fight where Rees looked terrible in before getting knocked out.
Burns got lucky last Saturday night in beating Jose Gonzalez (22-1, 17 KO’s) in a 9th round stoppage when Gonzalez quit on his stool after the 9th round. Gonzalez said after the fight he didn’t know that he had such a wide lead and that if he knew that he wouldn’t have quit.
#8 WBC Manuel Charr (23-1, 13 KO’s) has a near hopeless dream of getting a rematch against WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko, who made short work of Charr in stopping him in the 4th round last year in September. Charr has it in his head that all he has to do to get another nice paying bout against Vitali is for him to beat David Haye (26-2, 24 KO’s) next month in their fight on June 29th in the Manchester Arena in Manchester, UK.
Charr said to Sky Sports “He’s [Vitali] never fought David Haye and Haye has called him out for three years now. Vitali said he wanted to knock him out, shut him up and all this other rubbish, but he never did anything about it. The fight has never happened. I won’t let Vitali do the same to me. I want my rematch and to get it I have to knockout David Haye on June 29th.”
Eddie Hearn has ruled out what would be a lucrative fight between his fighter IBF super middleweight champion Carl Froch and 48-year-old IBF light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins this year in September. Hearn doesn’t want Froch to be fighting guys that are slightly bigger than him like Hopkins because he sees it as putting Froch in a difficult position.
Hearn said this to Sky Sports News “It’s flattering [that Hopkins wants to fight Froch]. Hopkins understands the value of a fight with Froch, but I don’t think Carl needs a fight at a catchweight…he’d be at a big disadvantage.”
Manny Pacquiao (54-5-2, 38 KO’s) hasn’t had an easy fight since his one-sided 12 round unanimous decision win over a completely shot Shane Mosley two years ago in May, 2011. Since that fight, Pacquiao has gone downhill himself and looked bad in his two fights against Juan Manuel Marquez and his fight with Tim Bradley.
Pacquiao lost two of those fights, but you can make strong argument that he deserved to lose three of them because his win over Marquez in November 2011 was a controversial one. Pacquiao now will be fighting Brandon Rios (31-1-1, 23 KO’s) on November 24th in Macau, China.