WBO World Middleweight Champion Andy Lee has told challenger Billy Joe Saunders he has the punch to end his dreams.
Lee defends his title against Saunders this Saturday night (19th December) at the Manchester Arena, exclusively live on BoxNation, in the mouthwatering showdown that has got divided the fight trade.
World title challenger Billy Joe Saunders has blasted arch nemesis Chris Eubank Jr saying he is a “phony” who is not at world level.
The 26-year-old from Hatfield, who takes on WBO champion Andy Lee this Saturday night, exclusively live on BoxNation from the Manchester Arena, has said he was left unimpressed with Eubank Jr’s win and that he will fall short if he takes on the best around.
The World Boxing Council, with the full cooperation of all interested parties, proudly announces the status of its Middleweight division. Upon the joint request of WBC Middleweight World Champion Saul Alvarez and WBC Middleweight Interim Champion Gennady Golovkin and their corresponding promotional companies, Golden Boy Promotions and K2 Promotions, the WBC has ruled as set forth below.
In a recent interview, the Ukrainian featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko (5-1-0) stated that he is not at all interested in talking about Guillermo Rigondeaux (16-0-0), but is instead interested in fighting Mexico’s Leo Santa Cruz (31-0-1).
Rigondeaux, with every fight he slowly nails his own career shut. One by one, his fights prove to be less and less exciting, and this kind of lackluster event has no monetary value to most. All this aside, he is an exceptional technical fighter, accumulating victories one after another seemingly without much effort.
This past Saturday night at the AT & T Center in San Anonio, Heavyweight Travis Kauffman (30-2, 22 KO’s) and former two-time world title challenger Chris Arreola engaged in a action packed bout that saw Arreola get a dubious split decision by scores 114-113 twice for Arreola and 114-113 for Kauffman.
Most accounts of the fight had Kauffman getting the decision, which included PBC ringside scorer Steve Farhood.
When Tyson Fury (25-0-0) defied most odds and came out victorious against Wladimir Klitschko (64-4-0) on November 28th in Düsseldorf, Germany, there were some assumptions and expectations from the boxing community. One of them was that Fury and Klitschko meet again in a rematch. The other one was that Fury would be a different kind of champion, fighting more often and facing anyone and everyone. This appears to be not the case. Right after his victory, Fury stated that he is not interested in fighting Deontay Wilder (35-0-0), because Wilder is simply not a champion fight material, despite his unblemished record and a 97% KO rate.
As a scribe of the sport for over a decade and a fan for many more, what we witnessed this past Saturday qualified as one of the most troubling moments I’ve ever personally witnessed. In the aftermath, I sat quietly and analyzed all the rhetoric online from a mass of fans who felt they had the answer to the question, “why” (does Roy Jones continue to fight)? The overwhelming response of course was harsh condemnation. “Maybe he needs the money”…..”He’s gotta be broke”….yada, yada, yada. Neither of those possibilities could be proven, but going deeper in thought, revealed an answer that probably could.
Nineteen years ago today Riddick Bowe and Andrew Golota fought a rematch in Atlantic City, New Jersey in one of the most brutal and entertaining bouts in heavyweight history. The fight isn’t as memorable as ‘The Thrilla in Manila’, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, or the ‘Fight of the Century’, and it isn’t remembered as well as many other magnificent contests that took place during the rich history of the heavyweight division. But the rematch between Bowe and Golota is every bit as brutal and every bit as entertaining as any heavyweight match ever put to film.
I give new British heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua (15-0, 15 KOs) full credit for beating his chubby fellow countryman Dillian Whyte (16-1, 13 KOs) by a 7th round knockout last night in their pay-per-view fight on Sky Box Office, but the win really did nothing to change the perceptions that fans have about Joshua as far as him being slow, robotic and having stamina problems.
The victory also didn’t change the minds of this writer that Joshua is still too robotic to beat a 21st century athlete like WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder or even some of the other top heavyweights in the division. Like I said, I give Joshua full credit for beating Whyte, but honestly that doesn’t mean jack to me.
In front of a packed house at the Sport Palace in the capital of Ukraine, undefeated #1 ranked cruiserweight contender Oleksandr Usyk, (9-0-0, 9KO’s) scored a seventh round stoppage of Pedro “El Reguilete” Rodriguez, 22-2-0 (19KO’s), on Saturday night. Defending his WBO Inter-Continental Cruiserweight Title for the fourth time, Usyk aggressively battled the Cuban from the opening bell, dropping him in the sixth stanza. Following a barrage of punches from the 2012 Olympic Gold Medalist, Rodriguez was sent to the canvas again in the seventh as the fight was waived off.