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TAPIA DOCUMENTARY Debuts TONIGHT on HBO
In a purely boxing sense, Johnny Tapia’s greatest victory was his July 18, 1997, points nod over fellow Albuquerque fighter Danny Romero. His worst defeat would have to be the first fight he ever lost as a pro, to Paulie Ayala on June 26, 1999, a somewhat controversial decision which was replicated, and even more hotly disputed, in their rematch on Oct. 7, 2000.
But many boxers understand that the toughest fights don’t always take place in the ring. Life on the street can be daunting, and even more so when daily battles continue inside someone’s mind, against unseen demons that intrude with such regularity that they become so much harder to conquer than any flesh-and-blood human being in the opposite corner.
As a fighter, Johnny Tapia was so driven that he could not abide even the notion of defeat. As a child and then as a man, he could not escape the memory of the murder/rape of his mother, a traumatic event which so tortured him that he sought relief from cocaine, which only worked until he required the next high that would again allow him to escape from reality.
In “Tapia,” which makes its debut Tuesday (TONIGHT) at 11 p.m. EST on HBO, viewers again see the many sides of Johnny Tapia, a five-time world champion in three weight classes who was just 45 when his tortured heart finally gave out on May 27, 2012. In 60 compelling minutes, during which Tapia and his steadfast manager-wife, Teresa, tell their stories of public triumph and personal tragedy, viewers will come to understand, as much as possible, the forces that prompted one man’s frequent journeys to hell and back. The good Johnny – devoted husband, loving father of three sons, fierce competitor inside the ropes – was a fleeting presence in the lives of those he cared about, often replaced by a drug-addled stranger whose addiction proved stronger than the more admirable shadings of his nature.
“I was a broken puzzle, ready to be fixed,” Tapia, his voice anguished, says of Teresa’s refusal to give up on him, when arguably the sensible and prudent thing would have been for her to run away as far and as fast as she could. “I have put her through hell more than anybody. She went through all the downs I went through, and she went through all the ups that I had. She should have left a long time ago, but she knew that there was a better Johnny in me.”
Perhaps that “better Johnny” would have emerged sooner, and to stay, had his mom, Virginia Tapia Gallegos, decided not to go dancing one fateful night in May 1975. Just eight years old, her son had a premonition that something terrible might happen.
“It was a Friday afternoon,” Tapia recalled. “My momma said that I was going to my grandma’s house ’cause she was going to go dancing. She liked to go dancing on Fridays and Saturdays. I didn’t want her to go. I begged her not to go. And she never came back. “They found some of her jewelry. About three days later, they said she was in the hospital. Four days later they said she was dead. It’s not like she got hit with a car. I wish it would have happened that way, (rather) than her being stabbed 22 times with an ice pick and raped. I still remember waiting at that door for my mom to come and pick me up. Let’s just say I still wait at the front door for her. But she’s never going to come back.”
The heinous crimes that resulted in Virginia’s death went unsolved for 24 years because key evidence against the perpetrator was misplaced, and lingering questions about the case lit a fire inside Tapia that burned hotly the rest of his life. Even when the assailant was identified with enough certainty that he surely would have been convicted, it was too late to bring him to justice; he had been killed by a hit-and-run driver eight years after his unspeakable violation of Tapia’s mother.
“There was a closure, in my heart, in my soul,” Tapia said. “They finally found out. I was kind of pissed off it took so long, so many years when they had the right guy right there.
“I wanted at him first. I was going to hurt him. But he died. A car ran over him three times. Maybe it was for the best. I’d have stabbed the s— out of him like nobody’s business. I still think about him. I would have (spent) the rest of my life in prison, no problem. Just knowing that I got him. Nobody ever touches my momma. I don’t care who you are, what you are, how you are. Nobody puts their hands on my mom. That’s the love of my life. That’s my queen.
“The saddest part of my life is outliving my mother. I tried to kill myself so many times. I always seemed to come back. I struggle with that every day. I want my mom. I can’t have her today.”
Taken in by his grandparents, the young Tapia lived in abject poverty, which often is the breeding ground of elite fighters. His grandfather, a former boxer, was “a real rugged, tough macho man,” according to Tapia, which made it all the easier for him to gravitate toward boxing and the discovery of a natural gift that was fueled in part by pain and rage.
But, even as he turned pro and began to rise in prominence, the meaner streets of Albuquerque – hey, every city has them – began to divert him, with the lure of gangs and drugs that sink their hooks into so many desperate youths.
“The first time I did (cocaine) I was, like, wow,” Tapia said. “I enjoyed it. That’s why I kept doing it. It was my mistress.”
And a most possessive one at that. Tapia was becoming a fixture of televised boxing and nearing a world title shot when he failed his first drug test in June 1990, setting into motion more such positive tests and, eventually, his arrest by Albuquerque police. Another arrest – for threatening to kill a witness in the murder trial of his cousin – came at the same time the New Mexico boxing commission was calling a news conference to announce Tapia’s suspension after he had failed still another drug test, and thus was revoking the conditional boxing license it only recently had granted him.
The raft of legal problems kept Tapia out of boxing for 3½ years, but that didn’t prevent him from fighting. He helped make ends meet by being paid $300 a pop for bloody scraps in which he took on all comers in a seedy bar’s oversized cooler, with almost all rules of pugilistic civility set aside.
Fortunately for Tapia, during his suspension from boxing he met a 20-year-old beauty, Teresa Chavez. They soon married, and it wasn’t long before her own resilience was tested, to the max.
“She was a source of stability for the troubled fighter to grab a hold of,” narrator Liev Schrieber intones. Which was good, because Tapia was anything but stable.
“She didn’t know I was a bad drug addict,” Tapia said. “I hid it from her. A couple of guys told her, `If you want to know where Johnny is, go to the restroom.’ She caught me. She was mad, mad, mad. But she didn’t know the real me. That night, I ended up dying on her. That’s how it started out for her as Teresa Tapia.”
Nine months later, Teresa—who took on the role of her husband’s manager in 1995 — locked him inside their small, rented house to help him quit drugs, cold turkey. For three weeks, he was a basket case, breaking everything in the house. But Teresa didn’t waver.
“She said, `Go ahead and break it. You’re going to fight pretty soon, you’re going to pay for everything.’ She said, `You can break everything, but I’m still going to stay here.’”
Tapia did go on to fight again, and very well, the “Baby-Faced Assassin,” as he was then known, capturing the vacant WBO super flyweight belt from Henry Martinez on an 11th-round stoppage on Oct. 12, 1994, in Albuquerque. There would be many other such good nights within the relative safety of the boxing cocoon, Tapia continuing to excel there even as he occasionally and predictably slipped in his ongoing struggle with cocaine.
Tapia’s re-emergence as Albuquerque’s hometown hero more or less coincided with the rise of another fighter from the same city, Danny Romero, who was seven years younger and cloaked in a squeaky-clean image that had never fit Tapia.
“I was already kicked out of boxing and he was coming up,” Tapia noted. “I was the bad guy, he was the good guy. I did the drugs and went to jail. He did everything good, you know? I came back into boxing, I was taking his spotlight. That’s when he started calling me out.”
It took nearly three years for the Tapia-Romero fight to be made, and when it took place, it was at the Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas instead of Albuquerque because of fears a venue in New Mexico’s largest city might be disrupted by the presence of gang members who wanted in on the action. With a heavy security presence in the arena, Tapia dispatched Romero in a humdinger of a fight, by scores of 116-112 (twice) and 115-113, in the process claiming Romero’s IBF super flyweight championship to go with the WBO version he already held.
Tapia’s new trainer, Freddie Roach – one of 11 trainers Tapia employed at one time or another – knew all about his troubled past, which, to his way of thinking, made his assignment all the more intriguing.
“He’s one of the greatest fighters in the world today,” Roach said of Tapia. “He’s probably the most exciting fighter in the world today also. He wouldn’t be Johnny Tapia without those demons, I guess. He’s just a strait-laced, real nice guy. He probably wouldn’t be as good as he is.”
But the demons Tapia had always been able to displace on fight night, or at least use to his advantage, deserted him in his first confrontation with Ayala. He entered the ring at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with a 46-0-2 record, but left with his first “L” and bereft of his WBA bantamweight title.
“I gave it my all,” Tapia said, which obviously was true as that bout, as disappointing as it was to him, was named “Fight of the Year” by The Ring magazine. “Hey, everybody loses. That’s not a problem. But you don’t have to steal it from me.”
Tapia said he was more upset about the loss for Teresa’s sake than for his own. The only place he had never disappointed her was on fight night, and now he had.
“She keeps me going in life,” he said. “She keeps me strong. What I seen in her eyes, I let her down. I have before, quite a few times. But in the ring, I would never do that.”
Shortly after Ayala had smudged his previously undefeated ring record, Tapia had two mental breakdowns, and was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. There were now explanations for his erratic behavior, if not necessarily excuses, but even prescriptions for symptom-alleviating medications could not rid him of his forever-present demons. He was getting older, not better, and, despite being paid a career-high $2 million for his Nov. 2, 2002, bout with Marco Antonio Barrera, he suffered a lopsided, unanimous-decision setback that again sent him careening to the edge of disaster. Another drug overdose left him in a coma. Again, he recovered. But he and Teresa must have sensed there are only so many comebacks anyone can make before that person runs out of miracles.
“Every time I look at Johnny, every minute we spend, I constantly will catch myself memorizing lines on his face and the way that he smiles because I always think that’s the last time I’ll see him,” Teresa said. “I’ve made it a habit, being married to him, not to think of tomorrow. You just don’t.
“And Johnny will tell you, `Never think of tomorrow because it may never come, and don’t think of yesterday because it’s gone. You have to live in today.’ That’s what I’ve learned to do with him.”
Perhaps there is no easily identifiable straw which broke the figurative camel’s back for Tapia, but if there were, it might have come while he was hospitalized after the Barrera fight. Robert Gutierrez, Tapia’s best friend, brother-in-law (he was Teresa’s brother) and nephew (he had married Tapia’s niece) was killed in an automobile accident as he sped to Albuquerque to be at Tapia’s bedside.
“That was my best friend,” a teary Tapia, no longer the “Baby-Faced Assassain,” said of still another heartbreak he had had to endure. “I felt that I killed him because I was in the coma. If I could take all that back, I would … I miss him.”
The heart failure that finally lifted Tapia from his earthly misery came one day after the 37th anniversary of his mother’s death. Call it a coincidence if you will, but the timing of his passing at least suggests that Tapia was simply ready to be greeted at heaven’s gate by the angel who had left him far too soon.
“I think if my mom was alive, I probably would have never fought,” Tapia said of the path onto which circumstances had steered him. It is a theory that can’t be proven, of course, but he leaves this mortal coil with indisputable words of caution for all who might be tempted to make some of the same mistakes he did.
“My message to the kids all over the world is, if you’ve never tried drugs, don’t do it,” he said. “The first time is a mistake, the second time’s a habit. Please, don’t do it.”
Kudos to those who make HBO Sports’ documentaries so compelling – executive producer Rick Bernstein and narrator Liev Schrieber, as well as fellow executive producers Lou DiBella and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and director Eddie Alcazar, who recognized a story that needed telling, and told it well.
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Boxing Trainer Bob Santos Paid his Dues and is Reaping the Rewards
Bob Santos, the 2022 Sports Illustrated and The Ring magazine Trainer of the Year, is a busy fellow. On Feb. 1, fighters under his tutelage will open and close the show on the four-bout main portion of the Prime Video PPV event at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Jeison Rosario continues his comeback in the lid-lifter, opposing Jesus Ramos. In the finale, former Cuban amateur standout David Morrell will attempt to saddle David Benavidez with his first defeat. Both combatants in the main event have been chasing 168-pound kingpin Canelo Alvarez, but this bout will be contested for a piece of the light heavyweight title.
When the show is over, Santos will barely have time to exhale. Before the month is over, one will likely find him working the corner of Dainier Pero, Brian Mendoza, Elijah Garcia, and perhaps others.
Benavidez (29-0, 24 KOs) turned 28 last month. He is in the prime of his career. However, a lot of folk rate Morrell (11-0, 9 KOs) a very live dog. At last look, Benavidez was a consensus 7/4 (minus-175) favorite, a price that betokens a very competitive fight.
Bob Santos, needless to say, is confident that his guy can upset the odds. “I have worked with both,” he says. “It’s a tough fight for David Morrell, but he has more ways to victory because he’s less one-dimensional. He can go forward or fight going back and his foot speed is superior.”
Benavidez’s big edge, in the eyes of many, is his greater experience. He captured the vacant WBC 168-pound title at age 20, becoming the youngest super middleweight champion in history. As a pro, Benavidez has answered the bell for 148 rounds compared with only 54 for Morrell, but Bob Santos thinks this angle is largely irrelevant.
“Sure, I’d rather have pro experience than amateur experience,” he says, “but if you look at Benavidez’s record, he fought a lot of soft opponents when he was climbing the ladder.”
True. Benavidez, who turned pro at age 16, had his first seven fights in Mexico against a motley assortment of opponents. His first bout on U.S. soil occurred in his native Pheonix against an opponent with a 1-6-2 record.
While it’s certainly true that Morrell, 26, has yet to fight an opponent the caliber of Caleb Plant, he took up boxing at roughly the same tender age as Benavidez and earned his spurs in the vaunted Cuban amateur system, eventually defeating elite amateurs in international tournaments.
“If you look at his [pro] record, you will notice that [Morrell] has hardly lost a round,” says Santos of the fighter who captured an interim title in only his third professional bout with a 12-round decision over Guyanese veteran Lennox Allen.
Bob Santos is something of a late bloomer. He was around boxing for a long time, assisting such notables as Joe Goossen, Emanuel Steward, and Ronnie Shields before becoming recognized as one of the sport’s top trainers.
A native of San Jose, he grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood but not in a household where Spanish was spoken. “I know enough now to get by,” he says modestly. He attended James Lick High School whose most famous alumnus is Heisman winning and Super Bowl winning quarterback Jim Plunkett. “We worked in the same apricot orchard when we were kids,” says Santos. “Not at the same time, but in the same field.”
After graduation, he followed his father’s footsteps into construction work, but boxing was always beckoning. A cousin, the late Luis Molina, represented the U.S. as a lightweight in the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics, and was good enough as a pro to appear in a main event at Madison Square Garden where he lost a narrow decision to the notorious Puerto Rican hothead Frankie Narvaez, a future world title challenger.
Santos’ cousin was a big draw in San Jose in an era when the San Jose / Sacramento territory was the bailiwick of Don Chargin. “Don was a beautiful man and his wife Lorraine was even nicer,” says Santos of the husband/wife promotion team who are enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Don Chargin was inducted in 2001 and Lorraine posthumously in 2018.
Chargin promoted Fresno-based featherweight Hector Lizarraga who captured the IBF title in 1997. Lizarraga turned his career around after a 5-7-3 start when he hooked up with San Jose gym operator Miguel Jara. It was one of the most successful reclamation projects in boxing history and Bob Santos played a part in it.
Bob hopes to accomplish the same turnaround with Jeison Rosario whose career was on the skids when Santos got involved. In his most recent start, Rosario held heavily favored Jarrett Hurd to a draw in a battle between former IBF 154-pound champions on a ProBox card in Florida.
“I consider that one of my greatest achievements,” says Santos, noting that Rosario was stopped four times and effectively out of action for two years before resuming his career and is now on the cusp of earning another title shot.
The boxer with whom Santos is most closely identified is former four-division world title-holder Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero. The slick southpaw, the pride of Gilroy, California, the self-proclaimed “Garlic Capital of the World,” retired following a bad loss to Omar Figueroa Jr, but had second thoughts and is currently riding a six-fight winning streak. “I’ve known him since he was 15 years old,” notes Santos.
Years from now, Santos may be more closely identified with the Pero brothers, Dainier and Lenier, who aspire to be the Cuban-American version of the Klitschko brothers.
Santos describes Dainier, one of the youngest members of Cuba’s Olympic Team in Tokyo, as a bigger version of Oleksandr Usyk. That may be stretching it, but Dainier (10-0, 8 KOs as a pro), certainly hits harder.
This reporter was a fly on the wall as Santos put Dainier Pero through his paces on Tuesday (Jan. 14) at Bones Adams gym in Las Vegas. Santos held tight to a punch shield, in the boxing vernacular a donut, as the Cuban practiced his punches. On several occasions the trainer was knocked off-balance and the expression on his face as his body absorbed some of the after-shocks, plainly said, “My goodness, what the hell am I doing here? There has to be an easier way to make a living.” It was an assignment that Santos would have undoubtedly preferred handing off to his young assistant, his son Joe Santos, but Joe was preoccupied coordinating David Morrell’s camp.
Dainer’s brother Lenier is also an ex-Olympian, and like Dainier was a super heavyweight by trade as an amateur. With an 11-0 (8 KOs) record, Lenier Pero’s pro career was on a parallel path until stalled by a managerial dispute. Lenier last fought in March of last year and Santos says he will soon join his brother in Las Vegas.
There’s little to choose between the Pero brothers, but Dainier is considered to have the bigger upside because at age 25 he is the younger sibling by seven years.
Bob Santos was in the running again this year for The Ring magazine’s Trainer of the Year, one of six nominees for the honor that was bestowed upon his good friend Robert Garcia. Considering the way that Santos’ career is going, it’s a safe bet that he will be showered with many more accolades in the years to come.
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Bygone Days: The Largest Crowd Ever at Madison Square Garden Sees Zivic TKO Armstrong
Bygone Days: The Largest Crowd Ever at Madison Square Garden Sees Zivic TKO Armstrong
There’s not much happening on the boxing front this month. That’s consistent with the historical pattern.
Fight promoters of yesteryear tended to pull back after the Christmas and New Year holidays on the assumption that fight fans had less discretionary income at their disposal. Weather was a contributing factor. In olden days, more boxing cards were staged outdoors and the most attractive match-ups tended to be summertime events.
There were exceptions, of course. On Jan. 17, 1941, an SRO crowd of 23,180 filled Madison Square Garden to the rafters to witness the welterweight title fight between Fritzie Zivic and Henry Armstrong. (This was the third Madison Square Garden, situated at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, roughly 17 blocks north of the current Garden which sits atop Pennsylvania Station. The first two arenas to take this name were situated farther south adjacent to Madison Square Park).
This was a rematch. They had fought here in October of the previous year. In a shocker, Zivic won a 15-round decision. The fight was close on the scorecards. Referee Arthur Donovan and one of the judges had it even after 14 rounds, but Zivic had won his rounds more decisively and he punctuated his well-earned triumph by knocking Armstrong face-first to the canvas as the final bell sounded.
This was a huge upset.
Armstrong had a rocky beginning to his pro career, but he came on like gangbusters after trainer/manager Eddie Mead acquired his contract with backing from Broadway and Hollywood star Al Jolson. Heading into his first match with Zivic – the nineteenth defense of the title he won from Barney Ross – Hammerin’ Henry had suffered only one defeat in his previous 60 fights, that coming in his second meeting with Lou Ambers, a controversial decision.
Shirley Povich, the nationally-known sports columnist for the Washington Post, conducted an informal survey of boxing insiders and found only person who gave Zivic a chance. The dissident was Chris Dundee (then far more well-known than his younger brother Angelo). “Zivic knows all the tricks,” said Dundee. “He’ll butt Armstrong with his head, gouge him with his thumbs and hit him just as low as Armstrong [who had five points deducted for low blows in his bout with Ambers].”
Indeed, Pittsburgh’s Ferdinand “Fritzie” Zivic, the youngest and best of five fighting sons of a Croatian immigrant steelworker (Fritzie’s two oldest brothers represented the U.S. at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics) would attract a cult following because of his facility for bending the rules. It would be said that no one was more adept at using his thumbs to blind an opponent or using the laces of his gloves as an anti-coagulant, undoing the work of a fighter’s cut man.
Although it was generally understood that at age 28 his best days were behind him, Henry Armstrong was chalked the favorite in the rematch (albeit a very short favorite) a tribute to his body of work. Although he had mastered Armstrong in their first encounter, most boxing insiders considered Fritzie little more than a high-class journeyman and he hadn’t looked sharp in his most recent fight, a 10-round non-title affair with lightweight champion Lew Jenkins who had the best of it in the eyes of most observers although the match was declared a draw.
The Jan. 17 rematch was a one-sided affair. Veteran New York Times scribe James P. Dawson gave Armstrong only two rounds before referee Donovan pulled the plug at the 52-second mark of the twelfth round. Armstrong, boxing’s great perpetual motion machine, a world title-holder in three weight classes, repaired to his dressing room bleeding from his nose and his mouth and with both eyes swollen nearly shut. But his effort could not have been more courageous.
At the conclusion of the 10th frame, Donovan went to Armstrong’s corner and said something to the effect, “you will have to show me something, Henry, or I will have to stop it.” What followed was Armstrong’s best round.
“[Armstrong] pulled the crowd to its feet in as glorious a rally as this observer has seen in twenty-five years of attendance at these ring battles,” wrote Dawson. But Armstrong, who had been stopped only once previously, that coming in his pro debut, had punched himself out and had nothing left.
Armstrong retired after this fight, siting his worsening eyesight, but he returned in the summer of the following year, soldiering on for 46 more fights, winning 37 to finish 149-21-10. During this run, he was reacquainted with Fritzie Zivic. Their third encounter was fought in San Francisco before a near-capacity crowd of 8,000 at the Civic Auditorium and Armstrong got his revenge, setting the pace and working the body effectively to win a 10-round decision. By then the welterweight title had passed into the hands of Freddie Cochran.
Hammerin’ Henry (aka Homicide Hank) Armstrong was named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the inaugural class of 1990. Fritzie Zivic followed him into the Hall three years later.
Active from 1931 to 1949, Zivic lost 65 of his 231 fights – the most of anyone in the Hall of Fame, a dubious distinction – but there was yet little controversy when he was named to the Canastota shrine because one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who had fought a tougher schedule. Aside from Armstrong and Jenkins, he had four fights with Jake LaMotta, four with Kid Azteca, three with Charley Burley, two with Sugar Ray Robinson, two with Beau Jack, and singles with the likes of Billy Conn, Lou Ambers, and Bob Montgomery. Of the aforementioned, only Azteca, in their final meeting in Mexico City, and Sugar Ray, in their second encounter, were able to win inside the distance.
By the way, it has been written that no event of any kind at any of the four Madison Square Gardens ever drew a larger crowd than the crowd that turned out on Jan. 17, 1941, to see the rematch between Fritzie Zivic and Henry Armstrong. Needless to say, prizefighting was big in those days.
A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.
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Jai Opetaia Brutally KOs David Nyika, Cementing his Status as the World’s Top Cruiserweight
In his fifth title defense, lineal cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia (27-0, 21 KOs) successfully defended his belt with a brutal fourth-round stoppage of former sparring partner David Nyika. The bout was contested in Broadbeach, Queensland, Australia where Opetaia won the IBF title in 2022 with a hard-earned decision over Maris Briedis with Nyika on the undercard. Both fighters reside in the general area although Nyika, a former Olympic bronze medalist, hails from New Zealand.
The six-foot-six Nyika, who was undefeated in 10 pro fights with nine KOs, wasn’t afraid to mix it up with Opetaia although had never fought beyond five rounds and took the fight on three weeks’ notice when obscure German campaigner Huseyin Cinkara suffered an ankle injury in training and had to pull out. He wobbled Opetaia in the second round in a fight that was an entertaining slugfest for as long as it lasted.
In round four, the champion but Nyika on the canvas with his patented right uppercut and then finished matters moments later with a combination climaxed with an explosive left hand. Nyika was unconscious before he hit the mat.
Opetaia’s promoter Eddie Hearn wants Opetaia to unify the title and then pursue a match with Oleksandr Usyk. Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez, a Golden Boy Promotions fighter, holds the WBA and WBO versions of the title and is expected to be Opetaia’s next opponent. The WBC diadem is in the hands of grizzled Badou Jack.
Other Fights of Note
Brisbane heavyweight Justis Huni (12-0, 7 KOs) wacked out overmatched South African import Shaun Potgieter (10-2), ending the contest at the 33-second mark of the second round. The 25-year-old, six-foot-four Huni turned pro in 2020 after losing a 3-round decision to two-time Olympic gold medalist Bakhodir Jalolov. There’s talk of matching him with England’s 20-year-old sensation Moses Itauma which would be a delicious pairing.
Eddie Hearn’s newest signee Teremoana Junior won his match even quicker, needing less than a minute to dismiss Osasu Otobo, a German heavyweight of Nigerian descent.
The six-foot-six Teremoana, who akin to Huni hails from Brisbane and turned pro after losing to the formidable Jalolov, has won all six of his pro fights by knockout while answering the bell for only eight rounds. He has an interesting lineage; his father is from the Cook Islands.
Rising 20-year-old Max “Money” McIntyre, a six-foot-three super middleweight, scored three knockdowns en route to a sixth-round stoppage of Abdulselam Saman, advancing his record to 7-0 (6 KOs). As one can surmise, McIntyre is a big fan of Floyd Mayweather.
The Opetaia-Nyika fight card aired on DAZN pay-per-view (39.99) in the Antipodes and just plain DAZN elsewhere.
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