Federer and the Punch

Published

10 years ago

July 5, 2015

Once a year, I let tennis into my life.

I’m reluctant to do so. Wimbledon catches my attention for its entire duration but I don’t like the way competitors are feted for their “stamina” and “courage.” Yes, the levels of fitness they obtain are impressive, and yes it can be difficult to play on when losing, but these are well paid elite athletes in pursuit of cash money.

And nobody is punching them in the face while they submit to their cardio exam.

There is a video on YouTube on the legendary Rafael Nadal exalting “the heart of a warrior.” Overlap between tennis and boxing fans seems reasonably rare and I’d suggest that this is why such radical statements as this are allowed to be made; relative to other tennis players, it is very possible that Nadal does indeed have the heart of a warrior, but compare him to, say, Austin Trout and that claim becomes somewhat ridiculous. Compare him to someone like Israel Vazquez and such a claim becomes utterly bizarre.

Additionally, Nadal was meekly eliminated form Wimbledon early last week by a journeyman of such low ranking that it would have made Mike Tyson shudder. Still, the one-hundred and second ranked men’s tennis player, Dustin Brown, showed a lot of guts in picking up that win – but nothing like the heart James “Buster” Douglas displayed in knocking out the once-rampant Iron Mike.

Different sports – different levels of commitment and risk. Different men.

I was interested then in the questions raised by William Skidelsky in his new book about the great Roger Federer (perhaps the greatest tennis player in history) in his new book Federer and Me. Skidelsky freely admits to an obsession born of some seemingly clichéd self-psychoanalysis but the obsession bares fruit. Skidelsky’s insight into his subject is impractical and born of compulsion and so gets to the root of a matter that stirred within me some fistic interest, specifically his description of Federer’s backhand which he lauds as capable of reaching “any part of the court with every conceivable variation of height, spin and power; and he can do this from almost any position.” To a fairweather tennis fan such as myself that just sounds like tennis, but apparently this is not so. Apparently men’s tennis has retreated from the net, where the creative, exciting tennis of yesteryear was played, to the baseline at the rear of the court, where power dominates all. Thudding, booming hits swapped in rallies defined by endurance and hitting ability as much as technique. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Federer hits his backhand one-handed in pursuit of grace and touch, not power.

Angles; variation of height and power – the firm belief that placement can be more important than power. Skidelsky could be writing about a boxer, not a tennis player.

I want to take you back now to June of 1963. The #2 contender to the welterweight title held by Emile Griffith is twenty-two year old Cuban Jose Stable, two years away from the spirited but doomed shot at the title which would ruin him, and in his prime. Matching him at Madison Square Garden, New York, is Philadelphian and former #2 contender Charley Scott. Scott, once a promising prospect himself, now stands on the precipice of journeyman hell. Both men have much to lose.

Bell.

Federer’s technique is a matter of geometry. Rafael Nadal, his nemesis, deals in torque. Federer has spoken of his admiration for Nadal, of his respect for the Spaniard’s concentration, but equally has stressed that he could never play tennis in such a way. For Federer, Nadal’s mission is to make every point the same – Nadal wants to win by force. Federer gives the nod to Nadal’s overwhelming sense of self but admits that he would find such an approach boring. Federer wants variety. He wants surprise.

Scott and Stable meet ring centre. Stable gives ground a little but fights and when he comes dipping back to Scott the two bump heads to shoulder. Stable places his head under Scott’s chin and they both try to make room for punches without going wide in search of the tiny entrance behind one-another’s elbow – it’s a trap, you see. Something that is rarely mentioned when comparing old-school to new in boxing is this propensity of the referee to permit infighting, and as we shall see, more pertinently, for the boxers to do the same. Infighting was so much a part of the sport up to and including the sixties that it was not even remarked upon, generally, in commentary. It was as much a part of the boxing canon as out-fighting; there was literally no difference in how the two were perceived – a fighter need both to succeed.

Now, a fighter can be held to be a technician by the boxing public if he can throw a very good one-two from the outside. In the run up to his fight with Jennings this year, Bryan Graham, writing in The Guardian named Wladimir Klitschko definitive of the “Eastern European technicians”; Steve Bunce, the pre-eminent British boxing journalist, saw Klitschko “heavyweight’s finest technician”; some less pre-eminent members of the press have even begun to talk about “technician” as a style that Klitschko embodies.

Please understand, I am not saying that anyone who labels Klitschko a technician is wrong; I’m not interested in semantics but rather etymology and what it means for boxing. It is now reasonable to call Wladimir a technician but there is a time when you would have been laughed at for doing so. Draping yourself across your opponents back and leaning down when he gets close was no more legitimate in infighting in 1963 than drawing a knife after a knockdown is now.

Federer is described as “pre-modern” by Skidelsky. In boxing we prefer “old-school”. Either way, what it means is belonging to a different time. Just as Federer’s essence belongs to an era before graphite rackets drove big-hitting bomb-builders to the baseline, Stable and Scott belong to an era long before referees separated fighters that went head-to-head. Naturally, this had consequences for their boxing.

For one thing, the sixties were a time when to become a technician one needed more than a booming jab and footwork birthed specifically to control distance. A technician had to fight at all ranges. If a fighter spent an evening’s work trying to bore in he was no more – but also no less – a technician than the man who backed up all night and jab-jab-jabbed. Both were lacking. A technician was a man who had mastered jab-, mid- and close-range. The word had no other meaning.

In 1963, Scott and Stable have entered the third round. They have agreed now that the fight will be settled on the inside, and given that neither man is a knockout hitter, crisp, volume punching will decide the result. Scott has decided to spring Stable’s trap and punch wide to the body, Stable responds by quadrupling the uppercut to the mid-section, an astonishing technical achievement which requires poise, balance, and the co-operation of a referee willing to let the opponent do enough punching inside that such an advantage presents itself; that last point is important: that such an advantage presents itself.

Such an advantage is not presented to the modern day boxer. It’s a rare, rare night when a boxer can be inside long enough in rounds one and two that he can feel-out and deploy a plan for infighting success. Infighting has become an opportunity to out-muscle a fighter for a psychological edge, perhaps land one punch, perhaps two, before the referee breaks. In 1963 a fighter might spend twenty minutes of a thirty minute fight finding room for punches inside, if he boxed to a certain style. Consider, if you will, how much time a fighter will spend on such techniques in the gym if that is liable to be the case. Now, flip that coin. What if all a fighter has to do to avoid infighting is clinch?

It is common to hear people say that the clinch is “killing boxing”. The truth is both more terrible and less dramatic than that: clinching is modern boxing. Clinching, specifically, is the reason that a whole plethora of infighting skills have been eliminated from boxing’s toolbox. It is one of the great ironies of sporting history, I think, that after boxing became a staple of television’s diet, clinching was frowned upon due to it being seen as dull. This cultural shift trickled through to the ring where referees were encouraged to break as many clinches as possible meaning all a fighter short of in-fighting skills needed to do in order to end that action was clinch. This, in turn, led to an erosion of infighting capabilities in modern fighters because all that is needed to negate any close action is a clinch – and this, finally, results in a huge upturn in clinching.

Boxing, the snake that eats itself.

The last two lineal heavyweight champions of the world, the keepers of the flame of the culture of the sport, have resorted almost exclusively to clinching as an infighting defence. I am a huge admirer of both Wladimir Klitschko and Lennox Lewis; I don’t believe they have done anything other than what was absolutely right for them. All any opponent wants to do with Klitschko is come inside and rough him up in search of the KO. The idea that Klitschko should play Russian-roulette with anyone that breaches his jab when the clinch is available to him is absurd and while people are free to dislike him for it, criticising him for it is not reasonable.

Some version of this is what old-timers and classic apologists are trying to tell us when they say that boxers were “more skilled” in those days. Newsflash: they were. But this is not all it seems to be, nor what dismissive modernists presume it to be, nor, finally, what some old-school determinists insist it is. At the opening of the ninth round, Scott and Stable are surprisingly fresh, and although Stable is well ahead, Scott remains game. By the time they meet ring centre in that penultimate round Stable is sure of his own speed advantage, assured in his technical superiority and his eye for distance is in. He comes narrow but reaches all the way around for a right-hand lead to the kidney, and then a left hand gunned for Scott’s jaw that is caught on the gloves, another right to the body followed up by a left uppercut which glances across the dipping Scott’s scalp. Because Scott, too, was seeking out the inside where he has done his best work, and because the referee will allow them both to punch there, these punches were available for Stable; and so he has learned them.

This is not the case for their modern counterparts. The only time real fighting will take place inside is when the fighters decide to allow it. Before Ricky Hatton’s 2007 tilt at Floyd Mayweather his trainer Billy Graham was direct in asking that Hatton be allowed to fight on the inside. I understand why; his man’s whole strategy relied upon being able to get close and throw punches. The simple fact is, however, is that it is not in the referee’s gift to allow fighting on the inside. That gift lay with Mayweather, whose strategy for victory was to hit Hatton on the outside and nullify him inside. This, he did, by holding. Once Mayweather holds the referee is honour bound to separate them.

This fact is obscured by occasions when infighting takes place, as was the case in the first Mike Alvarado-Brandon Rios war. Here, Alvarado allowed Rios inside, and allowed him to work, while waiting to reclaim distance and blast his man, giving the impression that the referee was “allowing them to work inside” in the parlance of American commentary; in fact, Alvarado was allowing Rios to work inside by neglecting to hold. He was punished for this tactical transgression.

The only ready solution to this infighting issue, should one be required, is for the referee to penalise a new generation of fighters who take holding for granted. This will result in physically and technically inferior fighters claiming wins on point deductions and disqualifications, at least in the short term; or will result in the bizarre sight, as in Lewis-Tyson, of a fighter leaning while holding his arms out wide to prove he is not holding. There is nothing harder in sports than enforcing a cultural change through a rule change (see the total inability of football’s governing body to eliminate diving in football [soccer] by penalising it).

Stable hit Scott with combination after combination on the inside in that ninth round at a point in the fight where Scott needed a knockout to win. If Scott elected to hold, Stable would have been allowed to fight out; meanwhile, if Stable had hit while holding, he would be in breach. So Scott fought on, tending to dip to his left, something Stable did too, but every now and again Stable hops out of their formation and in again to his right creating a whole new mess of geometry between the two. Next time you are watching a fight, or better yet sparring, take note, during a rare infighting exchange, of the enormous difference a small step to the left makes for both fighters. When they are head to head they seek the same punches dependent upon handedness, but with that single half step one fighter is looking for the left hook to the body, the other the right uppercut to the head. There are dozens of such variations. Now, perform the same exercise on the outside – both men still seek to jab.

Like Federer, Scott and Stable are seeking to land punches all over the court and for the most part there is no modern equivalent. Initiating a clinch is a legitimate skill in modern boxing, but it is not one that can be compared to the pulse of this whirling dervish of a contest. Scott has to try to get his head on Stable’s left shoulder opening up his right hand to the body when Stable uses his left; he wants to lock down Stable’s left with this tactic. Meanwhile Stable wants to quick-time Scott’s body when he is stepping in and snipes for the head while Scott is trying to find position. Even this singular version of the inside game is enthralling and fuelled by drill upon drill in the gym.

What this does not mean is that Scott and Stable are better fighters under their ruleset than modern fighters are under theirs. What it means is that fighters from the 1960s have, by necessity, a deeper skillset. Wladimir Klitschko is as brilliant at what he does as Jose Stable was at what he did – more brilliant, Klitschko has perfected, even defined a certain style where Stable was only a disciple of his – but he does less. That he can now be named a technician is the single harshest indictment of the shrinking pool of skills necessary to achieve greatness in boxing.

And so at last we return to tennis and the final analogy between this less demanding sport and the commitment that is boxing. Nadal is just as technically correct as Federer – more so, perhaps, given the specifics of the era, produced by graphite rackets – but Federer’s skilful backhander opens up a whole world of new and more varied techniques.

“Roger Federer,” writes Skidelsky, “made tennis beautiful again.” Whether or not it will be beautiful enough to see Federer to yet another Wimbledon title remains to be seen (he had qualified for the second round at the time of writing), but it’s unlikely we will ever see a return to the beauty of boxing as is it appears in the time of Stable and Scott. I don’t say that boxing was better then – fights like Segura-Marquez and Matthysse-Molina render that opinion invalid – but I do say it was deeper, richer.

I reach for it with the same sense of nostalgia with which Skidelsky reaches for Federer, nostalgia for a time I never knew.

Stable beat Scott by a unanimous decision. At the final bell they embraced, and walked the ring, arm in arm.

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Matt McGrain

Boxing Trainer Bob Santos Paid his Dues and is Reaping the Rewards

Published

13 hours ago

January 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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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.

Dainier Pero

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

Published

6 days ago

January 10, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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 50^th 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 10^th 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

Published

1 week ago

January 8, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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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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