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Can David Lemieux Carry His Power as he Moves Up in Weight?

The hard punching and ultra-exciting David Lemieux has been boxing since he was nine years old and one could say that his entire life has been devoted to the sport. He broke out of the professional boxing gate fast with 24 straight wins, the first 20 coming inside the distance. His first round destructions of Elvin Ayala and Hector Camacho Jr. were particularly scary, and his stoppage of Purnell Gates (18-1) raised eyebrows. He was blessed with one-punch KO power in both hands and a propensity to rehydrate an inordinate amount of poundage. In short, he was a formidable force, peaking rapidly — or so it seemed.
Trained by the highly successful, multi-skilled and ever-present Russ Anber, the handsome French Canadian-Armenian, born and raised in Montreal, soon became a crowd favorite and an idol to Quebec’s female boxing fans. (Whether that had anything to do with a later stamina issue is open to speculation.)
Shock Time
In 2011, Lemieux suffered his first setbacks, losing unexpectedly in back-to-back fights with Mexico’s Marco Antonio Rubio and Montreal’s Joachim Alcine (David’s stamina or lack thereof played a role in both). Between these two fights, he and Anber had a parting of the ways. Shakened but sobered, Lemieux regrouped and launched a new winning streak that included a savage uppercut KO over once-promising Fernando Guerrero (26-2), and a bloody win over tough Gabe Rosado in David’s first fight outside Quebec province.
Title Time
That earned David a shot at the vacant IBF world middleweight title which he won by UD over Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam (31-1 coming in). Lemieux decked the French-Cameroonian in the second round, twice in the fifth, and again in the seventh, but N’Dam was resilient, as is his wont, and lasted until the bell rang ending the beat down.
On October 17, 2015, in his first title defense, Lemieux faced off against a prime Gennady Golovkin (33-0) at Madison Square Garden with four middleweight belts a stake. David was game and showed great resolve, but Golovkin ended matters in the eighth round, piling on the shots on a bloodied Lemieux, forcing referee Steve Willis to stop the fight despite Lemieux’s protests.
Lemieux then ran off four more wins including a TKO of listless Glen Tapia in which Lemieux showed what rehydration can do as he came in much bigger than “Jersey Boy.” However, the showcase of this streak was a spectacular third round KO of Curtis Stevens in Verona, NY via a monstrous left hook that left Stevens unconscious and ultimately stretchered out of the ring while HBO’s Max Kellerman went bonkers in plain sight.
During the post-fight interview, Kellerman asked Lemieux what he saw as they watched the replay. David said, “I see checkmate.”
After decisioning Marco Antonio Reyes in Las Vegas in May 2017, the Quebecois met slick Billy Joe Saunders (25-0) on home turf in a bid for the WBO world middleweight title. Saunders’ style of hit and run and all-around defensive wizardry was a puzzle that Lemieux couldn’t solve, dropping his record to 38-4. What followed was a badly needed win, a lopsided 12-round decision over the Algerian Karim Achour in Quebec City in May 2018.
His next go was a critical match-up with Gary “Spike” O’Sullivan (28-3). Lemieux vs. O’Sullivan, a middleweight title eliminator, was the chief supporting bout on the Golovkin-Alvarez II card at the T-Mobile Arena.
This one featured a number of heated verbal exchanges prior to the fight. O’Sullivan called Lemieux a one-trick pony, among other aspersions. (His one trick, noted many boxing writers, is knocking guys out.) Said David, “I promise you some fireworks…He has a big mouth. He likes to talk garbage on social media. He’s not the best kind of guy. I’m going to knock him out and make a lot of people happy.”
The fearsome puncher fulfilled his promise. He countered a slow left hook from O’Sullivan with a vicious left hook upstairs that decked Spike. Referee Russell Mora stepped in, looked at Spike’s glazed eyes, and stopped the action at the 2:44 mark of round one. It was another spectacular performance from the extremely fan-friendly David Lemieux. Of note, however, David had come in very heavy after his rehydration and his stomach area, though hard, was visibly large.
Moving up in Weight
Lemieux’s last scheduled fight was on Dec. 15 of last year against Taureano Johnson at Madison Square Garden. Prior to the weigh-in on the day before the fight, Lemieux suffered from severe dehydration and had to be hospitalized. The match, which was to serve as the co-feature to the bout between Canelo Alvarez and Rocky Fielding, was cancelled.
The highly ranked Lemieux (40-4) is now scheduled to fight at the T-Mobile Arena, this time on the undercard of the Canelo-Jacobs title match on May 4. His opponent will be Londoner John “The Gorilla” Ryder. What’s different about this match is that David, after repeatedly struggling to make weight at 160, will be fighting at 168 pounds as he ventures into the super middleweight division.
Ryder (27-4) is rated #1 by the WBA which recognizes Canelo Alvarez and Callum Smith as their champions. He is promoted by Eddie Hearn, the Managing Director of Matchroom Sport.
“John Ryder has been on a tremendous run,” says Hearn, “and now takes to the big stage in Las Vegas with the dangerous David Lemieux. It’s a huge fight for both with the winner being mandatory challenger for Callum Smith, and I fully expect that to be John Ryder.”
Eddie has it wrong. He should fully expect it to be David Lemieux because the 30-year-old KO artist will not only take his power with him, he will be far more comfortable at the higher weight. And if by chance his tendency to rehydrate is still there, expect him to enter the ring at an inordinate weight, maybe even as high as 185 pounds.
If so, “The Gorilla” will be in for a short night.
Ted Sares is a lifetime member of Ring 10, and a member of Ring 4 and its Boxing Hall of Fame. He also is an Auxiliary Member of the Boxing Writers Association of America (BWAA). He is an active power lifter and Strongman competitor in the Grand Master class and plans to compete in 2019.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.
One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.
Take your pick.
The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.
Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.
Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.
If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.
He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.
During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.
Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.
Fundora
Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.
Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.
Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.
Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.
Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?
When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.
This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.
Commerce Casino
Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.
UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.
Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.
It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.
Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?
That’s a question for another day.
Fights to Watch
Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).
Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).
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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.
Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.
Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)
Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.
The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).
Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”
A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.
Other winners:
Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon
Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney
Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire
Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix
The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.
The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.
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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.
He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.
Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.
“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.
“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)
Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.
During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”
He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.
He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.
On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.
Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.
If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.
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