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BJ Saunders Pursues Another World Title on Saturday if He Doesn’t Implode First

Dominic Breazeale, who challenges WBC world heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder on Saturday, has adopted the nickname “Trouble.” The moniker would be a better fit for former WBO world middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders who returns to the ring earlier that day with Shefat Isufi in the opposite corner. Trouble has blistered Saunders since his amateur days.
There’s no question that Billy Joe is a highly skilled practitioner of the so-called manly art. He represented Great Britain in the Beijing Olympics at the tender age of 18. He won European, British, and British Commonwealth titles before winning the WBO version of the world middleweight title. In his last significant bout, he gave the redoubtable David Lemieux a boxing lesson on Lemieux’s turf in Quebec. His record as a pro is unblemished (27-0, 13 KOs). But incidents outside the ring have cost him his belt and branded him a boorish lout.
After losing his second round matchup in the Beijing Olympics, Saunders was sent home when a video surfaced of him behaving lewdly with a Frenchwoman at his hotel in France where the British team was domiciled in preparation for the games. More recently, Saunders was shown harassing a 37-year-old female crack cocaine addict in a video leaked to a British tabloid.
The incident unfolded in September of last year. Saunders, sitting behind the wheel of his Rolls Royce, offers the woman $150 worth of cocaine if she will assault a passerby and perform a sex act on one of his companions. She responds by slapping a stranger, whereupon Saunders speeds away.
This was all in jest and Saunders would later apologize for what he termed “harmless banter.” But the British Boxing Board of Control wasn’t amused. Calling the incident disgusting, they hit Saunders with a $100,000 fine for “bringing the sport into disrepute.”
Saunders, the great-grandson of a famous bare knuckle fighter, is a member of the Irish Traveler community. He is believed to be a distant relative of Tyson Fury with whom he now trains. They recently purchased matching red Ferraris.
Irish Travelers tend to grow up fast. The boys invariably leave school early and enter the workforce at a tender age, usually in some form of construction work such as paving streets. The girls tend to marry young and begin childbearing while still in their teens.
Saunders, 29, appears to be fast-tracking his 10-year-old son Stevie into adulthood. The boy was recently filmed driving his father’s new Ferrari around a car park (i.e. a Travelers compound). Proud Papa uploaded the film to his son’s Instagram page.
This wasn’t the first time that young Stevie made the news. In September of 2017, at the weigh-in in London for Saunders’ bout with Willie Monroe Jr, the kid went and kicked Monroe in the balls. Most of those in attendance, although certainly not Monroe, found this quite amusing.
Since dethroning middleweight titlist Andy Lee, a fellow Traveler, Billy Joe has been relatively inactive. His bout on Saturday will be only his fifth in the last 42 months.
Some of this inactivity can be blamed on bad luck. Title defenses against Ukraine’s Max Bursak and countryman Martin Murray were put on the backburner and eventually cancelled when he suffered injuries in training. But he has only himself to blame for his lost fight with Demetrius Andrade.
Saunders vs. Andrade was all set for Oct. 20 of last year in Boston. But when a random VADA test turned up a banned stimulant, the Massachusetts Athletic Commission refused to grant Saunders a license, killing the match. He, in turn, vacated his title, a proactive move as the WBO was expected to strip him of it.
Andrade subsequently won the belt. His forthcoming match with Maciej Sulecki in June will be his second title defense. As for Saunders, his only action since vacating the title was a stay-busy fight in December that was buried on the undercard of the Frampton-Warrington show in Manchester. Saunders weighed in at a flabby 178 pounds but his opponent, a 41-year-old Namibian, graciously surrendered after four rounds.
The WBO then resurrected the Saunders-Andrade fight, deeming Saunders the mandatory challenger. But Billy Joe would have none of it. Instead he made it known that he would henceforth campaign as a super middleweight and his promoter Frank Warren then went out and matched him with little known Shefat Isufi, a Munich-based Syrian, potting the fight at a soccer stadium in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, near Saunders boyhood home.
The WBO anointed Saunders-Isufi an interim world title fight which meant that the winner would go on to meet the organization’s 168-pound title holder, Gilberto Ramirez. But then Ramirez vacated the belt to compete as a light heavyweight and, presto, the WBO dropped the interim tag to rake in a higher sanctioning fee.
Has Shefat Isufi (27-3-2) earned the right to fight for a world title? That’s a rhetorical question, of course, and needless to say, with so many alphabet straps up for grabs, rhetorical questions of this nature get asked a lot.
Assuming that he doesn’t do something stupid that torpedoes the match, Billy Joe Saunders will win this fight. The only question is which Billy Joe will show up, the Billy Joe that looked like a common journeyman in his dull title defense against Artur Akavov or the Billy Joe that looked almost Lomachenko-like against David Lemieux?
From a financial standpoint, moving up to the 168-pound weight class looks like a smart move. The top dogs in the middleweight division – Canelo, GGG, and Daniel Jacobs – appear to be heading there so Saunders is ahead of the curve. But it would be premature to analyze those potential matchups. With Billy Joe Saunders, one never knows what tomorrow will hold.
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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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Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis Wins Welterweight Showdown in Atlantic City

In the showdown between undefeated welterweight champions Jaron “Boots Ennis walked away with the victory by technical knockout over Eamantis Stanionis and the WBA and IBF titles on Saturday.
No doubt. Ennis was the superior fighter.
“He’s a great fighter. He’s a good guy,” said Ennis.
Philadelphia’s Ennis (34-0, 30 KOs) faced Lithuania’s Stanionis (15-1, 10 KOs) at demonstrated an overpowering southpaw and orthodox attack in front of a sold-out crowd at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It might have been confusing but whether he was in a southpaw stance or not Ennis busted the body with power shots and jabbed away in a withering pace in the first two rounds.
Stanionis looked surprised when his counter shots seemed impotent.
In the third round the Lithuanian fighter who trains at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, began using a rocket jab to gain some semblance of control. Then he launched lead rights to the jaw of Ennis. Though Stanionis connected solidly, the Philly fighter was still standing and seemingly unfazed by the blows.
That was a bad sign for Stanionis.
Ennis returned to his lightning jabs and blows to the body and Stanionis continued his marauding style like a Sherman Tank looking to eventually run over his foe. He just couldn’t muster enough firepower.
In the fifth round Stanionis opened up with a powerful body attack and seemed to have Ennis in retreat. But the Philadelphia fighter opened up with a speedy combination that ended with blood dripping from the nose of Stanionis.
It was not looking optimistic for the Lithuanian fighter who had never lost.
Stanionis opened up the sixth round with a three-punch combination and Ennis met him with a combination of his own. Stanionis was suddenly in retreat and Ennis chased him like a leopard pouncing on prey. A lightning five-punch combination that included four consecutive uppercuts delivered Stanionis to the floor for the count. He got up and survived the rest of the round.
After returning shakily to his corner, the trainer whispered to him and then told the referee that they had surrendered.
Ennis jumped in happiness and now holds the WBA and IBF welterweight titles.
“I felt like I was getting in my groove. I had a dream I got a stoppage just like this,” said Ennis.
Stanionis looked like he could continue, but perhaps it was a wise move by his trainer. The Lithuanian fighter’s wife is expecting their first child at any moment.
Meanwhile, Ennis finally proved the expectations of greatness by experts. It was a thorough display of superiority over a very good champion.
“The biggest part was being myself and having a live body in front of me,” said Ennis. “I’m just getting started.”
Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn was jubilant over the performance of the Philadelphia fighter.
“What a wonderful humble man. This is one of the finest fighters today. By far the best fighter in the division,” said Hearn. “You are witnessing true greatness.”
Other Bouts
Former featherweight world champion Raymond Ford (17-1-1, 8 KOs) showed that moving up in weight would not be a problem even against the rugged and taller Thomas Mattice (22-5-1, 17 KOs) in winning by a convincing unanimous decision.
The quicksilver southpaw Ford ravaged Mattice in the first round then basically cruised the remaining nine rounds like a jackhammer set on automatic. Four-punch combinations pummeled Mattice but never put him down.
“He was a smart veteran. He could take a hit,” said Ford.
Still, there was no doubt on who won the super featherweight contest. After 10 rounds all three judges gave Ford every round and scored it 100-90 for the New Jersey fighter who formerly held the WBA featherweight title which was wrested from him by Nick Ball.
Shakhram Giyasov (17-0, 10 KOs) made good on a promise to his departed daughter by knocking out Argentina’s Franco Ocampo (17-3, 8 KOs) in their welterweight battle.
Giyasov floored Ocampo in the first round with an overhand right but the Argentine fighter was able to recover and fight on for several more rounds.
In the fourth frame, Giyasov launched a lead right to the liver and collapsed Ocampo with the body shot for the count of 10 at 1:57 of the fourth round.
“I had a very hard camp because I lost my daughter,” Giyasov explained. “I promised I would be world champion.”
In his second pro fight Omari Jones (2-0) needed only seconds to disable William Jackson (13-6-2) with a counter right to the body for a knockout win. The former Olympic medalist was looking for rounds but reacted to his opponent’s actions.
“He was a veteran he came out strong,” said Jones who won a bronze medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics. “But I just stayed tight and I looked for the shot and I landed it.”
After a feint, Jackson attacked and was countered by a right to the rib cage and down he went for the count at 1:40 of the first round in the welterweight contest.
Photo credit: Matchroom
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