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Looking Ahead to Lomachenko-Campbell and Other Fights on Saturday’s Docket
Vasiliy Lomachenko, #1 on several pound-for-pound lists, returns to the ring on Saturday at London’s O2 Arena to meet Luke Campbell in a battle of former Olympic gold medalists that will air on ESPN+. Lomachenko last fought in April when he ran off Anthony Crolla in a total mismatch. During their 10 minutes of fighting, Crolla was credited with landing only 12 punches. The bout ended with him splattered face down on the canvas.
Campbell, a southpaw like Lomachenko, is a big star in the UK. When he won gold at the 2012 London games, becoming the first British boxer to win gold in his weight class (bantamweight) since 2008, British Mail issued a first-class postage stamp with his likeness on it and he was appointed an MBE, short for the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. (The closest kin to an MBE in the U.S. would be the Presidential Medal of Freedom.) He enhanced his profile with an appearance on ITV’s popular “Dancing on Ice” series where he placed third.
As a pro, Campbell is 20-2 (16 KOs). Both losses were by split decision, the first to Ivan Mendy and the second to former WBA and WBC lightweight champion Jorge Linares. He avenged the loss to Mendy after taking on Shane McGuigan as his trainer.
Lomachenko, reportedly 396-1 as an amateur, has won 12 straight since coming up short in his second pro bout against mauler Orlando Salido. During the streak he won titles in three weight classes: 126, 130, and 135. Three lightweight title belts will be at stake on Saturday, all but the IBF diadem held by Richard Commey who reportedly has a date with Teofimo Lopez in December.
Campbell has a history of starting slow and has been dropped by Linares, Mendy, and Argenis Mendez, although he always got up. Needless to say, he’s a big underdog.
There’s a growing feeling, however, that the Englishman, with his home field advantage, will make things interesting. They may weigh the same, but standing side by side one can see that Campbell is bigger. Boxing writer Mark Eisner says that Campbell will be the hardest puncher that Loma has faced since Salido. He notes that Loma has had hand and shoulder problems lately and speculates that this could be a sign of age creeping in. To this we would add the Shane McGuigan factor. The laurels keep coming for the 2016 BWAA Trainer of the Year. For this fight, McGuigan has reportedly had Campbell sparring with three guys at once.
That would seem wise. In the ring, Lomachenko is a ghost, a ghost with a hammer in his hand to steal the nickname applied to the fabled Welsh flyweight Jimmy Wilde. “He’s even better than I thought. His balance and his feet are incredible,” said Anthony Crolla, “and the angles he picks are just crazily good.”
There are two interesting fights on the undercard. Charlie Edwards defends his WBC world flyweight title against Mexico’s Julio Cesar Martinez. Hughie Fury, Tyson Fury’s cousin, opposes former heavyweight title-holder Alexander Povetkin. A participant in seven world title fights (excluding interims), Povetkin, who turns 40 in a few days, is a consensus 17/10 favorite.
The Fury-Povetkin fight will air at 4:00 pm ET / 1:00 PT on ESPN+ with the Lomachenko-Campbell bout to follow. The undercard will start on ESPN+ at 1:00 pm ET / 10:00 am PT.
Bendigo
On Saturday in the Australian inland city of Bendigo, which can trace its name to a famous British bare-knuckle fighter, there’s an important 10-round domestic squabble between Brisbane’s Jeff Horn (19-1-1, 13 KOs) and Melbourne’s Michael Zerafa (26-3, 15 KOs). If Horn should win, as expected, he will fight Ryota Murata in late December for Murata’s WBC world middleweight title. That’s the word from Horn’s U.S. promoter Bob Arum.
Horn, a former schoolteacher who fights with a metal plate in his neck, etched his name in Australian sports lore in May of 2017 when he scored a unanimous, albeit controversial, decision over Manny Pacquiao. It was a monumental upset and it came in a fight hyped as the biggest boxing event ever in the Land Down Under.
That led to a fight with Terence Crawford which didn’t turn out well for him. In his last start, Horn starched countryman Anthony Mundine with a left hook in the opening round. Mundine is ancient and his reflexes are shot, but he twice held a version of the world super middleweight title and this was a nice scalp for Horn to hang on his bedpost.
Michael Zerafa’s three losses have all come on the road: vs. Arif Magomedov in Moscow (UD 10), Peter Quillin at Foxwoods in Connecticut (KO by 5), and Kell Brook (UD 12) in Brooks’ hometown of Sheffield, England. He doesn’t lack for confidence. “Quite simply, my boxing ability is vastly superior to Jeff Horn. He is tough, yes, but skills pay the bills and he only knows one way, which is to walk forward,” said Zerafa to Melbourne Herald Sun reporter Jon Anderson.
Zerafa, like Horn, likes to press the action. This has the appearance of an entertaining fight.
Minneapolis
Five years have elapsed since Erislandy Lara fought Canelo Alvarez. The fight, said Las Vegas Review-Journal sports editor Ed Graney, “was tougher to score than your average Hawaiian Tropic swimsuit competition.” But in the end, two of the judges thought Canelo’s aggression trumped Lara’s slicker boxing and the budding Mexican superstar was returned the winner on a split decision.
Lara and his long-time trainer Ronnie Shields didn’t think the fight was tough to score. “We wuz robbed,” they shouted. And indeed, had the crowd at the MGM Grand Garden not been overwhelmingly pro-Canelo, the result may have been different.
Lara demanded a rematch that never happened and almost certainly never will happen now that Canelo’s thicker torso has thickened some more, mobilizing him to pursue prey in higher weight classes. Their 2014 match was contested at the “catchweight” of 155 pounds.
While Lara, the Cuban exile, will never have the opportunity to avenge that particular loss, a victory on Saturday over Ramon Alvarez, Canelo’s older brother, will ease some of the hurt. The winner will claim the vacant WBA 154-pound world title, giving the WBA two 154-pound world champions (arrrgh), the other being Julian Williams.
Lara (25-3-3, 14 KOs) is a bigger favorite over Alvarez (28-7-3, 16 KOs) than is Lomachenko over Campbell. But hold the phone. Lara is 36 years old (perhaps even older) and beginning to show his age. In his last start, against Brian Castano, Lara lost the last three rounds on all three cards and had to settle for a draw. In his fight before that, he was knocked down in the 12th round by Jarrett Hurd, enabling Hurd to capture Lara’s world title belt on a split decision in a fight that was a strong Fight of the Year candidate (but ultimately overtaken by Fury-Wilder).
Al Haymon, the driving force behind Premier Boxing Champions, reportedly has more than 100 fighters under contract. As a consequence, his shows tend to have very deep undercards. There are 15 bouts scheduled on Saturday’s show at the Armory. Most qualify as “showcase fights” for Haymon’s blue-chip prospects, of which there are many.
Lara vs. Alvarez will air live on FOX at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT. The appetizer is an 8-round match between ever-improving six-foot-five junior middleweight Sebastian Fundora (13-0, 9 KOs) and fellow southpaw Jamontay Clark (14-1, 7 KOs).
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Cardoso, Nunez, and Akitsugi Bring Home the Bacon in Plant City
Cardoso, Nunez, and Akitsugi Bring Home the Bacon in Plant City
The final ShoBox event of 2025 played out tonight at the company’s regular staging ground in Plant City, Florida. When the smoke cleared, the “A-side” fighters in the featured bouts were 3-0 in step-up fights vs. battle-tested veterans, two of whom were former world title challengers. However, the victors in none of the three fights, with the arguable exception of lanky bantamweight Katsuma Akitsugi, made any great gain in public esteem.
In the main event, a lightweight affair, Jonhatan Cardoso, a 25-year-old Brazilian, earned a hard-fought, 10-round unanimous decision over Los Mochis, Mexico southpaw Eduardo Ramirez. The decision would have been acceptable to most neutral observers if it had been deemed a draw, but the Brazilian won by scores of 97-93 and 96-94 twice.
Cardoso, now 18-1 (15), had the crowd in his corner., This was his fourth straight appearance in Plant City. Ramirez, disadvantaged by being the smaller man with a shorter reach, declined to 28-5-3.
Co-Feature
In a 10-round featherweight fight that had no indelible moments, Luis Reynaldo Nunez advanced to 20-0 (13) with a workmanlike 10-round unanimous decision over Mexico’s Leonardo Baez. The judges had it 99-91 and 98-92 twice.
Nunez, from the Dominican Republic, is an economical fighter who fights behind a tight guard. Reputedly 85-5 as an amateur, he is managed by Sampson Lewkowicz who handles David Benavidez among others and trained by Bob Santos. Baez (22-5) was returning to the ring after a two-year hiatus.
Also
In a contest slated for “10,” ever-improving bantamweight Katsuma Akitsugi improved to 12-0 (3 KOs) with a sixth-round stoppage of Filipino import Aston Palicte (28-7-1). Akitsugi caught Palicte against the ropes and unleashed a flurry of punches climaxed by a right hook. Palicte went down and was unable to beat the count. The official time was 1:07 of round six.
This was the third straight win by stoppage for Akitsugi, a 27-year-old southpaw who trains at Freddie Roach’s Wild Card gym in LA under Roach’s assistant Eddie Hernandez. Palicte, who had been out of the ring for 16 months, is a former two-time world title challenger at superflyweight (115).
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Introducing Jaylan Phillips, Boxing’s Palindrome Man
On Thursday, Nov. 28, as Americans hunkered down at the dinner table with family and friends for our annual Thanksgiving Day feast, junior welterweight Jaylan Phillips and his trainer Kevin Henry were up in the sky flying from Las Vegas to Rochester, New York. For their Thanksgiving repast, they were offered a tiny bag of peanuts.
Phillips would not have eaten too much had the opportunity presented itself. The next day was the weigh-in. On Saturday, the 30th, he would compete in the 6-round main event of a small club show.
Phillips wasn’t brought to Rochester to win. His opponent, Wilfredo Flores, had a checkered career but he had once held a regional title and he lived in the general area. In boxing parlance, Jaylan Phillips was the “B” side. His role, from the promoter’s standpoint, was to fatten the record of the house fighter.
Jaylan didn’t follow the script. He won a unanimous decision over his 11-3-1 opponent, advancing his record to 4-3-4, and returned to Las Vegas with a new nickname, albeit not one of his own choosing or intended as a permanent accessory. This reporter dubbed him The Palindrome Man.
A palindrome is a word that spells the same backward and forward. Phillips’ current record is palindrome-ish.
It’s an odd record. One would be hard-pressed to find other active boxers with a slew of draws inside a small window of fights. It harks to the days, circa 1900, when some journeymen boxers accumulated as many draws as wins and losses combined.
A boxer with a 4-3-4 record would seem to be an unlikely candidate for a feature story, but the affable Jaylan Phillips is not your run-of-the-mill prizefighter.
Boxers, as we know, tend to be city folk, drawn from the black belts and the barrios of America’s urban places. Phillips grew up in Ebro, Florida, population 237 per the 2020 U.S. census. Ebro is in the Florida panhandle in the northwestern part of the state in a county that was dry until 2022. It is 23 miles due north of Panama City Beach but a world apart from the seaside Florida resort town and its pricey beachfront condos.
Of those 237 people, only five identified as African-American or black, or so it would be written, but the census-taker was obviously slothful. “That’s a crazy number,” says Phillips. “There has to be at least 40 or 50. And the reason I know that is that we are all related.”
“What does one do for excitement in Ebro?” we asked him. “Hunting, fishing, trapping, that sort of thing,” he said. And what does one trap? “Mostly raccoons,” he said, while adding that some of the elders in his extended family consider it a delicacy.
Phillips fought in Rochester, New York, on Saturday and was back in the gym in Las Vegas on Tuesday. He lives alone and does not own a car. His apartment, near UNLV, is three-and-a-half miles from the Top Rank Gym where he does most of his training. He jogs there and then jogs home again, this in a city where the temperature routinely exceeds 100 degrees for much of the year.
During his high school years, Phillips, now 25, concedes that he smoked a lot of weed and it impacted his grades. His interest in boxing was fueled by the exploits of Roy Jones Jr, another fighter with roots in the Florida panhandle. In his spare time, he enjoys watching tapes of old Sugar Ray Robinson fights which can be found on youtube. “He was the best,” says Phillips of Robinson who has been dead for 35 years, echoing an opinion that hasn’t diminished with the passage of time.
In his second pro fight, Phillips was thrust against a baby-faced novice from Cleveland, Abdullah Mason. Although Mason was only 17 years old, the Top Rank matchmaker did Jaylan no favors. He was still standing when the referee waived the fight off in the second round.
About the heavily-hyped Mason, Phillips says, “He’s a beast, like they say, but I would love to fight him again. I took that fight on two weeks’ notice. I’m confident the outcome would have been different if I had had a full camp.”
This observation will undoubtedly strike some as a delusion. Pound for pound, the precocious Mason just may be the top pro fighter in the world in his age group. But Jaylan isn’t lacking confidence which spills over when he talks about what lies ahead for him. “I will be a world champion,” he says matter-of-factly. And after boxing? “I see myself back home in Ebro living a humble life, hunting and fishing, but with a million dollars in the bank.”
If unswerving dedication and self-confidence are the keys to a successful boxing career, then Jaylan Phillips, notwithstanding his 4-3-4 record, is destined for big things. But here’s the rub:
“In boxing, it isn’t what you earn, but what you negotiate,” says the esteemed British boxing pundit Steve Bunce alluding to the importance of a well-connected manager. In a perfect world, each win would be stepping-stone to a bigger fight with a commensurately larger purse. But in this chaotic sport, a “B side” fighter who scores an upset in a low-level fight may actually be penalized for his “impertinence.” Promoters may be wary of using him again (the old “risk/reward” encumbrance) and, in a sport where it’s important for an up-and-comer to stay busy, his progress may be stalled.
Phillips doesn’t know when his next assignment will materialize, but regardless he will keep plugging along while setting an example that others who aspire to greatness would be wise to emulate.
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Emanuel Navarrete and Rafael Espinoza Shine in Phoenix
Emanuel Navarrete and Rafael Espinoza Shine in Phoenix
PHOENIX – Saturday was a busy night on the global boxing scene, and it’s quite likely that the howling attendees in Phoenix’s Footprint Center witnessed the finest overall card of the international schedule. The many Mexican flags on display in the packed, scaled down arena signaled the event’s theme.
Co-main events featured rematches that arose from a pair of prior crowd-pleasing slugfests. Each of tonight’s headlining bouts ended at the halfway point, but that was their only similarity.
Emanuel “Vaquero” Navarrete, now 39-2-1 (32), defended his WBO Junior Lightweight belt with a dramatic stoppage of more-than-willing Oscar Valdez, 32-3 (24). The 29-year-old champion spoke of retirement wishes, but after dominating a blazing battle in which he scored three knockdowns, his only focus was relaxing during the holidays then getting back to what sounded like long-term business.
“Valdez was extremely tough in this fight,” said Navarrete. “I knew I had to push him back and I did. You are now witnessing the second phase of my career and you can expect great things from me in 2025.”
“I don’t really know about the future,” said the crestfallen, 33-year-old Valdez. “No excuses. He did what he wanted to and I couldn’t.”
Navarrete, a three-division titlist, came up one scorecard short of a fourth belt in his previous fight last May, a split decision loss to Denys Berinchyk. This was Navarrete’s fourth Arizona appearance so he was cheered like a homeboy, but Valdez was definitely the crowd favorite, evident from the cheers that erupted as both fighters were shown arriving in glistening, low rider automobiles.
Both men came out throwing huge shots, but it was Navarrete who scored a flash knockdown in the first round, setting the tone for the rest of the fight. There was fierce action in every frame, with Navarrete getting the best of most of it, but even when he was in trouble Valdez roared back and brought the crowd to their feet. He got dropped again at the very end of round four, and Navarrete sent his mouthpiece into orbit the round after that.
When Navarrette drove Valdez into the ropes during round six it looked like referee Raul Caiz, Jr was about to intervene, but before he could decide, Navarrete finished matters himself with a perfect left to the ribs that crumpled Valdez into a KO at 2:42.
“He talked about getting ready to retire soon so I told him we had to fight again right now,” said Valdez prior to the rematch. There were numerous “be careful what you wish for” type predictions of doom and he entered the ring at around a two to one underdog, understanding the contest’s make or break stakes. “Boxing penalizes you if you have a lot of losses,” observed Valdez. “It’s not like other sports where you can lose and do better next season. In boxing, most people don’t want to see you again after a couple of losses.”
What Valdez might decide remains to be seen, but even in defeat he proved to be a warrior worth watching.
Co-Feature
After their epic, razor-close encounter almost exactly a year ago, it was obvious Rafael Espinoza, and fellow 30-year-old Robeisy Ramirez should meet again for the WBO featherweight title belt Espinoza earned by an upset majority decision. Espinoza turned the trick again this time around, inside the distance, but it was more anti-climactic than anything like toe-to-toe.
The 6’1” Espinoza, now 26-0 (22), was the aggressor from the opening frame, but 5’6” Ramirez, 14-3 (9) employed his short stature well to stay out of immediate danger and countered to the body for a slight edge. The Cuban challenger avoided much of their previous firefight and initially controlled the tempo. The crowd jeered him for staying away but it was an effective strategy, at least at first.
Espinoza connected much better in the fifth round and looked fresher as Ramirez’s face rapidly reddened. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere in round six, Ramirez took a punch then raised a glove in surrender. Whatever the reason, even looking at Ramirez’s swollen right eye, it looked like a “No Mas” moment. Replays showed a straight right to the eye socket, but that didn’t stop the crowd from hooting their disgust after ref Chris Flores signaled the end at 0:12.
***
Richard Torrez, Jr, now 12-0 (11), displayed his Olympic silver medal pedigree in a heavyweight bout against Issac Munoz, 18-2-1 (15). Torrez, 236.6, found his punching range quickly with southpaw leads as Munoz, 252, tried to stand his ground but looked hurt by early body work that forced him into the ropes. He was gasping for breath as Torrez peppered him in the second, and Munoz went back to his corner on unsteady legs.
Munoz’s team should have thought about saving him for another day in the third as he ate big shots. Luckily, referee Raul Caiz, Jr. was wiser and had seen enough, waving it off for a TKO at 0:59.
“I don’t train for the opponent,” reflected Torrez, who isn’t far from true contender status. “Every time I train, I train for a world championship fight.”
***
Super-lightweight Lindolfo Delgado, 139.9, improved to 22-0 (16), and took another step into the world title picture against Jackson Marinez, now 22-4 (10), 139.2.
On paper this junior welterweight matchup appeared fairly even, and Marinez managed to keep it that way for almost half the scheduled ten rounds against a solid prospect but Delgado kept upping the ante until Marinez was out of chips. The assembled swarm was whistling for more action after three tentative opening frames, as Delgado loaded up but couldn’t put much offense together.
That changed in the 4th when Delgado connected with solid crosses. In the fifth, a fine combination dropped Marinez into a delayed knockdown and a wicked follow-up right to the guts finished the wobbly Marinez, who had nothing to be ashamed of, off in the arms of ref Wes Melton. Official TKO time was 2:13.
In a matter of concurrent programming, Saturday also held a lot of highly publicized college football and basketball games which likely detracted from the larger mainstream audience and media coverage this fight card deserved. That’s a shame but you can’t fault boxing, Top Rank, or any of the fighters for that because, once again, they all came through big time in Phoenix.
Photos credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank
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