The Rematch of 2023: Kazuto Ioka vs Joshua Franco

Published

2 years ago

June 19, 2023

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The most fascinating rematch of the year will take place this weekend in Tokyo, Japan where the world’s number four super-flyweight, Kazuto Ioka (29-2-1) meets the world’s number five super-flyweight, Joshua Franco (18-1-3). This is a re-run of their December 2022 split draw and promises something fascinating.

Franco, out of Texas, is perhaps the most aggressive fighter in the world. In December, he threw 1400 punches, nearly double the number thrown by Ioka, out of Osaka, who deployed all his experience to remain in control of the early part of the fight, relying upon superior accuracy and technical excellence to outscore a fighter who outworked him in every single round. In the first, they threw over a hundred jabs between them and landed almost none, striking at one another’s high guards, Ioka giving ground in those small increments and showing better head-movement.

Part of what Franco struggled with in the early part of that fight was range. Ioka is a general of renown and he knows the ring-ranges and how to access them. If Franco stood off, he found himself engaged in a technical battle he absolutely could not win; if he overstepped, he found himself rushing an opponent who has mastered small moves and has the uppercut to protect them and the right-hand to exact a wearying toll. Both men have chins equal to the other’s power and it is unlikely that the rematch will produce a stoppage unless the thirty-four-year-old Ioka has gone back considerably, but Franco’s problem was not one of accumulation but one of points. Wherever he tried to fight he seemed outmatched.

Meanwhile, he was forced to continue to fight at a demanding pace because any round in which he was outworked he was sure to lose. He had no choice but to continue to attack and to try to rack up points of his own while placing his fight-engine under the closest scrutiny imaginable. Rounds fell through his fingers like sand, until, in the fourth, he banked one.

Franco had found the Goldilocks range for his punches, putting his left foot inside Ioka’s left foot and staying there. He allowed Ioka his superior boxing and bet upon himself to out-punch the Japanese, and it worked. Franco is not fast handed, but he throws meaty punches that sound and look dramatic. Both men were busier in the fourth round and it suited Franco to get hit if it meant he could land important punches of his own. He had established a foothold in the fight. He would not have it all his own way, far from it, but he won the remainder of the fight, arguably stringing together four through nine before dropping off in the tenth.

Ioka seemed genuinely befuddled to me. He did jab, he did push off with both gloves, he did slip and duck and throw the right when his back hit the ropes and he did make those incremental moves, but Franco now matched them and it seemed no matter where Ioka turned, Franco was in his space without over-reaching in the way he had through three. If Franco hit as hard as his punches looked and sounded, Ioka would have been in trouble in the sixth, but a knockout percentage of thirty-five won’t cut it. In fact, Ioka (46%) is probably the puncher of the two.

Ioka tried to neaten up even further, fighting only along the direct front, uppercuts and jabs, while Franco threw meathooks, going to the body with more frequency as the fight progressed, both throwing eye-watering beltline work throughout. But it should be noted that within this chaos, Ioka did not panic. And he continued to outland Franco. Only human, Franco ceded the tenth and I thought the eleventh, though the final and official scorecards were probably settled in this confusing and difficult spell of the fight, nine and eleven so close as to be scored either way so far as I could tell.

Those scorecards ran 115-113 for Franco and 114-114, 114-114, a majority draw. To rescue that draw, Franco had to win that twelfth round. Had Ioka, who came out of his corner screaming, won this round, he would have been fighting someone else this Saturday and Franco would be cursing his flagging stamina and looking to match more minor contenders. Instead, he turned in the best round of his professional career, throwing an overwhelming number of punches in what was his busiest round of a hard fight. As has been said, quantity has a quality of its own, and if Ioka wasn’t quite overwhelmed, he was certainly chased out of contention of this three minutes, which you should see if you haven’t.

I enjoyed the first fight enough to watch and score it twice, emerging once with a 114-114 card, and once with a 115-113 card for Franco, mirroring the judging exactly. But it is not a classic. Perhaps it is the sight and sound of the punches both men landed, hard and sure but never drawing a serious reaction. There was something bloodless about it. A good fight but not a great one.

What is exciting about the rematch is not that it might be the same, which would certainly be worth watching in its own right, but that it might be different. Franco found his man, beyond all hope of contradiction and for all that he slipped a bit in the late rounds, he rallied magnificently to find him again in the twelfth. When a swarmer finds his man, it tends to be a permanent arrangement. Franco knows how Ioka moves, where he will be and so was able to force him to fight with more frequency, and often to outfight him. Will round one of the rematch just be round thirteen?

If that is the case, Ioka cannot hope to win. There is no way Franco will lose each of the first three rounds again and Ioka needed each of these just to score the draw first time around. The only solutions for the Japanese veteran is for him to change where he will be, or changes up his fight plan completely enough that it doesn’t matter that Franco finds him.

The notion of Ioka on his bike is attractive but at thirty-four years of age, it is unlikely he could sustain this strategy. Worse, Franco thrives on momentum. Vacating the space might just encourage the American to fill it. It seems likely to me then that Ioka will try to increase his punch output early which is going to lead to a very dramatic late showdown, or, my guess, that he will have prepared some pet-punch, some by-design combination that will place the predictable Franco under his control or in his wheelhouse. This is likely to produce something very agreeable for both the Sweet Scientists and the casual fan.

On balance, and based upon very little, I think that Ioka’s time has come and gone. He’s in with the wrong man, a man who would have been beaten back by Ioka in his prime but who now represents a nightmarish prospect for an older fighter. It will once again be close, but this time Franco will be contesting the twelfth in search of the win rather than the draw and will do enough to get there, split on the official cards.

One fight of intrigue appears on the undercard. Daigo Higa (Japan, 19-2-1) and Sirichai Thaiyen (Thailand, 65-4) wore straps in previous lives down at 112lbs. Now they meet in a crossroads dust-up at 118lbs. For the loser, professional oblivion, but the winner will become a person of interest at bantamweight.

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Matt McGrain

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

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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 11^th 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

Published

3 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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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

Published

6 days ago

April 12, 2025

David A. Avila

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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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