A Pearl from the Boxing Vault: Fritzie Zivic Will See You Now

Published

7 months ago

June 19, 2024

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“He was a great teacher,” said Billy Conn. “[Fighting Zivic] was like going to college for five years, just boxing him ten rounds…”

Fritzie Zivic never asked why. He never asked if his opponent hit hard, if his opponent deserved the shot, if the opponent would be tough. He just said “yes” and signed the contract. While [Jake] LaMotta, who somehow gained the reputation for fearlessness of which Zivic was more deserving, was asked about Charley Burley, he is supposed to have muttered “Why do I need Burley when I have Zivic?” Zivic, of course, stepped out of his weight class to lose an under-celebrated series with LaMotta, and was one of the few top white contenders to ever meet the avoided Burley.

Perhaps this fearlessness is the reason why Zivic may have fought a better array of boxers than any fighter in history. In addition to the multiple contests with LaMotta and Burley, he met Kid Azteca, Bob Montgomery, Beau Jack, Henry Armstrong, Freddie Cochrane, Lew Jenkins, Izzy Jannazzo, Phil Furr, Bummy Davis, Sammy Angott, Lou Ambers and Jimmy Leto, something very close to a “who’s who” of boxing’s golden age, and he met most of them more than once. He didn’t always win, but he always gave his all and for this the people and the promoters of his hometown of Pittsburgh and beyond loved him. Other fighters? Not so much.

“He’s the dirtiest fighter I ever met,” claimed Charley Burley after his disputed points loss in their first fight. “He thumbed me over and over again.”

“When you fight for a living,” Zivic would explain years later, “if you’re smart you fight with every trick you know. If I hadn’t known nine zillion of them I never could have won the welterweight title from Henry Armstrong.”

In the modern era, fighters can come to a title without even matching a top contender. Forty fights is a career. But in the 1940s, it was unusual to see a champion with so few fights, even a young one. Like other trades, to reach the top of the heap a fighter had to become a master craftsman, the tools at his disposal needed to be of the highest quality. To this end, fighters needed to be matched often or tough or both. But there were and are some fighters who can provide a special lesson to that prospect or contender, a boxing lesson that, win or lose, crystallizes the nature of the sport for the man in the opposite corner.

Fritzie Zivic was such a fighter. Unquestionably world class in his own right, Zivic was a quick learner who took his “zillion tricks” and applied them to roughhouse boxing that tested every corner of his opponent, technical, physical and mental. Anybody that beat him looked destined for the top, anyone that lost could still pick up more than a thing or two. Unquestionably teak-tough, a stinging if not prohibitive puncher, he could box inside or out and a tight defense and iron chin kept him to two legitimate stoppage losses in a 232-fight career. But unquestionably, Zivic’s greatest strength were his smarts, the tricks, traps and roughhouse tactics he absorbed like a sponge during his eighteen years in the ring.

In December of 1936, Zivic would teach some of these tricks to a wonder-kid tearing his way up the middleweight division, one Billy Conn. Zivic was not yet in his own absolute prime but he was twenty-three and listed as a veteran of some sixty-eight fights. Still a teenager, Conn would at least have had bulk to fall back on as a substitute for experience, weighing some seven pounds heavier on fight night at just under 157lbs.

Zivic started fast, attacking with both hands and Conn allowed him his way, trying to outbox and outpunch the smaller man in the pocket. This had become Billy’s habit, fighting, as he did, in a fan-friendly manner that had made him Pittsburgh’s favorite prospect. He had been in a desperately close series with resident local tough and brutal infighter “Honey Boy” Jones. According to some, Conn had been lucky to emerge from their third fight with a decision, his inability to adapt costing him dear in points and punches. Now Zivic fought in a style intent on taking advantage of the same flaws Jones had partially exposed, and Billy was paying for it in blood.

“Through two torrid rounds,” wrote Regis Welsh for The Pittsburgh Press, “Fritzie belted Conn to a fare-thee-well, but never quite touched the vital spot. At the end of the second…[Conn] was smeared with blood from a cut on his left cheek and a badly battered mouth.”

The press hadn’t yet been enlightened to Conn’s iron chin and it’s quite possible that Fritzie had found the “vital spot” over and again throughout the fight. As time would tell, even history’s mightiest puncher would struggle to get over on the near invulnerable Conn. However, at the beginning of the third Billy looked “tired, weary and worn out” and “in the fourth and fifth, Zivic, in a rushing charge, bore Conn to neutral ropes and belted him about the head and body until it seemed that the anticipated kayo was inevitable.”

It needs to be said though, that in spite of his fighting the wrong fight, Conn was doing his own good work, mainly to the body. Some reports credit Conn with turning the fight with a body punch as early as the third, but whilst the supposed fight of two halves (Zivic winning the first five, Conn coming back in the second half of the fight) did not occur, it’s unlikely that Conn’s hooks had the supposed affect this early. Only two judges scored the third for Conn, and all three gave Zivic the fourth. Conn wouldn’t win a round on all three judges’ scorecards until the sixth.

It was in the sixth round that Conn cracked, and went outside. In the seventh and eighth Conn “boxed beautifully…he danced, feinted, pranced and punched.”  Zivic, now out of his element as a bullying counterpuncher and destructive infighter struggled to get past Billy’s “piston-like” jab. Conn had been trained for this by defensive specialist Johnny Ray from the very beginning, but he had been unable to make the transition in the ring until Fritzie had forced it. As one would expect, Zivic now changed tactics too, gunning almost exclusively for the body, only hunting Conn with power punches, bringing him the eighth round on one card. In the tenth, they went at it toe-to-toe again. “The boys used everything but knives,” stated the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “A wild-eyed crowd looked on.” The final round was shared on the three official cards resulting in a split decision win for Conn (6-3-1, 5-4-1, 4-5-1).

“From a mile in the rear to a nose in front takes heart in a man or a horse,” wrote Welsh in The Press. “Particularly in a novice of Conn’s immature ring experience against a seasoned veteran of Zivic’s type.”

Zivic’s type indeed! Fritzie was hell on wheels for a young fighter, one that hadn’t seen a top class cutie, never mind a back-alley wizard. But Conn knew what that fight had been worth, and he knew he was the better for it.

“He was a great teacher. [Fighting Zivic] was like going to college for five years, just boxing him ten rounds…I learned a lot in that fight. He’s a tough fighter, but I believe I’m just as tough.”

It’s a double lesson for a relative novice like Conn. First, he remembers every foul, every slither out of sight of the referee, every feint that cost him a round, every dig inside on the break. But it also teaches him that he can take it, that he can get in there with world-class fighters who know more than him and beat them. The first lesson is priceless, but the second can be the key to a career. Over the next twelve months the young Conn, who had struggled so desperately with Honey Boy Jones only three months earlier, would defeat great champions and ring legends such as Teddy Yarosz, Young Corbett III and Vince Dundee before adding Fred Apostoli and Solly Krieger and annexing the world’s light heavyweight title in 1939.

In 1941 he would be matched with the great Joe Louis. It would be unfair to Conn’s great trainer Ray, and to Conn himself, to lay too much credit for Conn’s legendary performance at Zivic’s door, but Conn’s tactics against Louis—mixing careful, punch-picking infighting with beautiful movement and judge of distance on the outside—were basically a more perfect version of the tactics he used in rounds six, seven, eight and nine against Zivic.

As for the teacher, he was naturally disappointed and was keen on a rematch, but fate was to intervene. Zivic would contract pneumonia the following summer whilst training for a match with Vince Dundee.

Chet Smith, then editor of The Pittsburgh Press: “There didn’t seem to be a chance for him…so we collected all we knew about him, wrote it into a story and sent it to the composing room…There were two weeks when it was touch and go with Fritzie, and the hospital folk refused to give out a single cheerful bulletin. We knew of course when he finally came out of the hospital that his boxing days were ended.”

I guess Zivic would have snorted at that. However they build them out in Zivic’s ancestral Croatia, they build them tough because Zivic was not only far from ended as a boxer, he would get better. There were more lessons to give out. The greatest fighter that would ever draw breath, he needed a lesson.

“I learned more in these two fights with Zivic than in all my other fights put together!”

So said Ray Robinson after pulling off the extraordinary feat of stopping Zivic in January of 1942. But this was the second time Zivic, a rarity in that he never discriminated against opposition on the grounds of colour or quality, had met Robinson. The first had occurred when Zivic had already slipped past his absolute prime, in October of 1941.

“It might have been a draw. It was close,” wrote the correspondent for The Telegraph Herald, but Zivic, the heavier man for a change, looked unsurprised at the unanimous decision against him. In the middle rounds he had, to a degree, had his way with Robinson but Sugar’s explosive domination of the ninth had left him struggling and at no time had he solved the Robinson jab. He knew he was beaten. “[Robinson] took a unanimous decision with such a convincing demonstration of speed and power,” wrote United Press ringside reporter Jack Cuddy, “that he will be favored to win the title.”

Robinson was learning from Zivic the same thing Conn had, that he could master a man at the next level, a veteran, a bigger one at that. But he learned more specific and unpleasant lessons in this fight, too.

“He was about the smartest I ever fought,” Robinson would later say in conversation with writer WC Heinz.  “…he showed me how you can make a man butt open his own eye…he’d slip my lead, then he’d put his hand behind my neck and he’d bring my eye down on his head. Fritzie was smart.”

He also taught Ray that he could coast a little in those middle rounds, that at the highest level he didn’t need to put forth every ounce in every moment, that he could let the occasional round go as long as he was paying attention. The same pattern that Sugar used in his first fight with Zivic he would use in his sixth fight with LaMotta, for the middleweight title, contesting the early rounds, easing off in the middle, and finishing so strongly as to stop the unstoppable, lifting the title on a late TKO. He sharpened that tool for the first time against Zivic.

By now Zivic was almost past the stage of teaching fighters of Robinson’s calibre lessons, but he had one more to give in their second fight just three months later.

Firstly, Robinson showed the importance of a lesson learned, nullifying Zivic’s darker arts, like Conn he was a better fighter for his 10 rounds in the ring with Fritzie. He worked hard to the body in clinches he couldn’t contest with craft or strength (something else he would repeat against LaMotta in their title meeting) and he was careful to break clinches at any cost when Zivic looked to utilize those lethal butts. When his opponent tried holding and hitting on the referee’s blindside, instead of trading he would dance away. Robinson had learned that the man who owned the real estate would win the negotiation and Zivic was being outclassed as a result. Of the first six rounds he won perhaps the first. In the seventh though, Robinson momentarily forgot himself and Fritzie delivered his last lesson. As Robinson came in Zivic stepped back and cracked Robinson with a left hook. “It really hurt. I was coming in and it met me on the chin!” Robinson would say afterwards that it was the hardest punch he had ever been hit with, according to The Afro American.

In the middle of the ninth, Robinson dropped Zivic with a perfect mirror image of the punch he had been shown in the seventh, using the right hand to ditch the heavier man as he was on the way in. Up at nine, Zivic never recovered, and although he was likely stopped prematurely in the tenth, he had nothing left to teach, at least not to Sugar. At 28-0, Ray, like Billy before him, saw his 20 rounds with Zivic as nothing less than finishing school for one of the most storied careers in boxing. They are only two of the dozens of fighters that Fritzie took to school, but perhaps they are the gifts he helped in giving that we can be most grateful for.

For the purposes of this article we’ve taken a look at three Zivic losses. I hoped, by looking at his fights with Billy Conn and Sugar Ray, we might see the benefit of letting a top prospect meet a dangerous genius-thug like Fritzie, the self-proclaimed “second dirtiest fighter in history” (he reserved top spot for Harry Greb). But Zivic did lose those fights. Let it not be forgotten then that between losing to Conn and Robinson, Zivic lifted the world’s welterweight title, destroying with a mixture of aggression, uppercuts and that dirty bag of tricks for which he remains famous, one Henry Armstrong. Zivic finished Armstrong as title material, beating him for the championship of the world not once but twice.

A 4-1 underdog, Zivic had been magnanimous about his own chances going in to their opener.

“If I lose it won’t be the first fight I lost, and if I win it, it won’t be the first fight I won.”

But Zivic had learned his own brutal lessons across the years and would be merciless in bringing them to bear. Also, across the years, between his title win and these more enlightened times, Zivic’s achievement in beating Armstrong has been undermined. Armstrong was old. He was past his best. Zivic had to get dirty to do it. All of that may be true, but it needs to be remembered that Armstrong had gone undefeated in thirteen bouts prior to meeting Zivic and that all of these fights were in defence of his welterweight crown, outside of one, his celebrated tilt at a world middleweight title. It needs to be remembered that in the previous three months, Armstrong had knocked out world-class contenders Phil Furr and Lew Jenkins. It needs to be remembered that Armstrong had his own bag of tricks, and that referee Arthur Donovan’s famous refrain, “if you guys wanna fight like that it‘s okay with me” was prompted by an Armstrong foul and not a Zivic one.

Most of all it needs to be remembered that Zivic never asked why, he just signed the contract. Whichever way you want to look at it, they just don’t make them like that anymore.

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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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