Ten Rounds while Amtrak-ing to New York for another women’s title fight …
10. Anthony Joshua made it clear this week that he intends to soldier on following a knockout loss to Daniel Dubois last weekend. Meanwhile Turki Alalshikh, the Chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and de facto face of Saudi boxing, is reportedly pushing for an immediate rematch between Joshua and Dubois.
Yeesh. Sending Joshua back in with Dubois, who knocked AJ down three times before flattening him with a counter right hand, feels like a bad idea. Save for a few seconds in the fifth round the fight between Joshua and Dubois was utterly non-competitive. If Joshua, 34, insists on continuing his career, a wiser move would be targeting a fight with Deontay Wilder (Malik Scott, Wilder’s trainer, has insisted that Wilder will fight again) or pursuing a showdown with Tyson Fury, should Fury lose a rematch against Oleksandr Usyk in December. Hard to see a Dubois rematch going much differently.
9. It should be a good scrap at Madison Square Garden on Friday when Mikaela Mayer, a former U.S. Olympian and 130-pound champion, takes on Sandy Ryan for a 147-pound belt. The rivalry between the two has turned personal in the aftermath of Ryan moving her training camp to the U.S. to work with Mayer’s training team, specifically longtime coach Kay Koroma, whom Mayer moved to Las Vegas to be closer to last year. Mayer has since split with Koroma and trained for this fight with Kofi Jantuah, another Vegas-based trainer.
“I should be having someone helping me get opportunities and navigate my way back to the world title, not working around me and training my competition,” says Mayer. “I’m genuinely not upset at any of them. I am actually grateful because it led me to Kofi and it led me to a situation where I feel a hundred times more taken care of. I feel like I’m learning and I’m growing at a faster pace than ever. I got a better coach, a better situation, and I got the fight that I wanted.”
8. As first reported by veteran boxing journalist Keith Idec, undefeated 140-pound contender Richardson Hitchins will return in December against José Pedraza. Which raises the question: Why isn’t Hitchins, the mandatory challenger for the IBF title held by Liam Paro, facing Paro next? After all, both Paro and Hitchins are promoted by Matchroom Boxing and Paro, who defeated Subriel Matias last June, has nothing scheduled.
While Hitchins won’t face Paro, he told me he expects to enforce his mandatory status next year “unless another opportunity comes for one of the other belts.” Hitchins has admitted that he struggles with the IBF’s 10 pound, post weigh-in rehydration clause but told me that if that is the only title opportunity available to him, he will take it.
7. Hollywood’s latest foray into boxing is The Featherweight, which tells the story of Willie Pep, who had multiple reigns as 126-pound champion. The story focuses on Pep’s later years, in the early 1960s, when Pep, then retired, was considering a comeback. Pep, one of the greatest defensive fighters in boxing history, retired with a record of 229-11-1. James Madio, who plays Pep in the docudrama, which is shot in Pep’s hometown of Hartford, Conn., told me Pep’s struggle to adapt to life after boxing drew him to the role.
“It’s like, what do you do?” asks Madio. “You don’t have any tangible skills. He doesn’t want to greet people at a door and walk them to a table in a place that he always ate. He doesn’t want to be a doorman, doesn’t want to work at a desk at the Hilton. He doesn’t want to do anything. He wants to save face. He’s got a lot of pride.
“Willie, to some degree, was his own demise. He gambled his money away. He had that great quote that says, ‘I made $1.2 million in my career. I spent $1.3 of it.’ It’s just who he was. He got divorced six times. All his wives were younger than him. All his wives took the houses. He has another great quote that I say all the time is, ‘As a fighter, first you lose your legs, then you lose your money and then you lose your friends.’ I mean, think about that. And that’s really it. He was his own worst enemy and that’s why he went back to the ring.”
The Featherweight is in theatres in New York, Los Angeles and Hartford.
6. I’ve bellyached plenty about Gervonta Davis’s choice of opponents in the past. But criticism of Lamont Roach, who is the frontrunner to face Davis in the fall, a source told me, is unwarranted. Good faith efforts to make a unification fight with Vasyl Lomachenko were scuttled when Lomachenko chose to take the rest of the year off while talks with Shakur Stevenson never got off the ground.
Could Davis move up in weight to face José Valenzuela? Sure, but Valenzuela, who picked up a piece of the 140-pound title with a win over Isaac Cruz in August, is as much an unknown as Roach, a reigning 130-pound titleholder. What a Roach-Davis fight will do is sell tickets. Lots of them. Roach, from Washington D.C., and Davis, from Baltimore, would draw a huge crowd in the mid-Atlantic area. Capital One Arena, which Davis sold out in 2023, generating a record $5.1 million gate for his win over Héctor Luis Garcia, is a natural venue.
5. Boxing giveth … and boxing taketh away. Social media buzzed Thursday over a report that David Benavidez and David Morrell were negotiating a fight for December. Benavidez, 27, and Morrell, 26, are two top light heavyweight contenders. While Benavidez has spent the last two years chasing a fight with Canelo Alvarez, Morrell has been chasing Benavidez. A report that Benavidez was now interested in the fight was well received.
Unfortunately, it isn’t true, at least according to Benavidez, who took to social media to shoot down the possibility of him fighting Morrell next. Benavidez, who defeated Oleksandr Gvozdyk in his 175-pound debut last June, called Morrell a “future” opponent. “Messy,” is how a source described the talks between Benavidez and Morrell. That means Morrell, who out-pointed Radivoje Kalajdzic last month in his first fight at light heavyweight, will have to wait a little longer for his shot at Benavidez.
4. Is Danny Garcia a Hall of Famer? Garcia, whose career likely ended after a knockout loss to Erislandy Lara this month, has a borderline case. He was one of the best 140-pounders of this generation, with wins over Amir Khan and Lucas Matthysse. But he failed to match that success at 147 pounds—Garcia lost his three biggest fights to Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter and Errol Spence Jr.—and fought just twice in the last four years. It will be interesting to see how the voters judge Garcia when his name appears on the ballot.
3. Netflix will produce a three-part documentary series on Jake Paul and Mike Tyson that will air in the weeks leading up to the heavyweight fight between Tyson and Paul on November 15. The series, executive produced by ex-Sports Illustrated EP Ian Orefice, will go behind the scenes of the training camps of both leading into the fight. The first two episodes will premiere on November 7.
2. A subplot of this week’s press conference promoting the October 12 card headlined by the mouthwatering light heavyweight title unification fight between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol was a savage rant by super middleweight Chris Eubank Jr.
Eubank Jr., who will appear on the card, took the opportunity to napalm every promoter he has ever worked with. That includes everyone from Frank Warren, who Eubank called a “scumbag,” to Eddie Hearn, who Eubank chastised for attempting to push a scheduled fight between Eubank and Conor Benn through in 2022 after Benn tested positive for a banned substance, to Kalle Sauerland, who Eubank said kept him in a “terrible contract” for years.
Hours later, after Warren publicly threatened to sue Eubank, he issued a statement apologizing for his comments. But that is what it means to wake up and choose violence.
1. Mahmoud Charr and Kubrat Pulev will finally (maybe?) meet on December 7 for a secondary version of the heavyweight title. Charr, 39, has not fought in two years. Pulev, 43, won a low-level fight last March. Get your popcorn ready.
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