Miss anything on Thursday? You might have! Catch up with the roundup.
Top Stories
Site notes: there will be staff picks today for the WBSS fights and Wilder-Breazeale at Noon ET and 5:00 pm ET, respectively. The Wilder-Breazeale weigh-in goes live today at 1:30 pm ET, and we’ll have the stream for you. We’ll also have live coverage of two cards: Ryan Burnett’s return in Belfast at 3:00 pm ET via ESPN+, and the Broadway Boxing show at 8:30 pm ET on UFC Fight Pass.
Deontay Wilder and Dominic Breazeale are almost to fight night in Brooklyn. On Thursday, they had a pretty intense press conference, featuring Wilder rambling about the violence he’s going to inflict on Breazeale, who took a few shots back at the WBC titleholder. The staredown featured Wilder just talking and talking and talking.
Showtime’s All Access has been with the fighters this week, producing a couple of short All Access Daily episodes. Breazeale has said he sees no fundamental skill in Wilder, but then who does, really?
Another Showtime fight looks close to being announced for July 27, and may be during Saturday night’s broadcast, with Gervonta Davis heading home to Baltimore to face WBA mandatory challenger Ricardo Nunez. It’s not a good matchup, which puts it about par for the course for what PBC has given Showtime in 2019.
The WBSS in Glasgow is also almost here on Saturday, which a fair amount of you regulars are more excited for than Wilder-Breazeale. Josh Taylor says he expects to handle Ivan Baranchyk, and then have “no problems” with Regis Prograis in the final. Anthony Yigit has been in the ring with both Taylor and Baranchyk, and he broke down the matchup.
In the other WBSS fight on Saturday, Emmanuel Rodriguez’s team are alleging some poor treatment in Scotland, blaming Naoya Inoue’s team.
The WBSS fights are live on Saturday at 2:00 pm ET on DAZN.
Quick Hits
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16188618/commey_tr.jpg)
- Richard Commey will defend his IBF lightweight title against Ray Beltran on June 28, a fight that was expected and is now official. The current Top Rank plan seems to be do Commey-Beltran, then have the winner face Teofimo Lopez if Lopez beats Masayoshi Nakatani in an IBF eliminator, while Vasiliy Lomachenko fights Luke Campbell for the vacant WBC belt. If Lomachenko wins that, then he fights the Commey/Beltran-Lopez winner for all four belts. I don’t mean to write off Nakatani, who certainly would be in that mix if he upsets Lopez in July.
- Billy Joe Saunders and Shefat Isufi are both amped up for Saturday’s WBO super middleweight title fight, which will stream live on ESPN+.
- Junior welterweight Alex Saucedo has decided to part ways with trainer Abel Sanchez.
- It was another entertaining episode of Golden Boy DAZN Thursday Night Fights, with really good fights in the main event and co-feature. Romero Duno won a technical split decision over Juan Antonio Rodriguez in the lightweight main event, and prospect Manny Robles III survived a real battle with Rigoberto Hermosillo in the featherweight co-feature. The next edition of GBxDAZN will be on Thursday, June 13, featuring Seniesa Estrada in the main event.
- Deontay Wilder says if Wladimir Klitschko comes back, he’ll have to work his way back into a world title-type fight. He’s probably wrong, someone would probably give Wladimir one right away if he wanted it, but he’s not wrong in that it would probably be the smarter idea, competitively-speaking.
- Unbeaten junior welterweights Maxim Dadashev (13-0, 11 KO) and Subriel Matias (13-0, 13 KO) will meet in the Teofimo-Nakatani co-feature on July 19.
- Fanlong Meng will face Adam Deines in an IBF 175-pound eliminator on June 1 in Macau.
- Miguel Berchelt will attend next week’s WBO super featherweight title fight between Masayuki Ito and Jamel Herring, and likely challenge the winner.