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Chris Mannix of DAZN and Sports Illustrated has what you might call a minor obsession, at least, with seeing a fight between middleweight titleholders Demetrius Andrade and Jermall Charlo. To me it’s kind of an odd fight to obsess over, but to each their own.
Mannix brought the fight up again on social media, and Andrade had a quick and blunt response:
Ain’t gonna happpen because @FutureOfBoxing and Ronnie Shields KNOW Jermall Charlo can’t beat me! Report that... https://t.co/BYOaMNfcPa
— Demetrius Andrade (@BooBooAndrade) March 26, 2020
The 32-year-old Andrade (29-0, 18 KO) is coming off of a Jan. 30 win over Luke Keeler, while the 29-year-old Charlo (30-0, 22 KO) beat Dennis Hogan in his last appearance on Dec. 7. Both fights ended by stoppage.
Andrade has been barking a lot about facing a top name at middleweight, and DAZN are big backers and believers in him, presenting him as a level of star that he frankly just is not. I’m not blaming the Rhode Island native for that, even; he may well be as avoided as he says he is. He’s skilled, he’s a southpaw, and he doesn’t have a big fan base. That is, like, the classic recipe to be an avoided fighter.
I also found out on Twitter that some people really think Andrade has been fighting top five guys because the WBO called them top five contenders. I really had no idea that there was anyone out there taking sanctioning body rankings seriously, so you learn something new all the time if you look around enough.
Charlo was reportedly offered a big deal to fight Andrade on DAZN and turned it down. He went on a long rant in February on Instagram where he yelled at Andrade and Daniel Jacobs and Eddie Hearn a bunch, but not many people paid much attention.
Andrade-Charlo is a good fight and all — well, in the sense that they’re both highly-rated fighters, the actual fight might stink awful — but it really doesn’t seem particularly likely to happen, though this long break in boxing might, as Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza thinks may happen, change the way some people think about the fights they need to take. They simply might need bigger paydays, quicker, and take some risks they might have otherwise not taken. That’s a potential positive for boxing out of this lousy real world situation everyone is currently in.