Kambosos edges Lopez in massive upset to win unified lightweight world championship

Both men down, bloodied in fight of the year candidate; Ogawa drops Fuzile three times in win a vacant junior lightweight title

The exhausting nine-month wait for the long-delayed fight between Teofimo Lopez and George Kambosos Jr. proved to be well worth it as they turned in a classic battle that resulted in a massive upset.

Kambosos, given little chance by many to even make it out of the early rounds, instead dropped Lopez in the first round and battled him hard throughout the bloody, action-packed candidate for fight of the year. He survived his own trip to the canvas in the 10th round and won a split decision and the unified lightweight world championship on Saturday night in the main event of the Matchroom Boxing card on DAZN at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Judges Glenn Feldman (115-111) and Frank Lombardi (115-112) scored the fight for Kambosos and Don Trella had it 114-113 for Lopez, who was a 13-to-1 favorite and fighting in front of his crowd.

In taking Lopez’s IBF, WBO and WBA 135-pound titles, Kambosos, the IBF mandatory challenger from Australia, scored one of the biggest victories in his country’s boxing history.

“I believed in myself, I backed myself and I said it time after time. You might not believe it, but I believed in myself,” an ecstatic Kambosos said. “Look at me now! I’ve got all of the jewels. I’m not the king. You’ve got the four kings. I’m the emperor because I come to every other country and I take them out, one by one. All respect to (Lopez). Thank you New York City, Madison Square Garden, I love you all.”

The fight has hung over both men since upstart promoter Triller pulled a shocker by winning a purse bid for the fight on Feb. 25 for an astonishing $6.018 million, more than the other two bids combined: $3.506 million from Matchroom Boxing and $2.315 million from Lopez promoter Top Rank.

But Triller was never able to put on the fight as planned in Miami on two different dates in June. After moving it later in the month, Lopez came down with Covid-19, setting off a series of date and venue changes. There were eight different dates in all and various locations penciled in until the last straw was Triller’s effort to move the fight from New York’s Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4 to Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Oct. 16. Lopez agreed, but Kambosos didn’t and, eventually, the IBF declared Triller in default of its winning bid.

Matchroom Boxing’s Eddie Hearn, the under bidder, had the option to put on the fight under his bid and elected to do so. He doesn’t promote either fighter but saw the opportunity to grab a significant fight for his broadcaster, DAZN, and quickly got it signed, sealed and delivered. Though the fighters would make less under Hearn’s bid than Triller’s — $2,278,900 for Lopez and $1,227,100 for Kambosos — they still delivered a memorable battle after a build up filled with hard feeling and tough talk.

“All respect to Teofimo,” Kambosos said afterward. “He’s a great kid. The build-up was the build-up. We’re both competitive young guys. This was my night and it’s going to be my night for a very long time. I’m the emperor.”

Neither man had fought since October 2020, when Lopez pulled his own upset by outpointing Vasiliy Lomachenko in their unification fight and Kambosos outpointed former featherweight titlist Lee Selby in an eliminator to become Lopez’s mandatory challenger.

All along, Lopez said it would be an easy fight. He predicted a first-round knockout and came out looking for it.

Lopez (16-1, 12 KOs), 24, was extremely aggressive and landed many powerful and clean right hands, but Kambosos (20-0, 10 KOs), 28, walked through them. And then, in the final seconds of the first round, Kambosos landed his own clean right hand and knocked Lopez to his rear end in stunning fashion. Lopez beat the count and the round ended.

“Good shot, alright. Time to wake up, time to do the thing that I got to do,” Lopez said when asked what was going through his mind when he got dropped so unexpectedly.

Because Lopez had so dominated the opening round, two of the three judges scored it 10-9 instead of 10-8 for Kambosos despite the knockdown. Lopez had only been down once before, in the first round of his 2016 professional debut.

Kambosos said his plan for the first round was to find a home for his right hand and make Lopez wary of his power even though he is not known as a big knockout puncher.

“(The late Hall of Fame trainer) Cus D’Amato said a great saying when Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier, an unbelievable puncher,” Kambosos said. “Muhammad Ali rang up Cus D’Amato and said, ‘What do I do?’ He said, ‘You hit him with the best right hand you’ve ever thrown in your life in the first round and you change the fight,’ and that’s what I did. I had that in my head. My mentality, I said I’m going to hit this guy clean, hard, and put him down and the fight changed after that.”

Lopez crashed Kambosos’ post-fight interview and proclaimed that he deserved the victory.

“Hell of a fighter but I won tonight. Everybody knows that,” Lopez said. “I won tonight. I don’t care what anybody says, yo! I won tonight. Look, I ain’t no sore loser. I take my wins like I take my losses. At the end of the day I’m a true champion. I came out here, I did what I had to do and I went out there and did my best. I don’t care what anybody says. I am as real as it comes. I won this fight.”

Lopez, who lives in Las Vegas but is from Brooklyn, was booed by his own fans for his remarks.

Asked if he at least thought it was a close fight, Lopez said it wasn’t.

“I don’t believe it was a close fight at all,” Lopez said. “I believe that at the end of it all I scored it 10-2.”

After the surprising opening round, things calmed down a bit in the second round before Lopez turned it up again in the third and landed a heavy left hand. Kambosos finished a strong fourth round with a series of blows that appeared to buzz Lopez.

But in the middle rounds, Kambosos got into a groove, winning the fourth, fifth and sixth rounds on all three scorecards to open a wide lead — 60-54, 59-54 and 59-55 — as Lopez dispensed with his jab and looked for one big shot.

In the sixth round, Kambosos suffered a cut over his left eye, but Lopez looked frustrated that he could not land a big punch and put Kambosos away. By the end of the seventh round, Lopez had bruising and swelling around his eyes but he was closing the gap on the scorecards.

He broke through in the ninth round by landing a series of right hands that backed Kambosos up, although he quickly rebounded and land his own right.

Lopez nearly ended the fight in the 10th round when he landed a hard right hand behind the ear that dropped Kambosos. But when the fight resumed Lopez let him off the hook by not going all out when Kambosos was clearly hurt.

“I was trying to entertain the fans too much,” Kambosos said. “I’m an unbelievable boxer. They can’t believe how good I box. My defense, my movement — too sharp, too fast, too strong. My conditioning and my stamina are unbelievable. But I tried to entertain the crowd a little too much, got excited and got caught. What a warrior. I got back up against all odds and still finished the fight and won the next round.

“I wasn’t hurt after the 10th. I said to my corner it’s nothing, let’s go hard the next two rounds. I’m going to punish this kid and I won the next two rounds. No problem. That’s the kind of fighter I am, a warrior. All respect to him. He’s a great champion. He beat the great Vasiliy Lomachenko. But I’m the better fighter. Look at me; I’m the greatest fighter in Australian history. I’ve got all of the belts.”

Lopez suffered a bad cut over his left eye in the 11th round that forced referee Harvey Dock to call a timeout to have the ringside doctor examine the wound, which was pouring blood down Lopez’s face.

There was little urgency in the Lopez corner going into the 12th round but by that point Kambosos was ahead on two scorecards and even on the third.

According to CompuBox statistics, Kambosos landed 155 of 392 punches (40 percent) and Lopez landed 115 of 281 (41 percent).

During the extended training camp for the fight, Kambosos said he used the time to learn and work on things.

“It was a long, hard camp,” he said. “It was never my fault (for the delays). I wanted to fight. Every day I got better and better, I learned more and more and I didn’t take my foot off the pedal. Here we are. If you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t get this far, back yourself, believe in yourself and you can do it to.”

While the fight was being situated and Kambosos was in limbo, his wife gave birth to their third child and his grandfather, who he was very close to, died.

“This is for my kids and my grandfather, who sadly passed away two months ago,” Kambosos said, fighting back tears. “My family, my grandfather, I know he’s in the ring here with me right now.”

Kambosos said to Lopez he would give him a rematch if he wanted one in Australia.

“I got the belts, I won the fight,” he told Lopez. “I give you respect. Take it like a champ. Move on. We’ll do it again in Australia — 80,000 (fans), me and you, brother. What a war we’ll have. Let’s do it again.”

But Kambosos also said he is interested in unifying with WBC titlist Devin Haney, who defends against Joseph Diaz Jr. on Dec. 4 in Las Vegas, on another Matchroom Boxing card on DAZN.

“Mutual respect between me and Devin Haney,” Kambosos said. “I wish him all the best next week. I’ll see how I feel. I’ll probably be there. I have my three kids and I want to grieve my grandfather because I didn’t have the chance to grieve my grandfather.”

Lopez was unsure what he would do next. Perhaps a rematch, but he has also struggled to make weight and spoke often about moving up in weight after facing Kambosos. He wanted a shot at undisputed junior welterweight champion and fellow Top Rank fighter Josh Taylor but that is now unlikely.

“I’m going back to the drawing board,” Lopez said. “Spend time with my son. He was just born 11 days ago and that’s what really matters to me, family, man. Everything happens for a reason.

“I’ve been feeling this (weight issue) for two years now. They been draining me the whole time. I should have just dropped the belts like everybody did when they won all the belts. But no excuses, man. This ain’t the end of Teofimo Lopez.”

Ogawa wins IBF jr. lightweight title

In the co-feature, Japan’s Kenichi Ogawa scored three knockdowns and bloodied South African southpaw Azinga Fuzile to win the vacant IBF junior lightweight title by unanimous decision.

Two judges scored the fight 115-110 and one had it 114-111 for Ogawa, who scored a knockdown in the fifth round and two more in the 12th round.

They were fighting for the 130-pound world title that has been vacant since February, when Joseph Diaz Jr. was overweight for a title defense against Russia’s Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov and stripped the day before they fought to a draw.

It was the second title shot for Ogawa (26-1-1, 18 KOs), 33, who also fought for the vacant IBF title in December 2017. He won a controversial decision over Tevin Farmer in Las Vegas but the result was changed to a no contest after Ogawa tested positive for a banned substance.

Now, assuming his drug tests are clean, he has the elusive belt.

“I want to bring the belt back to my kids,” a teary-eyed Ogawa said through an interpreter with the belt wrapped around him. “My plan was to pressure him and back him up. But my disappointment was I didn’t throw enough punch. But I was able to catch him with the right and that was satisfactory.”

Ogawa, who suffered a cut on his right cheekbone from an accidental head butt, landed a huge overhand right on Fuzile’s chin to drop him to a knee in the fifth round. Fuzile, who was bleeding from the nose, beat the count and managed to survive the final minute of the round.

Ogawa opened a cut over Fuzile’s right eye in the ninth round on another accidental head clash and rocked him with a stiff right hand, which he found a home for throughout the fight.

By the end of the 10th round – seemingly Fuzile’s best of the fight – he was cut over the left eye from a yet another accidental head butt.

If there was any doubt Ogawa was on his way to the title, he dropped a fading and bleeding Fuzile (15-2, 9 KOs), 25, to a knee twice with right hands late in the 12th round.

“My trainer told me to go knock him out so I was going for the knockout,” Ogawa said of his 12th round strategy.

According to CompuBox, Ogawa landed 148 of 645 punches (23 percent) and Fuzile connected with 90 of 386 shots (23 percent).

Also on the card

• Featherweight prospect Ray Ford (10-0-1, 6 KOs), 22, a southpaw from Camden, New Jersey, walked down and battered Felix Caraballo (13-4-2, 9 KOs), 34, of Puerto Rico, into a one-sided eighth-round knockout. He did as he pleased and finally referee Ricky Gonzalez stepped in at 2 minutes, 10 second in the eighth round of their scheduled 10-rounder. Caraballo lost his third fight in a row.

• Heavyweight Zhang Zhilei (23-0-1, 18 KOs), 38, a China native fighting out of Bloomfield, New Jersey, easily stopped journeyman Craig Lewis (14-5-1, 8 KOs), 37, of Detroit, at 2 minutes, 10 seconds of the second round of their eight-rounder. Zhang dropped Lewis twice in the second round before referee Shada Murdaugh waved it off. The fight was Lewis’ fourth loss in a row and Zhang’s first fight since a majority draw with Jerry Forrest in February that landed Zhang in the hospital with near kidney failure and dehydration.

Photos: Ed Mulholland/Matchroom Boxing

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