Notebook: After brutal KO loss to Povetkin, Whyte views rematch as must-win

Garcia-Fortuna ordered; Shakur return; Serrano scores KO

Heavyweight contender Dillian Whyte believes his rematch with interim world titlist Alexander Povetkin is a fight he must win.

“This time I’ll beat him, and we’ll see what people are going to say,” Whyte said. “One, two or three losses mean nothing to a heavyweight nowadays. If you fight good fighters, the main thing is you can come back. This is a must-win fight for me, but I’m not a guy that worries about pressure. I just smile and take it in my stride.”

Povetkin and Whyte will meet for the second time on Saturday (DAZN in the U.S., Sky Sports Box Office in the U.K., 2 p.m. ET) at the Europa Point Sports Complex in Gibraltar, a British territory off the coast of Spain, in a sequel to a fight that ended in shocking fashion on Aug. 22.

Whyte was beating Povetkin easily through four rounds, including scoring a pair of knockdowns in the fourth round. He had Povetkin ready to go, but the former Olympic gold medalist survived to make into the fifth round.

Then, out of nowhere, Povetkin (36-2-1, 25 KOs), 41, of Russia, laid Whyte out cold with a devastating left uppercut to take Whyte’s interim belt. Whyte (27-2, 18 KOs), 32, of England, quickly exercised his contractual right to an immediate rematch.

They were due to fight again Nov. 21 but it was postponed to Jan. 30 because Povetkin contracted Covid-19. Then it was postponed again until Saturday because he had not fully recovered.

Whyte showed he could hurt Povetkin last time and said he will do it again but this time keep him on the canvas.

“I’ve been knocking people out for a long time,” Whyte said. “I carry a lot of power in both hands. Povetkin is a very cagey guy and an experienced guy, a very patient guy. He’s a tough guy as well. Last time I didn’t land properly and he went down, but he showed resilience by getting up and then he stopped me. This time when I hit him he’ll stay down.

“I’ll do what I need to do to get the win. I don’t care if I’ve got to rough a guy up or outbox them. I’ll do whatever it takes for me to win. It's the biggest fight of my career. I’m coming off a loss to the guy. The good thing is this is heavyweight boxing. One fight changes everything. When I touch him this time his whole body is going to vibrate. He’ll understand. I’m coming to do what I do best and that’s to inflict pain. If I’ve got to make it a dog fight then I’ll make it a dog fight. It will be a different story this time.”

Povetkin said he is expecting another good performance from Whyte but confident he will win again.

“I’m relaxed, confident and the only thing on my mind right now is to go out on Saturday and show some good boxing,” Povetkin said through a translator. “I’ve almost forgotten about the last fight because this is finished. I think that Dillian will be better in the second fight then the first. At the same time, I’ll try to be more careful, pay attention more to my defense.

“I don’t have this mindset that I’ll knock him out. It could go the distance. I’m not focusing on the knockout and I’m going to follow my plan.”

WBC orders Garcia-Fortuna

The WBC on Thursday ordered interim lightweight titlist Ryan Garcia (21-0, 18 KOs) to face Javier Fortuna (36-2-1, 25 KOs) with the winner being officially named mandatory challenger for world titleholder Devin Haney. If the sides do not make a deal, the WBC scheduled a purse bid on April 16.

“After careful consideration and countless communications with all parties involved, the WBC confirmed the course of action for the lightweight division,” the WBC said in its announcement. “Ryan Garcia won the WBC interim title and mandatory position (by seventh-round knockout of Luke Campbell on Jan. 2). Javier Fortuna had a signed contract to face (former titlist Jorge) Linares, which Covid prevented from happening. The WBC is hereby ordering Ryan Garcia vs. Javier Fortuna for the WBC interim lightweight championship and mandatory position in the division.”

Haney (25-0, 15 KOs) first, however, is set to make his third title defense against Linares (47-5, 29 KOs) on May 15 (DAZN).

Keep in mind the order is the WBC’s mandate. The fighters can go in another direction if they elect to. Whether Garcia will follow the order remains to be seen.

“We are going to talk to Team Garcia and see if there is any interest,” Golden Boy Promotions president Eric Gomez told Fight Freaks Unite.

Stevenson returns June 12

Junior lightweight contender Shakur Stevenson (15-0, 8 KOs), 23, a southpaw from Newark, New Jersey, and a former featherweight world titlist, is slated to return to the ring against Jeremiah Nakathila (21-1, 17 KOs), 31, of Namibia, who has won 10 fights in a row, on June 12, Top Rank chairman Bob Arum said.

The fight is ticketed for New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Arum hopes the arena can have 50 percent capacity as Covid-19 restrictions ease.

“We don’t have control of what the governor will do about capacity or what will happen with the pandemic, but the Garden feels that by June we’ll be able to do 50 percent of the Garden, but they don’t know for sure,” Arum told Fight Freaks Unite.

Stevenson is already the mandatory challenger for the winner of the April 3 fight between titleholder Jamel Herring and Carl Frampton, but Arum said even if the winner comes out with no injuries he will not face Stevenson in June, and that Stevenson-Nakathila would likely be for the WBO’s interim title with the winner getting the next title shot.

“If it’s Herring (who wins April 3), I don’t think he wants to fight Shakur,” Arum said. “If it’s Frampton, the idea would be that probably in the fall Frampton could fight Shakur at a big stadium in (Frampton’s native) Northern Ireland. Shakur doesn’t care where the fight is.”

Arum said Puerto Rican super middleweight prospect Edgar Berlanga (16-0, 16 KOs), of Brooklyn, New York, who has won all of his fights by first-round knockout, would be in the co-feature as long as he takes care of business against Demond Nicholson on April 24 and has no injuries. The June 12 card would be on the weekend of the annual Puerto Rican Day parade, which Top Rank has turned into a major fight date in New York for the region’s large Puerto Rican community.

Serrano retains unified title

Unified featherweight world champion Amanda Serrano dominated Daniela Bermudez en route to a ninth-round knockout in the main event of the Ring City USA card on NBC Sports Net on Thursday night outdoors at the Plaza del Quinto Centenario in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The fight was a showdown between two of the top pound-for-pound female fighters in boxing, but Serrano (40-1-1, 30 KOs), 32, a Puerto Rican southpaw, who fights out of Brooklyn, New York, dominated the entire fight.

Serrano was ahead 80-72 on all three scorecards going into the ninth round. In that round, Serrano blasted Bermudez, a junior featherweight titlist moving up in weight, with a left to the body and a right to the body that badly hurt Bermudez (29-4-3, 10 KOs), 31, of Argentina. Bermudez, who had never previously been stopped, took a step back, turned and went down to all fours, where referee Roberto Ramirez Jr. counted her out at 1 minute, 33 seconds. Bermudez had not lost since 2014.

Andrade-Williams card set

Matchroom Boxing on Thursday unveiled the undercard for the show headlined by middleweight titlist Demetrius Andrade (29-0, 18 KOs) in his mandatory defense against Liam Williams (23-2-1, 18 KOs) on April 17 (DAZN) at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. No spectators will be permitted. Besides the undercard, Matchroom announced the main event will begin at 6 p.m. ET, which makes it 11 p.m. in Wales, Williams’ home country.

In the co-feature, super middleweight Carlos Gongora (19-0, 14 KOs), 31, an Ecuador native fighting out of Boston, will take on Christopher Pearson (17-2, 12 KOs), 30, of Dayton, Ohio, in a 12-rounder. The fight will be the first for Gongora (19-0, 14 KOs) since he scored a dramatic 12th-round upset knockout of Ali Akhmedov on Dec. 18 on the Gennadiy Golovkin-Kamil Szeremeta undercard, also at the Hard Rock.

Also on the card:

• Heavyweight Mahammadrasul Majidov (3-0, 3 KOs), 34, faces fringe contender Andrey Fedosov (31-3, 25 KOs) in a 12-rounder. Majidov was a decorated amateur. He was a 2012 Olympic bronze medalist and 2016 Olympian from Azerbaijan and a gold medalist at 2017, 2013 and 2011 world amateur world championships. In 2011, he beat Anthony Joshua in the final. Fedosov has won seven fights in a row since a sixth-round knockout loss to Bryant Jennings in 2013.

• Lightweight Otha Jones III (5-0-1, 2 KOs), 21, of Toledo, Ohio, faces Jorge Castaneda (13-1, 11 KOs), 24, of Laredo, Texas, in an eight-rounder. They were scheduled to fight on the Juan Francisco Estrada-Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez rematch undercard on March 13 but a non-Covid-19 illness forced Jones to postponed the bout.

• Junior welterweight Arthur “The Chechen Wolf” Biyarslanov (7-0, 6 KOs), a 25-year-old southpaw from Chechnya, who fights out of Toronto, will face Israel Mercado (9-0, 7 KOs), 25, of Pomona, California in an eight-rounder. Biyarslanov was a late addition to the Estrada-Gonzalez II card but the fight was canceled when opponent Juan Carlos Burgos could not come to the United States because of an expired passport.

• Super middleweight Alexis Espino (7-0, 5 KOs), 21, of Las Vegas, will face an opponent to be named in a six-rounder and South Florida junior welterweight Aaron Aponte (2-0, 1 KO), 19, will face a foe to be named in a four-rounder.

Quick hits

Triller announced former light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver is out and former cruiserweight titlist Steve Cunningham is in as the opponent for former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir, 41, who is making his boxing pro debut on the company’s pay-per-view card headlined by Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren on April 17 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. What Triller didn’t announce was the reason for the change. It is because the Georgia Athletic Commission would not license Tarver (31-6-1, 22 KOs), 52, who hasn’t boxed since a draw at heavyweight with Cunningham in 2015, because he didn’t meet state requirements for obtaining a boxing license. They include that anyone 50 or older has to have had at least 10 fights in the past 10 years, including four in the past four years. Tarver hasn’t. Cunningham (29-9-1, 13 KOs), 44, still has to be approved by the commission.

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Spanish-language network EstrellaTV is getting back into boxing. It used to televise Golden Boy Promotions’ cards but after a break from those events it returns to ringside on Friday (10 p.m. ET) with the first of a series of monthly cards. The opening show of “Boxeo EstrellaTV” will take place at the Fit Center in Mexico City and is headlined by a 10-round flyweight bout between Adrian Curiel (17-3, 5 KOs) and Cristian Gonzalez (13-1, 5 KOs). The series will air on the last Friday night of each month through the end of 2021.

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Promoters Lou DiBella and Yvon Michel have signed a pair of Russian prospects to co-promotional deals, DiBella told Fight Freaks Unite. They signed heavyweight Vladimir Ivanov (4-0, 3 KOs), 29, who had his first fight of the deal in a fight they were able to place on last Saturday’s Artur Beterbiev-Adam Deines undercard in Moscow, where Ivanov blew away Alexander Stepanov in the first round, and 23-year-old amateur junior welterweight Gor Khachatryan, who makes his pro debut April 2 in Moscow.

Show and tell

Oscar De La Hoya had won a gold medal in the 1992 Olympics — hence the “Golden Boy” nickname — and his pro debut in November of that year was a big deal. Then a highly-touted lightweight, he faced Lamar Williams (5-1-1 at the time) at The Forum in Inglewood, California, where the East Los Angeles native was the huge crowd favorite. De La Hoya needed 102 seconds to blast out Williams. It was just the start for De La Hoya, who would go on to become the biggest star in boxing during his 1992 to 2008 career and win 10 world titles in a then-record six weight classes before being elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Here is a mint program from De La Hoya’s professional debut — his rookie program! — in my collection.

Povetkin-Whyte photo: Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing; Garcia photo: Tom Hogan/Golden Boy; Stevenson photo: Mikey Williams/Top Rank