Notebook: Martin, 'King Kong' both expect KO win in New Year's night PPV main event
WBC sets Fury-Whyte purse bid date, split; Santa Cruz excited for return; Ryan Garcia targets Isaac Cruz for April fight; Quick hits; Show and tell
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Most of the time, heavyweight contenders Luis “King Kong” Ortiz and Charles Martin exit the ring having knocked out their opponent. But they have also both suffered knockout losses in world title fights.
So, while most would expect the fight to end in a stoppage, they of course disagree on which man will have his hand raised following their IBF title elimination bout that headlines a five-fight, all-heavyweight Premier Boxing Champions card on Saturday (Fox Sports PPV, 8 p.m. ET, $39.99) at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. It is a rare boxing event on New Years Day.
“I’m ready to let my hands speak. I’m going to be very skillful in there,” Martin said at the final news conference on Thursday. “This is going to be a great fight. You don’t really see two southpaws too often (fight each other) in the heavyweight division. You’re going to see some really good boxing in this fight.
“You’re going to get a knockout in this fight. We’re not going to go 12 rounds. I know I’m going to knock him out. Me and my trainer, Manny Robles, have been doing a lot of great work in the gym. People only see what happens in the ring, they don’t see what happens behind closed doors. I have business to take care of on Saturday and we’re ready.”
Martin (28-2-1, 25 KOs), 35, of Carson, California, who held the IBF title for three months in 2016 before Anthony Joshua violently relieved him of it via second-round knockout, has won three in a row since a decision loss to Adam Kownacki in September 2018, but he is coming off a 23-month layoff.
Ortiz (32-2, 27 KOs), 42, a Cuban defector fighting out of Miami, who is ending a 14-month layoff, laughed off Martin’s prediction of a knockout win.
“When somebody says they’re going to knock me out, it just makes me laugh and smile,” Ortiz said through an interpreter. “Everybody says that. But you’re facing a fighter who has been through it before, so you can try your best.
“I’m glad that he’s saying that he’s going to knock me out. He’s coming with bad intentions and so am I. Anyone can land the big shot, but it’s going to be me with my hand-raised Saturday night.”
Ortiz, who will be fighting at the same resort where he turned pro in 2010, has been knocked out twice, both times by then-world titleholder Deontay Wilder.
Ortiz had Wilder in huge trouble and nearly knocked him out in the seventh round of their first fight, a 2018 fight of the year contender, before Wilder stormed back and stopped him the 10th round. In their 2019 rematch, Ortiz easily outboxed Wilder until getting flattened with a right hand in the seventh round.
The other PPV bouts (all 10-rounders):
Frank Sanchez (19-0, 13 KOs) vs. Christian Hammer (26-8, 16 KOs)
Jonnie Rice (14-6-1, 10 KOs) vs. Michael Coffie (12-1, 9 KOs), rematch
Gerald Washington (20-4-1, 13 KOs) vs. Ali Eren Demirezen (14-1, 11 KOs)
Viktor Faust (8-0, 6 KOs) vs. Iago Kiladze (27-5-1, 19 KOs)
Fury-Whyte purse split set
There is certainly no guarantee that heavyweight champion Tyson Fury and interim titlist Dillian Whyte will meet next, but the WBC on Thursday finally set the date for a purse bid and the split of the money.
WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman, who turned 52 on Thursday, told Fight Freaks Unite that the purse bid is scheduled for Jan. 11 with Fury due the lion’s share of an 80-20 split of the winning bid.
Whyte has been battling the WBC in arbitration over the split, seeking a much greater percentage of the money. Typically, a mandatory challenger and/or interim titleholder would receive as much as 45 percent, although 20 percent of a fight with Fury would still earn Whyte millions and by far the largest payday of his career. The WBC decided on 80-20, as requested by Team Fury, as a fair split based on the kind of money each fighter has been earning in recent fights. Fury has been making eight figures more than Whyte in recent fights.
Fury co-promoters Bob Arum of Top Rank and Queensberry Promotions’ Frank Warren have said all along that if they can’t make a deal with Whyte then Fury will fight somebody else around March, be it in a WBC defense or not.
Fury (31-0-1, 22 KOs), 31, of England, is coming off an epic 11th-round knockout of Deontay Wilder in their third fight to retain the title on Oct. 9 in Las Vegas in the fight of the year that featured Wilder going down three times and Fury getting dropped twice.
Whyte (28-2, 19 KOs), 34, of England, is coming off a one-sided fourth-round destruction of Alexander Povetkin in their immediate rematch on March 27 to regain the interim title he lost to him by shocking upset fifth-round KO in their first fight in August 2020.
Santa Cruz ready for comeback
Four-division world titlist Leo Santa Cruz is excited to end the longest layoff of his 15-year career in the co-feature of the fight between former unified welterweight titlist Keith Thurman and Mario Barrios on Feb. 5 (Fox Sports PPV, 9 p.m. ET) at Michelob ULTRA Arena at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
Santa Cruz, who holds the WBA’s featherweight title, has been out of action since Gervonta Davis brutally knocked him out in the sixth round to take his junior lightweight title on Oct. 31, 2020.
Santa Cruz (37-2-1, 19 KOs), 33, of Rosemead, California, is returning against Keenan Carbajal (23-2-1, 15 KOs), 30, of Phoenix, in a 10-round nontitle fight at junior lightweight with the plan to return to featherweight to defend his title later in 2022. Santa Cruz has not boxed at featherweight since February 2019 but the WBA has allowed him to keep the belt.
“I’m very excited to be back in this fight. This is the longest I’ve been away from the ring, so I’ve been anxious to return,” Santa Cruz said this week. “My last fight didn’t go my way, but I’m looking forward to getting back to the top.
“Keenan is a strong fighter who doesn’t run. We’re coming to entertain the fans and that’s what we’ll do. I’m very motivated that Keenan is going to come to fight. I don’t want to be chasing a fighter all night long. I want to go back and forth and that’s what Carbajal will bring to the table.”
Santa Cruz said he didn’t commit to returning to featherweight until he had already begun training for the February fight.
“I wanted to see how I felt in this training camp before making a decision about what weight I fight at in the future,” Santa Cruz said. “Now I’ve dropped the weight easily, so as long as everything goes well on Feb. 5, I’ll be back at 126 in my next fight.”
He said he has put the KO loss to Davis out of his mind after struggling in the immediate aftermath of his first stoppage.
“It was a bit hard for me after the knockout loss. But once I got back home and got encouragement from my fans, I felt better,” Santa Cruz said. “I just got overexcited in the fight and Gervonta landed a good punch. I always want to entertain the fans. I had to pay for it this time, but I always will try to give fans a great fight.”
FITE in Focus
FITE has the streaming rights to the all-heavyweight Premier Boxing Champions pay-per-view card headlined by the Luis Ortiz-Charles Martinez IBF title elimination bout on Saturday (8 p.m. ET) — New Year’s — and I was part of a panel that previewed the card for an episode of FITE in Focus. You can watch that show here:
Ryan Garcia wants Isaac Cruz
By the time lightweight star Ryan Garcia returns to the ring it will have been more than a year since his last fight and he can’t wait.
Golden Boy Promotions is planning for Garcia’s return on April 2 — he is still rehabilitating from right hand/wrist surgery — at a site to be determined and he knows who he wants to fight.
But Garcia is resigned to the fact that his first choice is unlikely to happen. That is a fight against newly crowned unified world champion George Kambosos Jr. So, with a title shot unlikely, Garcia is pushing hard to get contender Isaac Cruz, who lost a close and disputed unanimous decision to secondary titleholder Gervonta “Tank” Davis in an entertaining fight on Dec. 5 in Los Angeles, into the ring.
Garcia would like to eventually face Davis in a big-money showdown and wants to fight Cruz so fans and media will compare his performance and Davis’ against a common opponent.
I spoke with Garcia at length about his injury and fighting Kambosos or Cruz, and wrote about it for World Boxing News. Please read that story here: https://www.worldboxingnews.net/2021/12/30/ryan-garcia-kambosos-cruz/amp
Quick hits
In the final world title bout of 2021, Kazuto Ioka (27-2, 15 KOs), 32, will defend his WBO junior bantamweight belt for the fourth time when he faces Japanese countryman Ryoji Fukunaga (15-4, 14 KOs), a 35-year-old southpaw, on Friday at the Ota-City General Gymnasium in Tokyo. Ioka weighed in Thursday at 114.9 pounds and Fukunaga was 114.8. The fight was made only a few weeks ago. Ioka, a four-division titlist, was scheduled to face IBF titlist Jerwin Ancajas in a unification fight but the rapid spread of the omicron variant of Covid-19 caused Japan to close its borders to foreign travelers, leaving Ancajas unable to get into the country.
Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn announced he has signed WBC women’s junior lightweight titlist Alycia Baumgardner to a multi-fight promotional deal. Baumgardner (11-1, 7 KOs), 27, a Fremont, Ohio, native, is coming off her biggest win, a fourth-round knockout of the Matchroom-promoted Terri Harper to take her title on Nov. 13 in Sheffield, England. “2021 was definitely a breakthrough year for me,” Baumgardner said. “I had a great experience working with Matchroom. Signing this deal with them puts me in a position to achieve my next goal of becoming undisputed at 130 pounds. Have no doubt I am the top dog in my weight class and it's only a matter of time before I have all the belts to prove it. Nobody is going to stand in my way.”
Former middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (54-3-2, 30 KOs), 46, of Argentina, who retired after losing the title to Miguel Cotto in 2014 before returning in 2020, will seek his fourth win in a row of the comeback. Martinez, also a former junior middleweight titlist, is slated to face Macaulay McGowan (14-2-1, 3 KOs), 27, of England, on Jan. 27 at the Wizink Center in Madrid, Spain, where Martinez has close ties and has fought his three previous comeback fights. They are due to meet in a 10-rounder at middleweight. Martinez is coming off a unanimous decision over former junior middleweight world title challenger Brian Rose on Sept. 25. McGowan has lost two 10-round decisions in a row and has not boxed since December 2020.
Show and tell
Hall of Famer Sonny Liston was one of the most intimidating heavyweight champions in boxing history until Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) knocked him out to win the title in a massive upset in 1964 and then knocked him out again in the immediate rematch in 1965. Six months after knocking out Chuck Wepner in the ninth round of what would be Liston’s final fight, he died under mysterious circumstances in Las Vegas on Dec. 30, 1970 — 51 years ago on Thursday. Panini included Liston in its Italian multi-sport sticker sets in 1966 (his rookie), 1967 and 1969. I have all three of them in mint condition in my collection. The 1969 sticker is one of only 13 to be graded by PSA and it is the best it has graded as it is the only one at the 9 level. There are no 10s.
Ortiz-Martin and Fury photos: Ryan Hafey/PBC; Santa Cruz photo: Esther Lin/Showtime; Ioka-Fukunaga photo: Naoki Fukuda
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The 80:20 split offered to Whyte is typical of the crappy treatment Whyte's received over the past 4 years from the WBC.
Of course Fury's promoter is going to want a low ball offer for Whyte - the WBC didn't have to agree with Arum and set such a split - I'm sure if the shoe was on the other foot Arum, Warren and Fury would be furious.
The low offer has probably been set because they want, and expect, Whyte to reject it - however I'm hoping that because the offer is so far below the 45% upper limit given to some mandatory challengers that it simply strengthens Whyte's case against the WBC at CAS.
Charles Martin is a below average Heavy with little skill and no punch. Charles is a C class pug who will disappear quickly in any big fight. Martin is an unkept joke trying to make a dollar.