Hot diggity daffodil, it was a busy month! There are way too many fights to be able to cover everything, so before you toss this rag to the Wayside (see what I did there?), let’s look back at the more noteworthy events of the month.

~Leo

April 1st

O2 Arena, London
Anthony Joshua UD Jermaine Franklin - Heavy

This felt like an uninspiring performance for the former unified champion (so nice he did it twice, as I recall). The unheralded Franklin is as obscure of an American heavyweight as there can be. To allude to our B-Sides conversation about that fight, any time an American heavyweight starts making any sort of waves they are immediately scooped up in an attempt to have the “next big thing” in heavyweight boxing. Deontay Wilder commands enormous numbers for his outings and to a lesser but still respectable degree so does MexAm Andy Ruiz. For Franklin to be completely unknown coming into this speaks volumes to his credibility. This was supposed to be Joshua’s comeback, not just from back-to-back losses to Usyk, but from that embarrassing rant on the mic after losing. He lost to Usyk once, started training with Robert Garcia. Lost to Usyk again, went to train with Derrick James. As I’ve said in later discussions, this is his first fight with DJ (who trains two pound-for-pound talents), so he’ll need more time to develop good chemistry. The unfortunate thing about being Anthony Joshua is that tune-ups at this stage of his career aren’t going to be well-received and the caliber of a “tune-up fight” for him is a lot higher than what your average fighter would have. He has said he won’t be fighting again until December and there’s some scuttlebutt it could be a… wild opponent (possibly in Saudi Arabia, ew), so we’ll have to keep an eye on the situation.

Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Oklahoma
Robeisy Ramirez (Cub) UD Isaac Dogboe (Eng) - (vacant) WBO Feather

Business about as expected. Robeisy had Dogboe under his thumb the majority of the fight and cruised to a pretty clear win. Dogboe disagreed, but unfortunately I don’t think anyone cares for his thoughts on the matter. Let’s have a look at his contemporaries:

WBA - Mauricio Lara (Mex), next fight against Leigh Wood (Eng)
WBC - Rey Vargas (Mex), next fight likely against Brandon Figueroa (WBC interim)
IBF - Luis Lopez (Mex), next fight against Michael Conlan (Irl)

As far as unification fights go, the Lopez-Conlan winner (go on, Lopez) is the most possible one to make. I really don’t know what makes Arum go hard for Conlan (pause) but he sure loves to give that guy chance after chance after chance. Lara and Wood are booth with Matchroom while Vargas and Figueroa are on the PBC side of the house, so those belts are not very likely to be united. Lame. With guys moving up in the Top Rank ecosystem (Oscar from 126 to 130, Shakur from 130 to 135), it was clear that Robeisy was the next man up for Whatever Bob Orders. While I still hold out hope this won’t happen, I’m fully prepared for some easy defenses for Robeisy before he moves up to squeeze Valdez out of the scene.

April 8th

Busy ass night.

Ariake Arena, Tokyo
Tenshin Nasukawa UD Yuki Yohana - Super Bantam

For a guy making his professional boxing debut, Tenshin looked like a total natural. We talked a bit on Ultimate F’n Casual about MMA fighters crossing over to boxing and how they’ve all looked in the ring and Tenshin has by far been the best. Aldo and some of the other guys on that GameBred card some weeks ago looked a bit unorthodox but generally decent, but in my honest assessment they don’t have the look of an actual boxer. I am by no means disparaging the skills of the MMA fighters, but you can just tell by how they move that they’re not in their precise element. Yeah, definitely not the case here. We will watch his career with great interest.

Prudential Center, New Jersey
Shakur Stevenson TKO6 Shuichiro Yoshino - Light

Utter. Dominance. Stevenson had Yoshino figured out from the first, but I have to mention the elephant in the room: for all the times Shakur had Yoshino out of position and tagged him clean, all the punches that Shakur piled on, for the shutout that Shakur pitched that night, how was Yoshino not knocked out? “But it was a TKO in the 6th round!” Yes, the referee stepped in. How did Shakur get a few knockdowns, but couldn’t finish the job? Without any shadow of doubt, Shakur is stupidly talented, that was as good a masterclass as I’ve ever seen. After seeing the way Gervonta Davis finished off Ryan Garcia, it brings into question how Shakur can deal with someone who will likely be emboldened by his lack of power.

Keyshawn Davis TKO9 Anthony Yigit

Another guy whose career we will watch with great interest. Yigit started acting buffoonish in round 7 and kept it up until he was stopped. There’s levels to this and Keyshawn is higher on the skill-ladder than he may be getting credit for. Very excited about this youngster moving up the ranks.

DHSP, California
Brian Mendoza KO7 Sebastian Fundora - WBCi Light Middle

Something really funny that happened with this is recording the Spanish show, having a bit of a skid and not able to edit it in time for the actual fight, being so bold as to say that Fundora will end the fight inside of 5-6, and then this happens. So Jeison Rosario wasn’t the best win to really break out, but this one here really put the boxing fanscape on notice. Fundora had been pummeling through the division with relative ease and the fights along the way to his mandatory shot at Charlo seemed to be a formality. Mendoza had other plans, but I’ll gladly take my L over here with a slice of humble pie. It seemed the pinnacle of combat sports for Albuquerque was going to be Bareknuckle FC events (tbf, that’s not as bad as it sounds), but ABQ: your champion has arrived.

Brandun Lee UD Pedro Campa

Well, well, well - how the turn tables. I’ve been high on Lee for some time, but there was something funny in the air in the fight with Madera fight where Lee got put down and really shaken up. He had an 8 round fight that went totally under the radar for some reason, then he has this lackluster performance against a guy that Teofimo Lopez stopped in 7. I had chocked up the Madera trouble to maybe the ego getting a bit too large and he got himself quite literally knocked back on the right course. The biggest reason question marks are starting to come up for me is that Showtime was (and still is) heralding Lee as the next big thing. I’m not as certain I agree as I was before this outing.

Boeing Center, Texas
Marlon Tapales SD Murodjon Akhmadaliev - IBF+WBA Super Bantam

Did I overestimate MJ? Coming into this, I had looked at him as the sort of go-between of Fulton (slick boxer) and Inoue (strong power-puncher). It seemed to me that while he wasn’t necessarily a master in one aspect, he was sufficiently accomplished in all the right ways to have continued success. I’m not really good at this boxing picks stuff, I should stop making any; I never promised you coverage with well-reasoned analysis and thoughtful commentary. In fact, I promised you the exact opposite: the worst boxing writing you’ll ever read and dammit I do my best to deliver the goods (bads?). Anyway, MJ has the unfortunate task of trying to getting his titles back in a usually under-watched division where the attention is focused everywhere but him. Fulton and Inoue have all the eyes and headlines, as they should, but MJ was supposed to be the guy waiting for the winner on the other side for that smexy undisputed fight. Instead he drops the ball against middling Marlon. Go figure.

Bam Rodriguez UD Cristian Gonzalez - WBO Fly

Slam, wham, no thank you, Bam. Jokes. Bam was just as good as he’s ever been, but there are some serious concerns that were raised in this fight. After two great wins over Cuadras and Rungvisai, he has a relatively flat performance on the Canelo-GGG 3 undercard, then moves back down to “clear the path for his brother”… and has his fucking jaw broken by a guy with a 33% KO ratio. I fully concede it could have been a lucky shot, and Bam did continue to dominate the fight, so it’s more of something to keep an eye on rather than a full-on alert at this point. His fellow champions are Sunny Edwards (IBF), WBA champ Artem Dalakian (who?), and Julio Cesar Martinez (WBC); Sunny and JCM are fighting soon, while Dalakian is about due for a fight. I mentioned on our most recent B-Sides that it seems the promotional focus is moving with Bam. Gonz and Gallo, whatever you think of their trilogy, seem to be on their way out of the sport and it also seems they’re not planning to pass the torch, as it were. One of Bam’s contemporaries needs to step up in a big way if they’re going to drum up any interest for unification bouts in a highly unappreciated division.

UFC 287: Kaseya Center, Miami, FL
Israel Adesanya(1) KO2 Alex Pereira(C) - Middle

Once again I will attempt to sound like some kind of authority on MMA and fail spectacularly. The disclosure here, however, is not that I promised you terrible writing, rather it’s that you were already warned that I am the Ultimate F’n Casual. If your expectations weren’t already low, that’s a you problem. To start, the history between these two is really intense. For the uninitiated, they fought twice in professional kickboxing where Adesanya was bested twice by UD and KO3. Ouch. They face off again in MMA and Pereira gets the better of him by TKO2. As Nathan put it on our show, this was a bigger crossroads fight for Adesanya than many may have realized: Pereira was up in their rivalry 3-nil. If Adesanya had lost again, what could he have done? Move up 15 pounds, leaving behind a division in which he was already undersized? Instead, Adesanya finally got an emphatic win which he followed up with an emphatic celebration. Again, for the uninitiated, Pereira’s son mocked Adesanya when he had been knocked out. So after slaying the beast with his trusty bow and arrows, he returned the favor and taunted little Pereira. This could be one of those old credit card commercials: “Losing to your arch rival twice in kickboxing and again in MMA - $x. Your arch rival’s son taunting you as you’re unconscious on the canvas - $z. Finally knocking your arch rival out cold and taunting his son the way he taunted you - priceless. There are some things money can’t buy; for fumbling rants that only half-explain everything else, there’s the Ultimate F’n Casual.”

April 15th

Copper Box Arena, United Kingdom
Zhilei Zhang TKO6 Joe Joyce - WBOi Heavy

They don’t want a war, they don’t want a war with…Big Zhilei Zhang? I can guarantee there is a subsection of the boxing fandom that is saying “I aLwAyS kNeW jOyCe SuCkeD”, to which I reply: 1) no, you didn’t; 2) shut up. Whatever his faults may have been, there was truth in Joyce rephrasing the old Tyson quote “everyone has a plan until they punch me in the face and nothing happens”. If Zhang had only tagged Joyce a few times here and there, that would likely have been the case. Unfortunately for Joyce, it seems he completely disregarded the concept of training with at least one southpaw in preparation to face…a southpaw. Thus, Zhang’s straight left landed at will throughout the whole fight, giving Joyce’s face a thorough redecorating in the process. Is Joyce finished at heavyweight? Definitely not. He has the luxury of being relatively decent in a top-heavy division that is starved for a broader group of contenders. The Juggernaut memes, however, are dead. Now, it’s easy for us in the boxing world to say that Zhang is going to go back to West Taiwan a national hero, but how ubiquitous boxing is in Chinese culture is yet to be seen. There is something to be said that he’s a heavyweight, so the floor of how high his stock rises shouldn’t be underestimated. Zhang fighting one of the big three in Beijing, Shanghai? Madness. And don’t forget the old pipe-dream of selling “$1 PPV in a country of 1.3+ billion people”.

Even in this action shot you can see Joyce’s right eye and nose being pretty mangled from the lefts he was taking.

T-Mobile Center, Missouri
Max Holloway(2) UD5 Arnold Allen(4) - Feather
Edson Barboza KO1 Billy Quarantillo - Feather

Watching Holloway fight through a lens of actually trying to observe and take note of what was going on was pretty damn cool. His striking ability was clearly next level and the fluidity with which he transitions from left to right and back is exceedingly smooth. The clearest example of there being levels to the fight game, despite how closely ranked these two were, is in Allen’s ribs. Holloway’s kicks were landing on Allen’s left in a way that started hurting me to witness. Holloway was a class act, instructing his hometown crowd to not boo Allen when he had his chance to speak after the fight. Whatever Allen’s faults may be, the guy had a plan was able to execute it as the rounds started, i.e.: he has his coach were able to strategize well. What he seemed to lack was the ability to adjust to Holloway’s adjustments, which left Allen a step behind

April 22nd

International Arena, Wales
Joe Cordina SD Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov - IBF Super Feather

In case you missed it, Cordina won this title by sparking Kenichi Ogawa in what many called the KO of the year. Not much argument from me on that call. Then he got stripped because IBF gonna IBF and, IBF in another classic IBF move, made him the mandatory challenger to the title they took from him. This wasn’t quite an “of the year” performance from Cordina, but there is a huge benefit at Super Feather now that Shakur Stevenson has moved up to Lightweight: the playing field is much more level now.

WBA - Hector Garcia (Dom)
WBC - O’Shaquie Foster (USA)
WBO - Emmanuel Navarrete (Mex)

The downside to that, though, is that none of these guys are within his ecosystem and thus unification fights, which he specifically asked for (that and a rolex), are not quite as in the realm of possibility. But for the sake of discussion…
Navarrete is the most sus champ of the lot. I understand the appeal of a high-volume, high-action Mexican fighter but this guy just does not excite me when factoring in his poor lifestyle habits that have contributed to some lackluster outings. Foster is more of an unknown quantity. Vargas isn’t the most inspiring fighter so make what you will of that win, but I rate it as a good dub. Foster made a seasoned boxer play his game and even beat Vargas at his best tricks. I’m interested to see what’s next for him, but I’d rate him the same as Cordina but for obviously different reasons. Garcia is last on the sus ladder, which he gets because his ability is better than he’s given credit for (and he’s not underrated, which is saying something), but more to do with any permanence of the damage he sustained during the loss to Davis. If Cordina’s power is real and Garcia’s injuries resurface in a hypothetical fight, it would be Cordina’s fight to lose.

T-Mobile Arena, Nevada
Gervonta Davis KO7 Ryan Garcia - Super Light (136 catchweight)

I’ll spare you more of my nonsense and direct you to my boy Shrey’s writeup on this one.

David Morrell KO1 Yamaguchi Falcao

Falcao came in on less than two weeks notice. Yamaguchi isn’t the best boxer surnamed Falcao. Morrell very likely permanently ended a man’s career. The result is not at all surprising. I genuinely hope Falcao is alright cuz Morrell is a bad dude.

April Showers & April Fools

April 1st

April 8th

April 15th

April 22nd

Matchroom and DAZN ink three-year extension to USA and Mexico broadcast deals

Tank Davis Blasts Away Garcia in 7 Rounds