Bookings: Saunders/Lemieux, Sosa/Castellanos, Nery, Vargas, and more

October 18, 2017
David Lemieux, Boxing

Some major fight announcements have come down the pipeline in the past few days. First and foremost, we have an HBO main event in a middleweight title fight between Billy Joe Saunders and David Lemieux on December 19th. We also have pair of HBO co-features, Luis Nery, and a ShoBox.

 

Rey Vargas
WBC super bantamweight titlist Rey Vargas
  • Somewhat surprisingly, Billy Joe Saunders’s (25-0, 12 KOs) WBO title defense against David Lemieux (38-3, 33 KOs) is set to take place on Lemieux’s home turf in Quebec rather than in the United Kingdom. I am skeptical of this fight actually taking place for that reason, but hopefully I am wrong as it is one of the better matches to be made at 160 pounds. Finally Billy Joe Saunders will be fighting another top fighter.
  • HBO’s November 25th card main evented by the return of Sergey Kovalev against Vyacheslav Shabranskyy now has a really good co-main event in the form of a junior lightweight battle between Jason Sosa (20-2-4, 15 KOs) and Robinson Castellanos (24-13, 14 KOs). That is a near guaranteed all action fight. Dan Rafael is reporting that HBO will work to get the winner a title shot on their airwaves.
  • HBO’s December 2nd show headlined by Miguel Cotto’s retirement fight against Sadam Ali also has the beginnings of a co-main event. WBC super bantamweight titlist Rey Vargas (30-0, 22 KOs) will be defending his strap on the card, but no opponent has been named as of yet. I wonder if Golden Boy would be brave enough to toss Diego De La Hoya in there.
  • Current WBC bantamweight titleholder Luis Nery (24-0, 18 KOs) will fight a non-title fight on November 4th against Arthur Villanueva (31-2, 17 KOs). The likely reason that this isn’t for a belt is that Nery anticipates being stripped for failing a drug test following his dominant upset win over longtime titleholder Shinsuke Yamanaka.
  • Finally, Lou Dibella and Showtime have announced a November 10th ShoBox card. It is a pretty good one too. The main event will be between lightweights Yuandale Evans (19-1, 14 KOs) and Luis Rosa (23-0, 11 KOs) in a well matched contest. Real prospects in Russian junior middleweight Radzhab Butaev (7-0, 6 KOs), New Zealand heavyweight Junior Fa (12-0, 7 KOs), and American Olympian junior middleweight Charles Conwell (5-0, 5 KOs) round out the card in separate bouts.

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