There seems to be a revolving door of potential opponents for Danny Jacobs and Jarrell Miller on HBO’s scheduled April 28th card. It looks like Spike O’Sullivan and Trevor Bryan are out. Plus, we have the return of heavyweight enigma Andy Ruiz Jr scheduled now as well.
- British promoter Frank Warren is kicking off his 2018 scheduled with a February 24th card highlighting his three most promising young fighters. Light heavyweight Anthony Yarde (14-0, 13 KOs) will meet Frenchman Tony Averlant (26-9-2, 5 KOs) in the main event while both featherweight Zelfa Barrett (19-0, 12 KOs) and heavyweight Daniel Dubois (6-0, 6 KOs) will also be in action.
- Top Rank’s March 1oth show headlined by an excellent Oscar Valdez title defense against Scott Quigg has its co-main event. Andy Vences (20-0, 12 KOs) will meet Erick De Leon (17-0, 10 KOs) in the junior lightweight division. This is basically Top Rank taking two of its many unbeaten but middling prospects and mashing them together to try to get one to rise up. It’s not a bad idea.
- Andy Ruiz Jr (29-1, 19 KOs) will also return on the deep undercard of that show. The gifted but maddeningly non-committed heavyweight will be meeting former Olympian Devin Vargas. This will be his first fight back from narrowly losing his title shot against Joseph Parker in December. There is some talk that Ruiz has finally dropped some weight too, but that remains to be seen for sure in the ring.
- March 16th will make the return of Golden Boy’s “LA Fight Club” series on EstrellaTV. Golden Boy will put on a minimum of six of these shows this year with the other five dates being April 6, June 1, July 6, August 10, and October 12. These cards will remain in downtown Los Angeles as in years past. With their ESPN deal, I am a little surprised to this news. These cards were always as small time as it gets for a major promoter, but they are running a ton of shows and these fights could be used to line their undercards. This could be a sign that Golden Boy does not expect the ESPN deal to last long term.
- Initially Matchroom’s April 28th HBO card headlined by Danny Jacobs (33-2, 29 KOs) looked like it was going to pit the Miracle Man in against Spike O’Sullivan, but now it looks like the show will be going in a different direction. For some reason, talented but little known Polish fighter Maciej Sulecki (26-0, 10 KOs) has emerged as the front runner now. Sulecki has been campaigning at junior middleweight for his last three fights and is approaching a title shot, but he’d likely move back up for this major opportunity.
- The same thing is happening with the expected co-main event. The original talk was that heavyweight Jarrell Miller (20-0-1, 18 KOs) would be returning against fellow unbeaten American Trevor Bryan, but that too has changed. Now Miller will apparently be meeting European scene veteran Johann Duhaupas (37-4, 24 KOs). Neither of those matchups are particularly compelling.
- The highly anticipated HBO PPV May 5th rematch between Gennady Golovkin and Canelo Alvarez for the middleweight championship may have WBA junior lightweight titleholder Alberto Machado in its co-main event. Boxingscene is reporting that the three options Golden Boy is weighing are Francisco Vargas, Yuriorkis Gamboa, or lesser known unbeaten Ghanian Rafael Mensah. I’d be shocked if it was Vargas. This is preliminary level conversation at this point still.
