Where should Tyson Fury be ranked after his second comeback fight? What did I think of Carl Frampton and Bryant Jennings? We get to all that and more as we look at what it all meant for the sport last week in boxing.
I didn’t know what to make of Tyson Fury’s farcical comeback non-fight with old, blown up cruiserweight Sefer Seferi. I’m pretty sure they made him up and didn’t even bother to use a believable name. With that sort of performance at that bloated weight against what might have been a heavy bag in disguise after extended time away essentially due to mental illness, I had no idea what to do with Fury in terms of ranking him in the current heavyweight division. I decided to stick him just outside the top ten and see what happens. The Francesco Pianeta fight made me feel a lot better. Tyson Fury is not exciting in the ring as a general rule no matter his antics outside the ring, so it wasn’t surprising to get a dull fight. It was actually reassuring. Fury is rusty, but he looked more or less like himself in there. He was close to in shape and able to focus over the distance on implementing a game plan and fighting his fight. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that he will take off the last bit of weight and continue to work off the rust in the gym heading into the huge Deontay Wilder pay-per-view at the end of the view. Accordingly, I moved him up to third in the division behind the big two. He will be in position to restake his claim on the stop spot against Wilder too.
Carl Frampton’s fight was actually the opposite for me, though it didn’t impact his number two featherweight ranking. Maybe it was situational against a Luke Jackson who he knew couldn’t hurt him, but Frampton was much more power forward and flat footed. He dominated because he had every advantage in the ring, but a Carl Frampton fighting a more power punching oriented fight against say Leo Santa Cruz in a trilogy capper is going to fare poorly. Santa Cruz would work circles around him, literally. The Irishman doesn’t actually hit that hard and it has been his incredibly well rounded game that has gotten him to the top. He shouldn’t lose sight of that. I’m going to assume he hasn’t and he just fought that way given his opponent, but he isn’t getting any younger and he could be slowing down.
Back stateside at the Top Rank show, I’m just going to go ahead and say Bryant Jennings is getting too much praise for his performance over Alexander Dimitrenko. The big Russian has been a world level pushover. He has no top level wins and once lost to Eddie Chambers who was essentially a cruiserweight that night at a six inch and forty five pound disadvantage. Has anyone forgotten how he just walked in the ring and laid down against Joseph Parker? That wasn’t even two years ago. Last time out he fought to a draw (later overturned because of German rules to a DQ win) with a Montenegrin who lost three points along the way and who had only a couple wins over guys with winning records who then went on to be blown out by Agit Kabayel. For Bryant Jennings to overcome adversity and a close fight after seven rounds to score a thrilling knockout is not a good thing. It marks him far below world level. I don’t need to drop him in the rankings because I don’t think the guys below him like Hughie Fury are any better, but Jennings did comparatively poor against Dimitrenko.
Jesse Hart did his thing at least. He treated Mike Gavronski as the pushover he was meant to be. I’ve seen some comments that Hart was crude in there, but my response is to ask those saying so how much they had seen Jesse fight before. That was a controlled performance. The power punching Philadelphian usually wings them much more dramatically than that. He can get away with it with his power even at top level as evidenced at his narrow miss in upsetting Zurdo Ramirez, but controlling it even a little will still improve his chances. I like that he seemed to be doing that here. I actually moved Hart up three spots to number eight at super middleweight, but not really because of this performance. Whenever someone fights, I am forced to evaluate where I have them ranked. Sometimes I just look at it and realize I had done a bad job last time. I had James DeGale, Juergen Braehmer, and Chris Eubank Jr all ahead of him and I don’t know why. I think he’d go 3-0 against them with a couple knockouts to boot.
Let’s look at Russia’s success next. Their biggest win of a highly successful weekend by far was Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov’s absolute thrashing of Robinson Castellanos at junior lightweight. I had Robinson in the top five and he was undoubtedly in the top ten. Rakhimov just rolled right through him like he was nothing. The win launched the 24 year old Russian all the way up to twelfth despite only having thirteen fights He is a win from the top ten. I slipped Castellanos one spot behind him at thirteenth. I also worked Russian junior welterweight prospect Shohjahon Ergashev into the S8C Top 25 as the number twenty three junior welterweight. Much like with Jesse Hart above, this was more of a course correction though than a reaction to his performance this weekend. He had it easy, but I just thought he probably should have been in there already anyway. His future is bright.
A world title changed hands in Japan this weekend too, albeit with some minor controversy. Australian based Irishman TJ Doheny walked away with a super bantamweight title. Even though I scored it a draw, I was just as surprised as anyone when he got the decision. Ryosuke Iwasa seemed all but certain to get it. The fight was close and he was at home. Nope. I moved Doheny up to tenth and left Iwasa at nine. I thought it was an even fight and most others thought Iwasa won, so I just left him one slot ahead regardless of the bogus outcome. Also in Japanese boxing, a broken down version of Yoshihiro Kamegai lost a wide decision to little known Greg Vendetti and fell from twentieth to entirely out of the junior middleweight rankings. I considered sneaking Vendetti in and he’s close, but ultimately I went with emerging Spanish contender Sergio Garcia.
Main eventing that card was number twenty one junior lightweight Andrew Cancio picking up a win. He held his spot. As did number six super flyweight Carlos Cuadras and number seven light flyweight Akira Yaegashi. Yaegashi actually took his fight up two weight classes, but I’m not moving him or double ranking him just yet. The flyweights jump around those three divisions a lot when not challenging for a belt so I’ll just wait and see where he settles.
That’s all for this week. Next week we will take a look at the fallout from ESPN’s lightweight title fight and the supersized PBC on FS1 show the night before.
