Boxing

Teofimo, Shakur went from sparring as princes to fighting to be boxing kings

Published

8 months ago

January 30, 2026

It was early spring 2016 and an extremely busy day at Herman Caicedo’s gym in Miami. There have been many champions, contenders and aspiring Olympians, from Asia to America. But the star of this session was an amateur bantamweight from Newark, Fresh Jersey: an 18-year-old boy with dimples – I apply that term literally because he shaved once, but only in the hope that it would finally make something grow. That would be Shakur Stevenson.

“He performed at least 40 rounds of sparring – without a break and never leaving the ring,” recalls Caicedo, an experienced trainer. “He won eight or 10 rounds against my champion, Juan Carlos Payano.”

Then he gave Claudio Marrero – 19-1 at junior lightweight – another eight. Chucky Flores? – Moises Flores of Guadalajara, Mexico, then 24-0 – and Yenifel Vicente, a nine-year super bantamweight veteran with 27 wins, including at least eight in each.

“Weren’t there some guys from Kazakhstan too?” I’m asking.

“Yes,” says Caicedo. – They did well too. And they didn’t even look tired.

Even though Stevenson was just a kid in a fight against hardened men, he inevitably gave it his all as well or better than he could have done. But the last competitor he faced that day was a kid like him from Florida, Brooklyn, Fresh York, and also competing for a spot on the Olympic team. Teofimo Lopez Jr. he was a lightweight, just 32 days younger. How that day went depends on who you ask (as well as boxing judges, actually). The friend who talked me into this incredible session – four-minute rounds with 30 seconds of rest in between – recalls how Stevenson beat Lopez. But Caicedo, who is listed, remembers differently: “Look, it was a good job, not some drag fight. Shakur had just gone 40 rounds and Teo was fresh. But Teo probably did better. Shakur was very versatile, well-trained, didn’t make any mistakes. But Teo seemed a little faster, more athletic, more explosive, more like Roy Jones, you know what I’m saying? They both impressed me.”

You learn from sparring at your own risk. I know it. The bravest fighters I have ever seen – Muhammad Ali and Evander Holyfield – were notoriously underperforming in the gym. Ten years later, that day in Miami says something about each fighter, who they have become and how they will emerge from Saturday’s 140-pound title fight at Madison Square Garden. If they were princes then, they are now fighting to be kings, to be seen as the successors (at least in this hemisphere) of Terence Crawford and the ever-present spirit of Floyd Mayweather Jr.

“We signed both players thinking they could be great,” says Carl Moretti, the senior vice president who signed each of them ahead of the 2016 Olympics. “But the truth is, they’re even better than we thought.”

The fact that they are no longer considered top-level players is a different story, and a sorrowful one at that. But the more significant issue remains. All conversations at the beginning of this decade of the next Four Kings era (or maybe five?) turned out to be typical boxing fraud. But Stevenson and Lopez, now 28 each, represent the best of their generation, the most talented players with the deepest resumes. “Two guys in great shape who want to challenge each other,” says Lopez. “It helps the sport. It sets an example.”

I must note that such examples are subsidized and made possible by Saudi financier Turki Alalshikh. However, the fascinating element here is the warriors themselves – not only their talent, but also the huge discrepancy in their temperaments and career paths, which seem diametrically opposed.

Stevenson is similar to the kid from 2016. If there is something almost heroic about his sparring, it is due to his unrelenting obsession with the sport. “His life is boxing,” says Antonio Leonard, Stevenson’s co-organizer from the beginning. “He will go anywhere, he will never turn down a job. I saw him in sparring [Gervonta] “Tank” Davis – twice – in Baltimore. Tank couldn’t do anything about Shakur. I remember when he first started sparring with Terence.

He means Crawford. “I said, ‘Terence, don’t go simple on him, right?'”

“Hell no,” Crawford said. – I’m trying to kill him. Stevenson, unlike Crawford, is not a particularly brutal fighter. He won’t finish you off with one punch. And if you still want to criticize his lackluster win over Edwin De Los Santos, understand that he still won easily despite injuries to his right hand, left hand, and shoulder. Also understand that he understands distance the way Albert Einstein understood physics. He is the best defensive player of his generation and therefore the most avoided. Warriors are not afraid of beatings; they are afraid of being humiliated and of looking stupid and helpless. That’s what makes Stevenson a great fighter.

Now a photo is circulating on the Internet: Mayweather, Andre Ward, Crawford and Stevenson. He became convinced that he was next in line, that he was the all-time, No. 1 pound-for-pound. This may be true, but only if he plays as the bookmakers expect and beats Lopez. And that in itself – Teofimo’s prediction – is the most misleading of propositions.

According to DraftKings Sportsbook, Lopez is roughly a 2-1 underdog over Stevenson. In other words, Stevenson is a bigger favorite to fight Lopez than Lopez was in his last fight against Arnold Barboza Jr. Now consider this: Lopez scored a spectacular victory over Vasily Lomachenko.

“He kept asking about Loma when no one thought he had a chance – so what does anyone really know?” asks Lopez’s manager, Keith Connolly. “The truth is we beat an undefeated southpaw.”

In 2020, it was Lomachenko. In 2023, it was the best (or so it was thought) 140-pounder in the world, the time-tested former Olympian Josh Taylor. I will always remember the build-up to this fight, when Teofimo told me about his humble fantasy of dying in the ring. Then he started doing it with his father/coach, Teofimo Lopez Sr., on camera. I thought it would fall apart and I would definitely lose. He then made Taylor’s job easier.

This is the difference between Lopez and Stevenson. Where Stevenson is rational, always calculating and focused solely on boxing, Lopez is performative, charismatic and always has a hint of family drama. Stevenson wants to be a great fighter above all else. Lopez wants this too, but she wants to be loved and adored even more.

A few years ago, Stevenson lost his weight belts. He had been urinating blood for hours and had reached the point where simply trying to gain weight was threatening everything he loved. Lopez, on the other hand, endured a terrible weight cut that could have easily killed him, and lost the title (albeit by a whisker) in the ring against George Kambosos Jr. Then he bragged about it.

“The best thing that could have happened to me,” he told me.

Given Lopez’s undeniable talent for making life tough for himself, it’s worth noting that he turned down what was widely considered an easier and even more attractive fight with Devin Haney. Since Haney is also trained by an persuasive father, this could have gone down as the Super Bowl of boxing dads. But that would make Lopez the favorite.

“It just felt like the right time,” Lopez told me Wednesday afternoon. “I was dealing with personal matters, as you know, it happens in my career: marriage, family matters. It turned out the way it turned out.”

It worked – not coincidentally, I think – with Lopez as the underdog.

Now I remind him of that day in Miami ten years ago. “I remember,” he says. “We were both very knowledgeable players with high IQs and we were very selective with our punches. But you can’t do that in sparring. It was only three rounds.”

This one is forever.

Boxing

Christian Mbilli Aims to Dethrone Canelo Alvarez During Riyadh Season Showdown in October

Published

9 hours ago

September 19, 2026

The Punch Junkie™ News

"Christian Mbilli Aims to Dethrone Canelo Alvarez During Riyadh Season Showdown in October"

Christian Mbilli looks at Canelo Alvarez and sees an ancient relic from a bygone boxing era, a fighter whose dominance was artificially preserved through years of soft, handpicked opposition before reality caught up to him last year.

WBC super middleweight champion Mbilli (29-0-1, 24 KOs) will defend his belt against Canelo (64-3-2, 39 KOs) on October 31 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The bout tops a DAZN pay-per-view card. Mbilli knows the clock has run out on Canelo’s smoke-and-mirrors run. After the interviewer noted that Mbilli had previously labeled the 36-year-old Canelo old and past his peak, the champion refused to soften his stance.

“Of course. Yes, it’s very good timing for me to take him. He’s still very dangerous. He has big power and good counterpunching. I have to be careful, but I think it’s very good timing for me,” Mbilli said. “I think my pressure and my energy [are advantages]. I put a lot of energy and a lot of pressure.”

Canelo took this fight because Riyadh offered a massive paycheck to headline on October 31, but stylistically and physically, he is playing with fire.

When Gennadiy Golovkin was 36, he was still tracking fighters down, jabbing their heads back into the cheap seats, and maintaining relentless pace round after round. Canelo, 36, turned professional at fifteen years old. He has sixty-nine fights, over five hundred grueling rounds, and two full decades of wear and tear grinding away at his joints. His athletic odometer reads more like forty-two than thirty-six. Canelo has turned into a high-end luxury vehicle running on fumes. In his last stretch of fights, the pattern became undeniable.

He works in short sixty-second bursts, leaning back on the ropes, trying to hide behind a tight guard while taking deep breaths. Once that gas tank hits empty around round six, he does not recover. There is no second wind. Against Terence Crawford, that inability to sustain work resulted in complete technical surrender. He just stood there, unable to mount offense, looking bewildered because his physical vehicle refused to respond to the commands in his brain.

Mbilli is an aggressive pressure fighter; walking straight toward him would deliver easy counterpunching opportunities. That is the old Canelo arrogance talking, the memory of what he used to do to brawlers who lacked defense. The problem for Canelo is that Mbilli is not going to stand politely at mid-range, admiring his reputation or waiting for permission to throw. Mbilli unloads eighty to ninety punches a round. He crowds, headbutts, leans, and hammers away with bad intentions.

If Canelo gasses out after four rounds of trading and parks himself on the ropes looking for rest, Mbilli will not let him breathe. He will drown him under a relentless avalanche of leather. Unless Canelo can catch Mbilli early with a perfect, fight-altering counter hook down the pipe to force total respect, this matchup has all the ingredients of an embarrassing changing-of-the-guard beatdown.

Watching a legendary fighter get battered on his feet simply because his legs and lungs died on him five rounds earlier is one of the ugliest sights in boxing. Canelo may find out the hard way in Riyadh that you cannot overhaul a shot engine inside twelve rounds against a relentless physical wrecking ball.

If Mbilli dominates Canelo and exposes his shot gas tank in October, Riyadh Season finds itself holding a depreciated asset with one contractual commitment left to fulfill.

That puts the Saudi organizers in an awkward matchmaking bind. A rematch with Mbilli makes zero promotional sense. You pointed directly to the blueprint Canelo has followed throughout his entire career. He is not Sugar Ray Robinson traveling to Europe to instantly avenge Randy Turpin. Canelo treats losses as business write-offs.

When Floyd Mayweather schooled him, Canelo walked away. When Dmitry Bivol outclassed him, Canelo made polite noise about a return, then ran straight back to Gennadiy Golovkin and John Ryder, never stepping anywhere near Bivol again. After Terence Crawford outpointed him, Canelo accepted the check and moved on. If Mbilli batters him, Canelo predictably will never mention Mbilli’s name again.

That leaves Riyadh Season with a damaged commodity to burn off in their final contractual bout.If Turki Alalshikh turns around and pairs Sheeraz with Canelo after Mbilli dismantles the Mexican veteran, the optics would be rotten to the core.

You would have Sheeraz, an exposed belt-dropper branded as a runner by hardcore fight fans, standing across from a battered, shot version of Canelo coming off a stoppage or a one-sided drubbing. It would not be an elite championship contest. It would be an artificial, manufactured cash-out designed to prop up a fighter who just sprinted away from his real test.

Promoting that as a marquee event would be grotesque. The storyline cannot be sold as two supreme titans colliding. The hardcore fans would view it as a disgraced runner being rewarded with an elderly, worn-out punching bag who could not keep his legs under him against Mbilli.

If Canelo gets embarrassed on October 31, tossing him into the ring with Sheeraz would not fool anyone. It would just be a cynical liquidation sale where the promoter tries to pass a manufactured torch to an anointed favorite who was terrified of fighting his own mandatory.

About the author

Boxing 24/7 Wire

Boxing247.com is an independent boxing news publication covering the sport since 2001. It provides original reporting, fight analysis, schedules, results, and informed coverage of major fighters and events worldwide, backed by more than 25 years of professional boxing journalism.

Boxing

Former Heavyweight Champion Makes Comeback at 53, Ready to Face Any Challenge After Defeating Lennox Lewis

Published

17 hours ago

September 19, 2026

The Punch Junkie™ News

"Former Heavyweight Champion Makes Comeback at 53, Ready to Face Any Challenge After Defeating Lennox Lewis"

Hasim Rahman is willing to compete with the world’s top operators as he bids to break George Foreman’s record and become the oldest heavyweight champion in history.

Should he succeed in doing so, the 53-year-old would also trump the record of Bernard Hopkins, who was 49 when he reigned as boxing’s oldest-ever world champion.

Before attempting to tackle this challenge, though, Rahman must first end over 12 years of inactivity and complete his comeback assignment on September 24.

Standing in the opposite corner will be Phillip Triantafillo, who, with a record of 4-4, is certainly no world-beater and would be the first to admit his limitations.

Nevertheless, he is the man tasked with scuppering Rahman’s title ambitions in Indiana, where both men have agreed to collide in a scheduled six-round contest.

In his last professional outing, Rahman lost a three-round unanimous decision to little-known Australian Anthony Nansen and, prior to that, was stopped in two rounds by Alexander Povetkin.

As he looks to eventually secure a world title shot, however, the American has told Abrams Boxing that he is prepared to face any heavyweight in the sport.

“Any time I can make history I’m interested in doing it. It don’t really matter who’s on the other side [of the ring]. It could be any heavyweight in the world – any of them. I feel like I’m capable of getting in there with anybody in the world.

I’m punching like a 25-year-old and out working young guys in the gym. I’m ready for whatever and whoever, this is just step one.”

Known for his almighty upset victory over Lennox Lewiswho he stopped in five rounds before suffering a fourth-round stoppage defeat in their immediate rematchRahman went on to cement his legacy as a two-time world champion.

Boxing

John Hedges vs Pat Brown Fight Results and Scorecard Analysis

Published

17 hours ago

September 19, 2026

The Punch Junkie™ News

John Hedges vs Pat Brown Fight Results and Scorecard Analysis

World Boxing News provides results and a round-by-round scorecard as unbeaten cruiserweights Pat Brown and John Hedges collide at Manchester’s Co-op Live tonight.

Brown enters the biggest fight of his six-bout professional career against the more experienced Hedges, with both men putting their undefeated records on the line.

The British, Commonwealth, WBA International and IBF Intercontinental cruiserweight titles are at stake in the 12-round main event.

WBN will provide live updates and a live scorecard for the main event from Co-op Live throughout the evening.

Hedges vs Brown Live Scorecard

Pat Brown vs John Hedges

(Round-by-round scorecard will refresh every 2 mins)

British, Commonwealth, WBA International & IBF Intercontinental Cruiserweight Titles
Co-op Live, Manchester
12×3

Round	HEDGES	BROWN
Round 1	10	9
Round 2	9	10
Round 3	9	10
Round 4	10	9
Round 5	9	10
Round 6		IS
Round 7
Round 8
Round 9
Round 10
Round 11
Round 12
WBN Totals:

Official Result: BROWN KO6

Hedges vs Brown Results

Times are local UK

22:20

Pat Brown stopped John Hedges in six rounds courtesy of two beautifully placed body shots. Hedges had started well and stuck to his game plan, while Brown spent the early rounds looking for the heavier shots after a slow opener.

By the sixth, Hedges had become a little ragged and Brown switched his attention to the body after initially targeting the head. The finish came from a devastating shot to the solar plexus that doubled Hedges over, leaving him unable to beat the referee’s count of ten.

21:44

Shabaz Masoud dominated Ckari Cani Mansilla from start to finish to remain unbeaten and move to 16-0. Masoud swept every round on all three scorecards, with the judges unanimously returning shutout scores of 100-90.

20:45

Mark Jeffers improved to 21-2 with a unanimous decision victory over Kieron Conway after ten competitive rounds at super middleweight.

Conway remained in the contest throughout, but Jeffers did enough to earn scores of 97-93, 97-93 and 96-94.

19:52

Cory O’Regan became the new English lightweight champion with a commanding unanimous decision victory over Joe Howarth. The judges scored the contest 99-91 and 98-92 twice in O’Regan’s favor. O’Regan moves to 16-1, while Howarth drops to 15-3.

18:25

Alfie Middlemiss recorded the first stoppage victory of his professional career after Christopher Mondongo was pulled out by his corner following the fourth round.

17:53

Middleweight Tom Rafferty moved to 18-0 by stopping Irishman Liam Walsh in the second round of a scheduled eight.

17:35

Jack Power took every sessiok from Victor Ionascu to score a 60-54 decision at middleweight.

17:04

Super welterweight Garan Croft needed less than 90 seconds to get the job done, hurting Mohammed Graich before finishing him in the opening round.

16:50

Emily Whitworth kicked off the prelims by defeating Beata Dudek over six rounds at bantamweight. Whitworth won every round, with the referee scoring the contest 60-54.

Preview

Pat Brown and John Hedges meet over 12 rounds in an all-British cruiserweight clash at Co-op Live in Manchester.

Brown enters the main event with a perfect 6-0 record after stopping every opponent since turning professional. The Manchester fighter represented Great Britain at the Paris 2024 Olympics before beginning his professional career.

Hedges brings considerably more professional experience into the contest at 12-0 and travels to Brown’s home city looking to maintain his own undefeated record.

The vacant British and Commonwealth titles are on the line alongside the WBA International and IBF Intercontinental championships.

Shabaz Masoud features prominently on the undercard as he moves up to featherweight against Ckari Cani Mansilla, while Kieron Conway and Mark Jeffers meet in a British super middleweight title eliminator.

All bouts will be updated as results come in throughout the night, with more live coverage on World Boxing News.

About the Author

Phil Jay is the Editor-in-Chief of World Boxing News (WBN), a BWAA-acknowledged boxing news website founded in 2010. A veteran boxing reporter with 16 years of experience, he has interviewed world champions, broken international exclusives, and reported ringside from major events. His work is published worldwide through WBN and distributed on platforms including Apple News.

Read Phil Jay’s full bio and latest stories.