Sebastian Fundora’s towering stature is frequently billed as a nightmare puzzle for Jaron “Boots” Ennis. His gritty scrap against Ermal Hadribeaj exposed a deeper issue: height means little if you lack the hand speed and sharp timing to protect it.

Shawn Porter zeroed in on those deficiencies while breaking down Fundora’s October 17 win alongside Hadribeaj. The unheralded challenger slipped past the WBC junior middleweight champion’s reach all night, causing chaos until Fundora finally halted him with one tick remaining in round 12.

“He couldn’t time you last night,” Porter told Hadribeaj Porter’s channel. “You were coming after him, and there was not one moment where he saw you coming.”

Porter mentioned Timothy Bradley’s note that Fundora’s father deliberately schooled him in phone-booth infighting, knowing shorter foes would inevitably crowd him. Preparing for the trenches makes tactical sense. It does nothing to develop range control or a punishing perimeter game.

“You don’t have natural speed with the jab. You don’t have natural timing with the one-two,” Porter pointed out.

That gap undermines Fundora’s physical gifts. An 80-inch reach should turn the outside into a minefield, yet Hadribeaj walked into chest range round after round.

Labeling Fundora an inside specialist lets him off the hook. Smothering a foe by choice after dictating terms from the outside is one thing. Living on the inside because you lack the tools to keep opponents off your chest is entirely different. Porter’s critique puts Fundora squarely in that second camp.

Hadribeaj also smothered Fundora so effectively that the champion lost leverage on his trademark uppercuts. Porter observed that while a few broke through, the challenger took away the arc and velocity that crushed earlier rivals.

That pattern should set off alarm bells for Fundora’s camp ahead of a clash with Ennis.

Hadribeaj was an overlooked mandatory, not a pound-for-pound technician, yet he repeatedly forced the champion into disorganized exchanges.

Ennis would not have to wage a simple war of attrition. Boots could exploit those same entry lanes with explosive combinations, fluid stance switches, and evasive angles before Fundora resets his feet. Breaching Fundora’s perimeter would simply trigger a much heavier assault.

Hadribeaj maintains that Fundora’s rare height might still trouble Ennis. His own 12 rounds offered the opposite verdict: a modest puncher penetrated Fundora’s defenses at will.

Boots would still have to respect the champion’s durability, heavy inside clubs, and unrelenting output. Fundora eventually broke Hadribeaj through pure grit, and absorbing that type of heat drains any gas tank.

Fundora cannot gamble on elite punchers gassing out before his defensive gaps catch up to him. Halting Hadribeaj protected his belt, but it never answered Porter’s questions about how effortlessly he was reached.

Denzel Bentley laid out his reasons for parting ways with Frank Warren, but his grievances with Queensberry are getting swallowed up by an immediate crisis: walking into his Zuffa debut stripped of his WBO middleweight title.

The sanctioning body is poised to strip Bentley after his camp let the clock run out on confirming a mandatory defense against Yoenli Hernandez. While the official declaration is still pending, his November 7 clash with Shane Mosley Jr. looks set to happen without world title hardware on the line.

Bentley vented about prolonged benching and ghost dates that never got booked.

“I didn’t think I was being treated the best, but I wasn’t in the position to look for anywhere else to go,” Bentley said to Boxing King Media. “It was just to that point where I was out for 16 months.”

He claimed phone calls went ignored and pointed to backstage efforts to scratch him from an MF Pro card.

“No one cared about how I paid the bills or how I was getting on in life or how I was looking after my family.”

Any prizefighter needs a steady paycheck. The economics clearly drove his decision. Warriors Boxing took the Hernandez purse bid at the $200,000 floor, which would have netted Bentley a modest $150,000 to $160,000 payday.

Still, Hernandez secured his status as the rightful challenger. Venting about Queensberry does not justify leaving the top contender on ice. The WBO shut down Bentley’s appeal on October 22, handing both camps a strict 24-hour ultimatum to lock in the bout. Reports indicate his team let the window slam shut.

Instead, Bentley meets Mosley at London’s Copper Box Arena, serving as the co-feature under Chris Billam-Smith versus Cheavon Clarke on Zuffa Boxing 12.

Walking away from Frank Warren is one thing. Plenty of fighters get frustrated by sitting on the shelf and look for greener grass. Tossing away a world title to take a non-title fight against a tricky, surging veteran like Shane Mosley Jr. is completely different. In modern boxing, belts are the ultimate leverage coin.

Without that strap, Bentley loses the single bargaining chip that made him attractive to a new promoter in the first place.

If he gets past Mosley, he can at least try to spin the narrative: he stayed active, got paid, and can target other middleweight names under the Zuffa banner. If Mosley beats him, Bentley’s standing is devastated. He gave up his belt to avoid an unheralded Cuban slickster in Yoenli Hernandez for a modest $150,000 purse bid, only to turn around and get clipped by Mosley in his very first outing with a new outfit. That leaves him with zero hardware, zero momentum, and no moral high ground.

The idea that Zuffa will carry him as charity if he fails is pure dream. Look at how Dana White and the Zuffa machinery run the UFC. They are notoriously cold-blooded. They operate on a strict return on investment mindset. If you produce, entertain, and win, they push you. If you underperform, look flat, or drop a fight you were positioned to win, you are instantly expendable. They don’t do sentimental rebuilding projects for foreign imports who don’t hold a title.

Bentley’s value exists almost entirely in whether he delivers in the ring right now. If he beats Mosley convincingly, the gamble pays off. If he loses, he gave up a world championship just to become an expendable roster cut on someone else’s highlight reel.

Bob Arum claims he had Emanuel Navarrete ahead going into the 12th round against O’Shaquie Foster on Saturday night. That is a baffling read on a fight where Foster boxed circles around him before dropping Navarrete twice in the final three minutes.

Foster (26-3, 12 KOs) outclassed Navarrete (40-3-1, 33 KOs) by unanimous decision in San Antonio to collect the IBF and WBO super featherweight titles alongside his WBC belt. The judges turned in cards of 118-108, 115-111, and 118-108.

The Top Rank boss somehow watched a completely different fight through the first 11 rounds.

“Navarrete is not the easiest guy to fight because he comes from so many different angles, and I had him slightly ahead going into the last round,” Arum said to Fight Hub TV.

Sure, Navarrete is awkward. He throws punches from weird trajectories that you cannot mimic in training camp. Trying to argue that he was actually winning the fight going into the 12th is another story entirely.

Throwing unorthodox shots from strange angles does not win rounds if you are hitting air or gloves. Plodding forward without landing clean punches does not score points either. You have to look at who is actually landing effective blows. Foster picked Navarrete apart all night, yet Arum’s unofficial tally completely ignored his ring generalship.

The official scorecards shred Arum’s narrative. Foster’s two knockdowns in the 12th padded the final gap, though he already had the fight locked up on the cards. Two judges had Foster winning by ten points at the final bell. Even the tightest card had him up by four. Do the math without the 10-7 final round, and Foster was still cruising to a comfortable victory.

Arum conveniently skipped giving a round-by-round breakdown to back up his claim. Knowing which six rounds he somehow handed to Navarrete would be fascinating. What exactly was Arum scoring?

Boxing fans debate close rounds all the time. Claiming Navarrete led after 11 rounds is just pure promoter spin.

Foster should not have to rely on two late knockdowns just to get full credit for a masterclass. Dropping Navarrete twice was simply the exclamation point on a dominant night. Arum is trying to paint a picture where Foster needed a last-minute miracle to pull out the win, which is an insult to the clinic everyone else just watched.