Amid the layoffs and losses Jarrett Hurd and Jeison Rosario have endured, there have likely been moments where they have resisted, grappled with the truth and realized that boxing, for now, is what they were put on this earth to do. At some point Wednesday night, during what promises to be a compelling, mandatory fight scheduled for 10 rounds in the middleweight division, at least one of them will be forced to once again question their purpose and their future.
Therein lies the perverse beauty of all-or-nothing contests: you can’t hide from the truth.
The promoter who brought them together, ProBox TV boss Garry Jonas, is adept at revitalizing and developing careers through the very uncomplicated premise of creating well-matched 50/50 fights. Not so much throwing fighters into the deep end, but insisting they prove they can swim in the waters their talents are (or should be) accustomed to.
“Ideally, improvements would have been made, but we explained to the decision-makers that ProBox TV does not deal with such improvements,” explained Jonas, who thanked Sampson Leckowicz, Luis DeCubas and PBC for their aid in organizing the contest.
“There’s a shift in boxing where increasingly, defeats don’t matter, and good fights are what matter, even at the non-championship level. And fighters know they’ll be rewarded for taking on uncomfortable fights.
“I’m not sure it’s the end of the road for the loser,” Jonas told BoxingScene. “If both guys come prepared and show what they can do, then no — not with ProBox TV. But it’s clear that the winner has a clearer path back to prominence and large fights.”
Neither Hurd nor Rosario are novel to large fights. Both are part of a recent junior middleweight line that has produced several high-quality fights and led to Jermell Charlo winning all four belts, all by defeating Rosario along the way. Before that, the Miami, Dominican Republic-born fighter — currently 24-4-1 (18 KOs) — won the WBA and IBF titles eight months after Hurd lost them.
While Rosario’s time at the top was brief and unexpected, Hurd enjoyed a more fruitful stay at the top and even flirted with boxing stardom for a time.
Shortly after defending his title against Jason Welborn as a welcome appetizer before Deontay Wilder’s first fight with Tyson Fury in December 2018, Hurd was sitting with his team at a fancy pizza restaurant next to the Los Angeles Staples Center.
His broad, tattooed frame struggled to emerge from the tight T-shirt, and his bushy hair, dyed orange at the ends, gave him an aura that stunned everyone in the restaurant.
About 24 hours later, the plucky but mismatched Welborn had defied inevitable defeat for three and a bit rounds before succumbing to a final brutal body attack in the fourth. When Hurd—still the champion, still undefeated—flashed his pearly teeth in victory, it seemed he was getting ready to go.
The dramatic fall that followed came as a shock. Six months later, he lost another fight and two world titles to Julian Williams in a thrilling split decision after a fight in which Hurt embraced his love of brawling too eagerly. Challenger and gatecrasher Luis Arias outpointed “Swift” in a 10-round fight in the summer of 2021, and then, after a 16-month layoff, the unexpected Jose Armando Resendiz forced a 10-round stoppage.t round.
Having once defeated such greats as Austin Trout, Erislandy Lara and Tony Harrison, and drawn crowds simply by wearing a tight T-shirt, Hurt, 33, now finds himself fighting for attention and a sense of importance; a not uncommon situation when players who are used to winning suddenly start losing.
On Wednesday night at the ProBox TV Events Center in Tampa, Florida, Hurd meets an opponent who is also preparing to survive.
Even though he’s younger at 29, Rosario’s decline seems harder to reverse. He’s a fighter who dethroned Williams in an even bigger upset than Hurd’s loss to “J Rock,” but his reigns as WBA and IBF champion lasted only eight months. Charlo knocked Rosario down three times in September 2020, stopping him in eight rounds. It was 10 months before he was knocked out in six rounds by Erickson Lubin, and in his last foray into the world class in November 2022, Brian Mendoza needed just five to score a knockout.
It’s fair to say that such defeats have come to better fighters than those who irritated Hurd, and that Rosario, with better company, should have been a favorite to win. But who knows what all those punches from world-class boxers ultimately got out of him—all four of his career defeats came on the schedule. What’s more, he lived badly outside the ring, adopting bad habits that extended the miles he ran prematurely. announced his retirement after losing to Mendoza.
His novel coach, Bob Santos (who also manages Mendoza), was open about the extent of the rebuild when I’m talking to BoxingScene this week: “He’s in a hole and he’s going to have to find a way to get out of it. So he chose me as his coach to aid him get out of it, and it’s a pretty damn deep hole, to say the least.
“It’s no secret that he didn’t live the cleanest lifestyle,” Santos continued. “But I don’t care how talented you are – we have to give our maximum and give our all. If we can’t do that, what do we do? I don’t want him to cheat himself, me or the fans… We’ll see how he shows up on Wednesday night. It’s a tough task, but if he does everything right, he has a chance to turn things around.”
Whether Santos is laying all his cards on the table from the start, or is he bluffing, giving Hurd a false sense of superiority, well, only time will tell.
More encouraging was the battle cry of the warrior himself. “I feel like I’m starting over, when I was at my best” Rosario told BoxingScene“The way this camp has been going has been incredible. I needed a coach who doesn’t beat around the bush [like Santos] to get back into shape. We put in a lot of strenuous work over the last three months. I feel like I’m back in shape.”
Hurd, 25-3 (17 KOs), also hasn’t looked the same for a while now. What was once an thrilling, forward-moving style designed to maroon anyone who got in his way can now be described as sloppy, clumsy and far too uncomplicated to read. Trained by Andre Robin, Hurd accepts that what was once effortless is now much more tough.
“I sometimes wake up feeling stiff, because I don’t know why” he admitted last week“I used to just come to the gym and jump in the ring, man. That’s not happening anymore. I have to stretch and sultry up,” he admitted. “As you get older, your reflexes snail-paced down a little bit, your reaction time isn’t what you think it is, sometimes you see them coming but you can’t move away like you used to. That’s what happens with age. It’s part of the game. So you have to fight smarter.”
The feeling here is that Hurd, painfully aware of his own mortality, will actually be the smarter of the two, will see enough of what’s coming from his opponent and will be able to land the blows required to finish this thing in the second half – perhaps by exposing Rosario’s apparent vulnerability to the body, an area Hurd has always excelled in. But when it comes to anticipating this, a coin toss is certainly better than overthinking.
“They were probably hungrier and more focused than at any other point in their careers,” Jonas said when asked what kind of fight he expected. “The desperation and the sense of urgency that comes with it brings out the best in all of us.
“They both have a do-or-die mentality and they’ve known about the fight for a while, and they both come in fully prepared. But what’s going to happen? I have no idea. Not knowing what to expect is a good reason to watch the fight… I’m bullish it’s going to be good.”
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