By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – Gary Russell Jr. can’t believe Vasyl Lomachenko couldn’t knock him out.
Russell contends he was so physically depleted during their June 2014 fight in Carson, California, he couldn’t have envisioned shadow-boxing for 12 rounds, let alone competing against a championship-caliber opponent that long. Lomachenko beat Russell by majority decision in that 12-rounder for the then-vacant WBO featherweight title.
The 27-year-old Russell (26-1, 15 KOs), who since has won the WBC featherweight championship, wants nothing more than an opportunity to avenge his lone professional defeat. The Capitol Heights, Maryland, native is 100-percent confident the result of their rematch would be very different than their first fight.
“I’ll stop him,” Russell told BoxingScene.com Wednesday following a press conference in Manhattan. “I’ll stop him, hands down.”
Assuming Russell defeats Ireland’s Patrick Hyland (31-1, 15 KOs), a huge underdog entering their scheduled 12-round fight Saturday night at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut (Showtime; 11 p.m. ET), Russell has mapped out a road toward a Lomachenko rematch.
“God willing, if we get through this fight, I would love to see Lee Selby to unify,” Russell said, referencing the IBF featherweight champ from Wales. “Immediately after that, I would wanna see Leo Santa Cruz. Then, right after that, we’re gonna try to make it happen with Lomachenko.”
The 28-year-old Lomachenko (5-1, 3 KOs) is scheduled to defend his WBO 126-pound championship against Puerto Rico’s Roman Gonzalez (29-2-3, 17 KOs) on June 11 in The Theater at Madison Square Garden (HBO).
A Russell-Lomachenko rematch might be harder to make than their first bout because that fight was a championship match ordered by the WBO. Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc., which promotes Ukraine’s Lomachenko, and Al Haymon, who advises Russell, typically don’t do business unless a fight is mandated by a sanctioning organization or is too profitable too avoid (e.g. Mayweather-Pacquiao).
Whatever happens, Russell hopes to get another crack at the left-handed Lomachenko.
“I definitely wanna fight Lomachenko again,” Russell said. “I don’t care if he loses his next 10 fights. He’s gonna have to see me. He has to fight me.”
If the 2008 Olympian gets that opportunity, Russell won’t do the things he says led to him being six pounds over the 126-pound featherweight limit less than 24 hours before he weighed in for the Lomachenko fight.
Russell hired a nutritionist/strength & conditioning coach for that fight. He declined to name that coach, but Russell terminated their partnership after the Lomachenko loss because the scale they used throughout training camp wasn’t calibrated correctly, which left Russell to spend entirely too much time in a sauna during the hours leading up to the weigh-in.
“We tried to rehydrate and everything like that,” Russell said. “But everyone knows how the anatomy works. What you eat today doesn’t help you tomorrow. It helps you the day after. So we tried to do everything we can. It didn’t happen.
“If I can take anything from that particular experience it’s if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t bring anyone else in our camps. We normally do everything ourselves, and the one time we did decide to bring someone in, this was the outcome. It was costly, but it was a lesson learned.”
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.