LAS VEGAS – If only every fight was so easy to make.

As he celebrated the first defenses of his WBC and WBO junior middleweight belts Saturday night at Mandalay Bay, Sebastian Fundora looked out to the reporters in front of him and found a special guest.

It was the unbeaten contender expected to become his official WBO mandatory contender next week, Puerto Rico’s Xander Zayas.

“We’ve stood next to each other,” Fundora said. "It’s going to be a great fight that boxing needs now – Mexico versus Puerto Rico."

The 22-year-old Zayas, 21-0 (13 KOs), agreed, telling BoxingScene that while he would “love to get it in New York,” where he often performs at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, “if I have to go the moon to go get it, I’ll go get it.”

Even Fundora’s promoter, Sampson Lewkowicz, who is as shrewd a negotiator as boxing knows, had to admit that his fighter meeting Zayas makes perfect sense because Fundora is aiming to join his sister, Gabriela, as an undisputed champion.

Doing anything to veer from Zayas would likely cause the WBO to strip Fundora of a belt when the sanctioning body has already pressed him to follow its edicts – to fight Terence Crawford before Crawford departed to a super middleweight date with Saul "Canelo" Alvarez, and to fight a top-15 WBO fighter on Saturday.

Fundora, 22-1-1 (14 KOs), not only fought No. 5-rated Chordale Booker, he dominated him, knocking him down earlier in the fourth round and then finishing him later in the round with a brutal set of left-handed punches.

“Fundora made a good adjustment off the uppercuts, started coming around with the shots – the left hook – and it caught me, threw my equilibrium off,” Booker said of the decisive blows.

“He’s 6ft 6in, so no matter where he is in the ring, he’s covering a lot of ground. It’s the way he throws his shots, from the outside. It’s very deceptive the way it lands ... it just piles up. The trajectory is difficult to keep up with. Great style.”

Fundora soaked in the moment.

“I’m happy everything worked out – it was a nice title defense. I look forward to the future,” he said. “Time will tell. We have a lot of great fighters in this division, and one is in the crowd with Zayas.”

Although Zayas fights for Top Rank and Fundora fights for Premier Boxing Champions, the rival promotions can easily foresee the beauty of making this compelling bout here in the U.S. instead of letting another quality bout escape to Saudi Arabia.

“He did what he needed to do,” Zayas told BoxingScene of Fundora.

“Man, we worked for this [mandatory] position, now it’s happening.

‘It’s going to happen. I feel it’s something we both want to happen. We’re both excited for this opportunity. It’d be awesome.

“I feel like I have better speed, better skill, better boxing IQ. But he’s the champion for a reason. He’s a tough fighter. He knows how to fight and make adjustments, like Chordale said today. But I’m looking for a great matchup with Fundora.” 

Fundora sees the appeal.

“We’re prizefighters. We want to win the biggest fight we can,” he said.

Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.