Trivia question: Who was the lead play-by-play broadcaster for the most recent fights of WBO 140lbs champion Teofimo Lopez and his Saturday night opponent, three-division champion Shakur Stevenson?
Answer: Hall of fame broadcaster Jim Lampley, who called Lopez’s convincing triumph over unbeaten interim champion Arnold Barboza Jnr on the Times Square card in New York in May, and then worked Stevenson’s superb July showing versus heavy handed William Zepeda at Louis Armstrong tennis stadium in New York.
So as Brooklyn’s two-division Lopez, 22-1 (13 KOs), and Newark, New Jersey’s Stevenson, 24-0 (11 KOs), move toward Saturday’s battle of unbeaten 28-year-olds at Madison Square Garden on DAZN, we reached out to former HBO broadcaster Lampley for his thoughts on this compelling American bout.
The last time we spoke, you made an interesting point by saying the defensively sophisticated fighter most often gains victory over the opponent driven by aggression and offense. This is that kind of fight. Elaborate please.
“Generally speaking, when a fighter has the kind of defensive skills that Shakur has, most of his fights are going to go the distance. Generally speaking, in a match between a superior offensive fighter and a superior defender, over the course of 12 rounds, the defender is seen as having the advantage. See Floyd Mayweather. See Pernell Whitaker. Guys who had spectacular records because they were knockout proof and they retreated,y win the majority of rounds. In this fight, it is Stevenson who represents that model more than Teofimo, who still has defensive skills. But Shakur is the superior defensive fighter who is willing to rely on those skills as the fundamental basis for winning. Fighters like Teofimo, who are accustomed to getting applause from fans, networks, promoters for demonstrating their offensive skills are more likely to try and win with offense – like Mayweather and Whitaker. And they are more likely to expose themselves to risk. I expect Shakur is more risk-averse than Teofimo. It takes a genuinely explosive fighter to defy that paradigm and win.”
I can recall when you were in talks to call a Teofimo fight and you told me you were fascinated by how he defeated the great Vasiliy Lomachenko. We’ve seen Lopez also solve the puzzle of former undisputed 140lbs champion Josh Taylor and make a red-hot Arnold Barboza Jnr look beyond mortal in May in Times Square. So how rich is your respect level for Teofimo?
“He was the best fighter on the Times Square card, and there were a number of name fighters on that card that night (Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, Rolly Romero). In a recent situation where there were a number of fighters seeking that spotlight, Teofimo is the one who best upheld his reputation. He’s coming into this Shakur fight off that positive performance … it means he has considerable confidence.”
Shakur took on one hell of an offensive fighter in July by meeting William Zepeda. How impressed were you by that showing?
“Very. It was the first time I covered him live, and he showed me that he was in the mold of Pernell Whitaker or any other primarily self-protected fighter you could name. He also managed to produce some effective spurts of counter-punching in the fight, which made him the clear winner against a really good, prolific fighter.”
We’ve just had five-division champion Terence Crawford retire. Should Shakur win this fight and become a four-division champion, is he pound-for-pound No.1?
“I don’t think titles are the defining trait for that anymore. There are too many belts, too many opportunities, too much effective matchmaking on behalf of fighters like him to make that criteria the definition. It’s more about what you can do in any man-to-man situation and how well do you hold up your identity. Before we put that stamp on Shakur Stevenson, because he was fighting a one-note tune in Zepeda, let’s see what he can do in this very well made fight against another top name opponent.”
Two East Coast guys at Madison Square Garden. It feels like this fight should be bigger than it is?
“It’s more about boxing than it is the two fighters. It’s more about boxing being more or less set aside by general media and taken over by social media. It’s more about the absence of the general audience’s understanding of boxing and what makes a fighter really great. It’s more about the attention being paid to spectacle and knockouts than to skill itself. A lot of people didn’t realize how capable Crawford was going to be against Canelo [in September] and what a terrific chance he had … Crawford was chronically under-publicized and he has never gotten the full credit for who he is.
It doesn’t surprise if the fight is not the attraction you’d expect it to be within the boxing world. The problem is the various elements that distract people from boxing, and the way that boxing has lost its footing as a general-audience sport. You don’t see national-media platforms flocking to any boxing match, much less one between a multi-skilled fighter and a superstar defender in a lighter weight class. Lomachenko struggled to hold his audience after HBO went away. There is no platform which has assumed the position in society and the level of influence in boxing that HBO had. The media landscape is too diversified, too fraught with wide-ranging outposts and social-media and things based on smaller audiences. It’s like making this fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Deontay Wilder. Wilder is a big name, but from the past. Usyk is a legitimate heavyweight champion and No. 1 pound-for-pound contender whom 85% of the American audience know nothing at all about. That proves the sport does not have the platform or reach it once had, and partially that’s because HBO and Showtime have been replaced by more fragmented, more incidental media platforms that struggle to promote on the same level.”
Yet, boxing retains charm and appeal in comparison to other sports, even the NFL, which you have said drags out the Super Bowl with countless ads?
“To me, it [the Super Bowl] is an excruciating event to sit through in person and in the press box – the most overrated sporting event in America. The Super Bowl deflates its own story because it’s just too long and tedious. It’s not structured to be a great television event. It’s structured to be the most television-lucrative event. Whereas, 12-round boxing matches are over in less than one hour. That is a preservation of competitive suspense.”
Who wins Teofimo-Shakur and why?
“I’m picking Shakur off of what I saw in Queens. It’s a close, competitive fight, win-able by either fighter. When a high-quality southpaw with sophisticated defensive skills faces a conventional fighter, 80% of the time, the southpaw wins. I pick Shakur purely on the basis he’s a southpaw.”
You’ll be watching?
“Of course I will. And I’ll be rooting for both fighters. I like them both personally, and the people around them, and I hope for a great fight that the audience can recognize as such. It may turn out that only the deep-background, truly sophisticated fans will look at it and say, ‘Oh, that was a great show,’ as some from the more general audience will say, ‘Oh, that was a chess match. That wasn’t really what I wanted to see.’”
