LAS VEGAS – Shook.
That’s the word Teofimo Lopez used to describe what he sensed sitting across the stage from Vasiliy Lomachenko on Wednesday night. By design, Lomachenko and Lopez never came anywhere near each other before, during or after a press conference ESPN televised live from MGM Grand Conference Center.
The brash Brooklyn native still feels he gained a psychological advantage over the favored three-division champion from Ukraine.
“He feels it,” Lopez told BoxingScene.com following the press conference. “He knows what’s up. We’re ready, though. I’m who I am. I can’t wait to display it on October 17th.”
A relaxed Lopez and his team had hoped for some semblance of a traditional staredown toward the end of the press conference. They weren’t even permitted to stand several feet apart on the stage, while wearing masks.
“He’s shook,” Teofimo Lopez Sr. said, using the same word as his son. “That’s why they didn’t wanna have the face-to-face. They said no. That’s why I said what I said. ‘We’ve gotta have the staredown! We’ve gotta have the staredown!’ But they don’t wanna scare them anymore. That’s their little boy. After Saturday, everything’s gonna change at Top Rank. There’s gonna be a new king, and I can’t wait. Nothing was given to us. We took it.”
Except for Friday’s weigh-in, employees of Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc. and MGM Grand will continue working to keep Lomachenko and Lopez apart until they enter the ring Saturday night at MGM Grand Conference Center. That’s more challenging than usual because the abnormal circumstances amid the COVID-19 pandemic have forced Lomachenko and Lopez to stay on the same floor at MGM Grand, within Top Rank’s proverbial “Bubble.”
“He’s on one side of the hotel,” the younger Lopez said. “I’m on the other side of the hotel. We’ve got security guards who walk us in and out. They timed everything. They all communicate with each other, meaning the security guards, to make sure we don’t run into each other. For whatever reason, they expect us to throw hands in the hotel hallway. Nah, we’re able to wait. We’ve only got three more days.”
Lopez’s father/trainer and Lomachenko got into a well-documented altercation at a Manhattan hotel in December 2018. Lopez Sr. swears he saw something in Lomachenko on Wednesday night that he didn’t notice that night, when he promised Lomachenko his son would knock him out.
“I already see that this guy is shook,” Lopez Sr. said. “He made us go through hell to get here. He made us get a belt. And we did it, because we knew we could. But you saw him up there. He’s so stiff. He’s gonna realize on Saturday, when he walks into that ring, that he made a big mistake. But thank God he did, because we didn’t want this guy to get away. We got it.”
ESPN will televise the 12-round, 135-pound championship unification bout between Lomachenko (14-1, 10 KOs) and Lopez (15-0, 12 KOs) as the main event of an eight-bout card. The entire show also will be broadcast by ESPN Deportes and streamed by ESPN+, starting at 7:30 p.m. ET/4:30 p.m. PT.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
