
Naoya Inoue: record, next fight and profile →


In Monday’s episode of “Deep Waters” on ProBox TV, analyst Chris Algieri calls unified junior featherweight champion Naoya Inoue his favorite fighter.

Twenty-five-year-old super bantamweight contender Sam Goodman flew himself to Japan to be ringside to watch Naoya Inoue vs. Luis Nery last weekend, not knowing that he would find himself in the ring following the fireworks at the Tokyo Dome.

TOKYO – I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s fair to say I wasn’t expecting that. The pitch of the cheers was different, the weigh-ins, the pageantry, the respect, the routines, it was all different.

By the time Terence Crawford steps into the ring to face Israil Madrimov in a Los Angeles soccer stadium on Aug. 3, he will have been inactive for 371 days. That’s one year, plus a leap day, plus five ordinary days. That’s 53 weeks.

Talk to enough boxing lifers and they’ll say one of the most revealing elements of a champion’s mettle is how they perform once they’re knocked to the canvas.

TOKYO – Luis Nery might have cut a dejected figure this morning. There was discolouration around his eyes but as he sat in the hotel lobby, he posed for pictures and signed autographs for the fans. He smiled more than he had all week.


TOKYO – The story had already been written before it was played out in front of more than 40,000 frenzied fans at the Tokyo Dome. The stage had been set. We had seen the commercial. Japan’s leading man, the boyish wrecking machine that is Naoya Inoue was fighting for the honor of his country against the villain of the piece, Luis Nery.

Naoya Inoue survived a scare and a first-round knockdown at the Tokyo Dome on Monday to drop Mexican challenger Luis Nery three times on his way to a spectacular sixth-round knockout.