Oscar Valdez was furious when he found out early in November that Miguel Berchelt tested positive for COVID-19.
Valdez was well into training camp for a fight that was scheduled for December 12 in Las Vegas. The former WBO featherweight champion had taken every precaution possible to ensure that him and his team avoided contracting COVID-19, but Valdez doesn’t believe Berchelt did the same thing.
Once their 12-round, 130-pound title fight was postponed indefinitely, Valdez needed some time to calm down.
“It was very heartbreaking at first,” Valdez told BoxingScene.com. “I was very mad at him for the simple reason of him not taking care of himself, maybe. I seen him going out to public spots, baseball games. I got a little frustrated because I take this very seriously. We’re always at the gym, sanitizing, picking and choosing our sparring partners that we know that are tested. We’re taking this very seriously because we wanna fight. This is our job. This is how we feed our families. And the fans want this fight, so I got very upset at him for getting COVID.”
The highly anticipated bout between these Mexican rivals has been rescheduled for February 20 at MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas. Valdez admits that even as they move closer toward their fight, he cannot help but worry that it could be postponed again.
“What can you do? We are living in a global pandemic, so anything can happen,” Valdez said. “We’re just trying to stay focused. Hopefully, this time him and his teammates are taking care of themselves, because we are. We’re definitely taking care of ourselves because we really want this fight for the fans.”
The 30-year-old Valdez is training in Guadalajara, Mexico, for a main event ESPN will televise. The 29-year-old Berchelt prepared for this mandated defense of his WBC super featherweight title in Los Mochis, Mexico.
Valdez (28-0, 22 KOs) has been careful to avoid overtraining because he returned to the gym only a couple weeks after his 10th-round stoppage of Puerto Rico’s Jayson Velez (29-7-1, 21 KOs) in his last fight, July 21 at MGM Grand Conference Center.
“I’ve been training for almost a full year because this fight was supposed to happen in early 2020,” Valdez said. “It keeps getting postponed. Finally, we get the fight date of December 12th, and then my rival gets COVID. We were already in tip-top shape. So, the hard part is to actually slow down, because you can’t always do [high-intensity] training all the time. So, that was the hard part. But we actually did a good job on that. We relaxed a bit and then we stepped it up a bit.”
Berchelt (38-1, 34 KOs) stopped Mexican journeyman Eleazar Valenzuela (22-14-4, 16 KOs, 1 NC) in the sixth round of his last fight, June 27 at TV Azteca’s Studios in Mexico City.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
