Oleksandr Oleksandrovych Usyk vs. Ricardo Verhoeven & Frank Sanchez vs. Richard Torrez Jr. RBR.

Rico is 37 now and he's been through a lot of life and death wars in his kickboxing career. I can't even count the amount of times he's been dropped or seriously hurt. Hopefully, he got paid well for this fight, and he can retire entirely from combat sports soon. His health should be his main priority now imho.

 

Fury and Kabayel are licking their chops right now.

but f me, Rico deserves a rematch. He also has a career in boxing if he wants it — he was so, so much better than anybody thought. That weird ape swarmer thing he was doing was working quite well.

 

They really are. Through 5 rounds they had Rico landing 4 jabs, which just isn’t true.

 

hold on. AJ didn’t embarrass the sport at all when he fought Ngannou. He did exactly what you’d expect a high level HW operator to do to a MMA fighter in a boxing match.

and you just know right now the wheels are spinning in Eddie’s head and he’s already talked to AJ about it.

 

i did see usyk as elite at hw, relative to the rest, which i considered weak. i never bought into the atg talk, though. i just stayed out of those discussions cause his fanbase is pretty rabid and refuse to see anything outside perfection.

 

I was waiting for that **** to happen and I knew it would be soon they where moving him along to slowly for a reason

 

You don’t like him? I was hoping he could become a contender at least and give Itauma a run for his money

 

What did he do wrong ? Setting up this whole fight for starters. An absolutely embarrassing performance against a kickboxer and a title defense made of pure fluff

Oh and yes, Furys fight against Ngannou was also a disgrace so don't even bring that up

 

Funny tweet:

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Usyk is a disgrace..

 

Thank the universe I can experience what fighting fans must have been like to Ali when he got fat as a hog and arguably lost to Jimmy Young.

 

To me it wasn't them moving him along to slow. It was the stupid team lining up fights that wouldn't go past 3 rnds. They were obsesses with the KO. Fighting guys that he can swing wild with no regards to defense.

 

You're doing the same thing every casual does when a guy has a bad night or a great night. You're acting like all these things can be figured out and proven from one fight. Bakole knocks out a prospect in Jared Anderson and that means he's going to run the HW division. Fury chins Whyte and Timothy Bradley is calling him arguably the greatest HW of all time. It's overreaction nonsense.

Usyk is 39 years old and clearly wasn't in his best shape. He was in the ring with a guy much bigger with a crazy gas tank who has spent his entire life doing combat sports. Still stopped the fella at the end. Definitely a bad performance, but guess what? EVERYBODY HAS THOSE! Any fighter you want to name on the HW ATG list has had a worse night at the office than Usyk did tonight.

It's also wild people expect these ginormous dudes who have been fighting their entire lives to be KO'd in a round or two just because they aren't boxers. This isn't some video game where all the characters have stat and experience bars. Rico is a huge dude who knows how to fight. Usyk had a bad performance, but you trying to denigrate him or the division off of one fight is asinine.

 

Usyk was losing prior to the stoppage. But the way round 11 unfolded, Usyk would've definitely ended him in the 12th if it went that far.

Rico was also getting visibily slower as the fight progressed. He still had power in his shots but from the 5th onwards he was slowing down big time.

From the opening bell there was a lot of the Fury style shown by Rico.

Great fight, better than I expected. I'd watch the re-match for sure!