Fanlong Mèng vs. Israel Isaac Duffus

Is this big lunkhead serious? After hanging onto his IBF top 15 ranking despite now over two full rolling calendar years of inactivity, he's going to muck about with this...well, this doofus?

The southpaw Chinese giant (a native of Inner Mongolia but ethnically Han, and can apparently trace his lineage seventy-odd generations back to Mèng Kē, aka Mencius, the secondary major figure in Confucianism from the fourth century BCE, so, that's pretty cool I guess, although not especially uncommon or prestigious; his parents were both agricultural peasants) has been doing a dance of the seven veils with Artur Asilbekovich Beterbiev for a long time now. They were scheduled to meet in March of 2020, but that fight would be among the first event casualties of the global pandemic. Even at that point, however, Mèng had spent at least two years declining (to put it politely; there's another d-word that comes to mind) the opportunity to challenge the powerful Russian when nobody ahead of him in the rankings was able or willing.

Beterbiev would sit on the shelf for another full year himself after their match was scuttled before knocking out Russian-German southpaw Adam Deines, then #6 in the IBF rankings. Mèng hasn't competed since October fifth of 2019, when he stopped Gilberto Rubio Norzagaray to bump the Mexican's record into .500 territory.

His opponent is a Panamanian glass cannon who is just 1-2 in the last 3½ years since relocating to Los Angeles to seek Freddie Roach's tutelage. I understand that Beterbiev is tied up with a defense against current number one Marcus Browne in December, but this can't possibly be the best rust-shaker Mèng's team could find - suggesting they didn't look all that hard, and may not even be all that much of an improvement over Roc Nation, from whom Mèng extricated himself to become a free agent last year (but who at least got him the Deines and Frank Buglioni fights, by far the biggest pair of his professional career to date).

If he does finally end up settling business with Beterbiev in 2022, it may be that any slim window of success the man from Chifeng once had - as the partially unified light heavyweight kingping will have faced two consecutive southpaw contenders in Dienes & Browne, killing any discombobulating lefty novelty factor. Of course, if he is packing glass and Duffus cracks it, we at last will be free of the burden of worrying about when Beterbiev gets to do it.

 

Oof, this one's a long way off. Card airing on Telemundo at midnight EST.

The saving grace is that Boxeo Telemundo has always had their idiosyncratic habit, breaking with usual televised boxing convention, of STARTING with the main event. So, bip-bap-boom, hopefully an expedient KO and we can all go to bed.