Thank Al Haymon? No, thank you Floyd Mayweather.
Floyd Mayweather made good on his post-Pacquiao fight promise to vacate his cadre of welterweight titles. As a result, the upcoming June 27th fight between Tim Bradley and Jessie Vargas will now be for the WBO welterweight title. A title Bradley held previously and ultimately lost to Manny Pacquiao in their April 2014 rematch.
At Monday’s Los Angeles press conference to announce the fight,to take place at the Stub Hub Arena in Carson, CA, Bradley said the match-up will be a “fight of the year contender”. If it looks anything like his 2014 fight against Ruslan Provodnikov, it will easily make the running.
“I think this fight might be a candidate for fight of the year. I’m calling it right now. A lot of you out there see this fight on paper and you guys are like, ‘it’s an easy fight for you Bradley’.”
On paper this appears to be an easy fight for Bradley. For this bout, Vargas moves up to 147 pounds for the first time in his professional career without any and real world class competition on his resume. At the same time, the 26 year old challenger is undefeated, trained by Roy Jones Jr., and often finds himself on the generous side of close decisions. Lucky for Bradley this fight is taking place outside of Las Vegas. Vargas is harder to beat in Vegas than Floyd Mayweather.
Early prediction: As long as Bradley doesn’t overtrain and remains torn muscle free, he can pull off a win over the younger, smaller, inexperienced Vargas. Nonetheless it should be a good fight.
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