By Sean Jones: Unified lightweight champion Teofimo Lopez and his IBF mandatory challenger George Kambosos Jr will be moving their June 5th Triller pay-per-view fight to June 19th. The location for the fight event is still in Miami, Florida.
Chris Mannix of SI is reporting the news of the change of date for the Teofimo vs. Kambosos card.
This might not be the last time the Teofimo vs. Kambosos gets moved because the June 19th date is possibly the worst one for a lackluster fight like this.
Teofimo vs Kambosos Jr w competition on June 19th:
- Jermall Charlo vs. Juan Macias Montiel – Showtime
- Naoya Inoue vs. Michael Dasmarinas – ESPN
- Julio Cesar Chavez Sr vs. Hector Camacho Jr
- Julio Chavez Jr vs. Anderson Silva
- Jaime Munguia vs. Maciej Sulecki – DAZN
That’s entirely too much competition from other networks that the Teofimo – Kambosos Jr fight will have on June 19th.
Unless Triller doesn’t care about Teofimo’s fight doing poor numbers on June 19th, they need to kick that fight down the road to a date where there’s nothing going on.
The problem Teofimo has is his fight with Kambosos is an albatross, and clearly doesn’t belong on PPV. It’s nice that Triller paid a huge amount of money for the purse bid to stage the Teofimo – Kambosos fight, but this isn’t one that the U.S boxing fans were demanding to see.
That’s why Top Rank didn’t throw a ton o money at Teofimo and Kambosos because they saw it as a smaller fight for regular ESPN.
Teofimo sees himself as a pay-per-view star because his previous fight against former three-division world champion Vasily Lomachenko last October was shown on ESPN PPV.
The reason that was on pay-per-view is that Lomachenko is a pound-for-pound star, former three-division world champion, and two-time Olympic gold medalist. In other words, it was a big fight.
In contrast, Teofimo’s title defense against the unheralded 27-year-old Australian Kambosos Jr is a marginal one. Kambosos is not a former world champion, and he didn’t win any gold medals in the amateur ranks.
He’s just some guy that scraped by old-timers Lee Selby and Mickey Bey by narrow split decisions. Instead of Teofimo listening to his promoters at Top Rank to defend against Kambosos Jr on regular ESPN, he pushed it to a purse, and he lucked out when Triller paid a ton o money for it.
But now, they’re moving the fight around, and it makes you wonder if they’re beginning to understand that the Teofimo-Kambosos fight won’t bring in big PPV numbers no matter where they schedule it.
Obviously, it would be best to schedule the fight in a completely dead weakened where there is absolutely nothing to compete with the Teofimo fight, but that’s hard to do because almost any fight is better than this one. It’s such a poor one, and an insane idea to put it on PPV.
It doesn’t matter how many music artists Triller places on the same card as the Teofimo vs. Kambosos Jr fight, it’s a terrible fight.
There hasn’t been an official announcement by Teofimo’s promoters at Top Rank or more specifically Triller about the new June 19th date, but that is expected to come soon.
It’s a move that makes sense for Teofimo (16-0, 12 KOs) and Kambosos Jr (19-0, 10 KOs), as the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Logan Paul exhibition is scheduled for June 6th.
Having the Teofimo vs. Kambosos Jr fight so close to the Mayweather-Paul exhibition wouldn’t have been a good idea, as it would have put boxing fans in the position to dig deep to purchase two events on PPV a day apart.
Mayweather’s exhibition against YouTuber Logan Paul is a poor fight in the eyes of boxing fans, but it’s still viewed as a more interesting one compared to Teofimo’s title defense against Kambosos.
That’s not a PPV-worthy fight in the eyes of many boxing fans, but Triller is going to go ahead with anyone. But for a mismatch like Teofimo-Kambosos, it can’t afford to compete with a big fight like Mayweather’s.
“I think in the early rounds, it’s going to be a really good test, but in the end with the experience of Teofimo, he’s going to take advantage of that,” said trainer Eddy Reynoso to Little Giant Boxing in predicting a win for Lopez over Kambosos.