Naoya Inoue’s dominance of the junior featherweight division is such that his title defenses have grown into showcases of his talent rather than threats to his unblemished record.
Such will be the case on Christmas Eve in Tokyo when unbeaten four-division champion Inoue will have the holiday crowd’s attention by meeting Australia’s IBF mandatory challenger Sam Goodman on an ESPN+ card at Ariake Arena.
A news conference to formally announce the Christmas Eve card was staged Thursday in Japan, and Inoue will soon provide an exclusive interview with BoxingScene to elaborate on the fight and his future.
The card will also include a WBO bantamweight title defense by Yokishi Takei, 11-0 (8 KOs), against an opponent yet to be named.
Japan’s Inoue, 28-0 (25 KOs), is believed to be close to wrapping up his work at 122lbs, as the undisputed champion is expected to have his way with Goodman, 19-0 (8 KOs), and move on to a major event in America that Inoue’s U.S. promoter, Bob Arum, has touted.
The expectation is the bout will land in Las Vegas, and that it could very well become a showdown with unbeaten countryman and three-division and bantamweight champion Junto Nakatani.
Because of his previous destructions, Inoue surprisingly left something to be desired in his most recent bout, a seventh-round body-shot stoppage of veteran former titleholder TJ Doheny, in which Inoue was inactive by his standards in the early rounds before letting fly the defining barrage.
Yet “The Monster” has otherwise been a relentless, precision-punching fighting machine, rising to the top of the pound-for-pound rankings and flexing his popularity by selling out the 55,000-seat Tokyo Dome before flattening Luis Nery in May.
Goodman, 26, elevated to his lofty IBF position by defeating Doheny, Ra’eese Aleem and Miguel Flores in succession last year, most recently took a July 10 tune-up, defeating Thachtana Luangphon by unanimous decision.
Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.
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