Lee McGregor is hoping to make up for lost time when he fights Isaac Lowe on the undercard of the rematch between unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury.
A proposed fight with Lowe (25-2-3, 8 KOs) fell through last December when McGregor injured his arm. McGregor (14-1-1, 11 KOs) has been waiting for a route back to prominence to open up ever since.
The 27-year-old featherweight from Scotland finally gets his chance on December 21. As frustrating as the past 12 months have been, McGregor isn’t on unfamiliar ground.
“It relates to when I won the European title against Karim Guerfi,” McGregor told BoxingScene, remembering the build to their bantamweight fight in 2021. “I had three or four canceled dates, I got Covid and I was away from family. I was away from home for so long and I was just losing all hope of ever getting the fight, and then it finally happened and it was done in one round. Six months of preparation for less than three minutes. It was mad.
“Hopefully it’s a bit of deja vu and, come next week, the same thing happens and the same thing applies. It took so much work and so much grit and determination and discipline, and then it could be done in quick-style like that. Although you put so much into it, I’d bite your hand off for that result. Prepare for anything, though. Prepare for anything.”
For a while, McGregor was seen as one of British boxing’s brightest hopes. He became the fastest fighter to ever collect the British, Commonwealth and European titles and seemed poised for great things.
The close nature of the Kash Farooq fight meant that McGregor never received the acclaim he deserved for beating Farooq in an outstanding British title fight back in 2019. For some reason, McGregor’s stunning win over Guerfi didn’t catapult him to the heights it should have done.
Since then, McGregor has won four times but also fought to a draw with Argentina’s Diego Ruiz and lost a 12-round war with Erik Robles Ayala.
McGregor agrees that his biggest achievements so far have slipped under the radar, but he also knows that beating Lowe on such a massive platform could catapult him to a whole new level.
“For example, you mentioned Guerfi. Look what he’s done after I’d done that [to him]. He still, even just last week, knocked out that Terry Le Couviour, so he’s still going and doing well,” McGregor said. “But I don’t know. I just sometimes don’t feel like you get the credit you deserve, but it makes no odds to me.
“Probably the same thing will happen next week. I want to go in here and I want to do a job and I want to make a statement. I want to prove that I’m levels above Isaac, and doing that will no doubt put me in line for a world title shot going into next year, so it’s massive and it’s the biggest fight of my life on the biggest stage.”
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