David Benavidez says he’ll move up to cruiserweight to challenge WBA and WBO champion Gilberto ‘Zurdo’ Ramirez if he doesn’t get the WBC mandatory ordered immediately to challenge the winner of the October 12th rematch between undisputed light heavyweight champion Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol.
Impatient Benavidez
Benavidez (29-0, 24 KOs) is impatient and doesn’t want to be forced to wait around for his title shot like he did at 168 with Canelo Alvarez not giving him a title shot at any of the four belts when he captured all of them.
Jake Donovan is the one who broke the story of Benavidez telling him that he’ll move up to cruiserweight to take on ‘Zurdo’ Ramirez (47-1, 30 KOs) for his WBA & WBO belts if he can’t get the title shot right away against the Beterbiev-Bivol 2 winner.
Benavidez still needs to defeat WBA ‘regular’ light heavyweight champion David Morrell (11-0, 9 KOs) on February 1st in their headliner on PBC on Prime Video PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. It’s not a certainty that Benavidez will win the fight, but he has a history of being overconfident, believing he can walk on water.
So, he could find out the hard way not to look past his opponents in the 175-lb division. He could afford to do that at 68 because he was so much bigger than the limited opposition that he’d been fighting his entire career, but now that he’s fighting where he should have been from day one in 2013, he’s not so great.
“I’ve got to cut the distance, use my combinations, and use all my attributes,” said David Benavidez to Bet On Yourself channel, talking about his fight against David Morrell on February 1st. “I’m not worried about Morrell because I know that when I get a good boxer in there, then the best of myself comes out. I know that from experience.
“He’s a good fighter. I’ve got to be on my Ps and Qs. My defense has got to be good. My head movement has got to be good. That’s why I’ve been training all this time for. I know I’m going to do good. I love fighting, I love boxing, and I love everything about this. I’m going to show the people who I am on February 1st.
“I’ve talked to him a couple of times. He’s doing a great job. He’s putting together these massive fights,” said Benavidez about Turki Al-Shiekh. “I think it gives all the other fighters hope for the future that you might get a call and you might get a $50 million fight because What did Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk get? $100 million? It’s crazy.
“That’s crazy money. So, I feel us boxers went through this time where we really weren’t really making a lot of money. So now the doors are open, and we can make more money. I love what Turki Al-Shiekh is doing, but we’ve still got to think about the U.S. I want to be a Vegas fighter.”
It’s unlikely that Benavidez is going to enjoy the kind of money that Anthony Joshua, Oleksandr Usyk, and Tyson Fury have been getting for fighting on the Riyadh Season cards because the focus by Turki seems to be on paying the heavyweights tons of money. It doesn’t matter that Fury and Joshua are washed up. They’re popular for what they did in the distant past, and that’s good enough for them to be paid mega-millions.
“They still got to come to Vegas. People are still going to be in the U.S. Not everybody can go to Riyadh and go to all of those fights. I would be down to be on one of their cards, but we’ve got the U.S. that we need to take care of.
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