David Benavidez was talking tough during his time at the podium in their first press conference, vowing to break the mouth of David Morrell for questioning his courage in the last several years. The two fighters met up today to begin promoting their February 1st fight on PBC on Prime Video PPV in Las Vegas.
Morrell, 26, has gotten on Benavidez’s nerves by bashing him repeatedly for not stepping up to fight him. Benavidez felt it was more important to fight other guys, like David Lemieux, Ronald Ellis, Demetrius Andrade, and Caleb Plant.
The idea was for Benavidez to stay unbeaten to get the Canelo Alvarez mega-fight. That fight never materialized, so Benavidez is ready to take risky fights now against Morrell and the winner of the Artur Beterbiev vs. Dmitry Bivol 2 rematch if he gets that far.
Interestingly, Benavidez (29-0, 24 KOs) claimed that he couldn’t understand what the Cuban-born Morrell (11-0, 9 KOs) was saying when he was speaking Spanish to him. Benavidez speaks Spanish, but the accent is a little different than in Cuba, so he couldn’t understand Morrell.
Benavidez will challenge Morrell for his WBA ‘regular’ light heavyweight title in a loaded card at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The winner will be in a position to fight for the undisputed 175-lb championship against Artur Beterbiev or whoever holds the four belts by the second half of 2025.
“This guy has been disrespecting me. I’m going to break his mouth so he has something to remember me,” said David Benavidez during today’s kickoff press conference, ripping into David Morrell for criticizing him for the last two to three years because he refused to fight him until after his recent lackluster performance.
If Benavidez had agreed to fight Morrell years ago, he wouldn’t have been taunted by him. Benavidez felt it was more important to fight guys like Lemieux, Plant, and Andrade rather than Morrell. There had to have been some fear involved on Benavidez’s part not to agree to fight him until he looked unimpressive in his recent fight against Radivoje Kalajdzic.
Morrell still won that fight by a lopsided 12-round decision on August 3rd, but it wasn’t the type of performance that fans had been accustomed to seeing from him. Morrell had been looking better than Benavidez until that fight.
“He has been talking about me for about 2-3 years. Disrespecting me, my dad, my brother…so now you want to take it personally with me. So, I’m personally going to break his mouth so he has something to remember me by.”
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