How could you not be excited about Martin Bakole? He’s just about everything you could possibly want a heavyweight contender to be.
He has the size of a modern giant — 6-foot-6, anywhere from 275-300 pounds, depending on the day — but with the combination punching and handspeed of the slightly less gigantic heavyweight champions of the past.
He has the ingredients to be the subject of endless mainstream magazine-style features, coming equipped with both an effervescent personality and a unique background as a Congolese prince who left Africa some eight years ago for a new life in Scotland.
He has an air of mystery — beyond just the royal bloodline element. In the grand tradition of Marvin Hagler and Archie Moore, Bakole’s age is a point of debate — most sources say 31, but some say 33. What’s the truth there? And did he really stop both Oleksandr Usyk and Daniel Dubois in sparring, as he claims?
And then there are the obvious, omnipresent George Foreman comparisons. Who wouldn’t want to believe a “next Big George” has arrived? Now that Bakole has given up his svelte early-career 230-250-pound build and is pushing three bills, he’s built much like the later-stage Foreman, and he fights with the confident calm of that version of Foreman too.
A few days ago, we got the announcement of Bakole’s next fight: May 2, venue TBA (but possibly outdoors in Times Square), the third fight on the Ryan Garcia/Devin Haney pre-rematch double bill, taking on Efe Ajagba. So for the next three months leading up to that, it’s full steam ahead for the Bakole hype train.
I see all the reasons to buy a ticket and hop aboard that locomotive.
But at the same time, I’m wary.
When Bakole TKO’d Jared “Big Baby” Anderson in his most recent fight, last August 3 amid the never-ending fight card at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, I was as impressed as anyone else. Bakole took on an undefeated opponent, one touted by many as the next great American heavyweight, and battered him. He didn’t just win. He overwhelmed. His left hook did damage every time it landed. His right uppercut repeatedly caught Anderson off guard. Bakole put his punches together, showed an expert sense of timing and distance, and fought in an offensive-minded manner without ever getting sloppy or overcommitting.
And that calm. You couldn’t miss it. Bakole’s hands were often held low, but not in a “he needs to fix that technical flaw” way. It was instead with an air of “he knows exactly what he’s doing and is in total control here.”
So, yeah, Bakole established himself as a heavyweight to watch, a definite top-10 contender (the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board has him No. 6), part of that next wave ready to challenge the Oleksandr Usyk/Tyson Fury/Anthony Joshua establishment.
But it’s also gone a couple of leaps beyond that. Podcaster and media mogul Bill Simmons has emerged in American sports as the avatar of the mainstream fan who has a casual interest in boxing. He’s not one of those guys who knows nothing about the sport and only has something to say when Mike Tyson is fighting Jake Paul. But neither is he the type to make time for Diego Pacheco vs. Steven Nelson on DAZN. Simmons sits at that midpoint; he tunes in for the major pay-per-view fights, probably catches 10 or so shows over the course of a year, sometimes bothering with the undercards, sometimes not. And among his roughly 150 podcast episodes per year, he sneaks a little boxing talk into about a half-dozen of them.
And every time the heavyweight division has come up in conversation since August 3, Simmons has aggressively pivoted the conversation to Martin Bakole and implied that he’d have a tough time picking against Bakole, regardless of the opponent.
Presumably, this is based on watching Bakole fight one time.
Bakole didn’t come out of nowhere to beat Anderson — he had a solid track record entering that fight and was a popular mild upset pick among insiders familiar with his talents. But to mainstream fans, especially mainstream American fans, Bakole did emerge from out of nowhere that night.
And he looked exceptional, no doubt. But it was one fight. And we’ve been down this road before.
I distinctly remember the Seth Mitchell hype machine going into overdrive in 2012, and it actually happened in large part because of Simmons’ podcast — specifically because comedian Louis CK was on it as a guest and was gushing about the destructive, undefeated young heavyweight whom he’d just seen overcome a rocky moment or two to stop Chazz Witherspoon.
From that point forward, Mitchell fought a grand total of three more times professionally, including a first-round KO loss and a second-round KO loss, and was out of the sport a year after CK’s endorsement.
This is not to shame Simmons or CK and hurl an “oh, those silly casuals” insult at them. We’ve all stumbled into these sorts of misperceptions and let ourselves get carried away. Larry Merchant was certainly no silly casual when he loudly declared, “Derrick Jefferson, I love you!” at the conclusion of Jefferson’s frantic, ferocious KO of Maurice Harris in 1999. Jefferson was undefeated at the time and a gifted puncher and a TV-friendly slugger. It was natural to fall in love with him.
Two months later, he lost to David Izon. Then he lost his next fight after that, was never again perceived as a contender, and was in fact stopped in all four of his career defeats.
There’s something about an exciting, relatively young heavyweight, one who produces a memorable knockout in a step-up spot, that we just can’t resist. I wouldn’t put Michael Grant in this precise category, because it wasn’t a singular eye-opening win in his case. He beat Izon, then Obed Sullivan, then Lou Savarese, and dramatically got off the deck twice to make Andrew Golota submit. That wasn’t exactly the late-‘90s heavyweight Mount Rushmore, but it was enough of a resume to make Grant’s April 2000 title shot against Lennox Lewis feel very much deserved.
And, in what still stands 25 years later as the worst boxing prediction I’ve ever made, I tabbed Grant to win.
So, again, casuals and hardcores alike, we all get fooled and go overboard sometimes when a promising big man sweeps us off our feet.
Hilariously in retrospect, there was a Ring magazine cover a little over 20 years ago — the March 2004 issue — that featured three young heavyweights: Audley Harrison, Dominick Guinn, and Joe Mesi. The headline: “Who Will Replace Lewis, Tyson & Holyfield?”
I was one of the editors at the time, so I’m not pointing fingers here. And in our defense for a cover image and headline that very much did not age well, it was a dark time for young heavyweights. Wladimir Klitschko had just recently been splattered by Corrie Sanders, and there wasn’t much else to choose among. (The other two hopefuls mentioned in the article but not featured on the cover were Calvin Brock and Malik Scott. Again: a dark, dark time.)
But it speaks to the fans’ and the media’s need to latch on to a next Tyson, or a next Foreman, or a next someone, and our vulnerability to going all-in on a heavyweight based on little evidence.
Or, perhaps, on the wrong evidence. A knockout artist punches his way straight into our hearts, whatever his other limitations.
It’s notable that the actual two best heavyweights of the current era, Usyk and Fury, are not knockout artists, and few can claim to have seen their success coming. Sure, Emanuel Steward tabbed Fury as a potential great, but Emanuel had a unique eye for such things. Most of us saw Fury as a goofy oaf who famously put the CompuBox counters to the test by throwing, landing, and absorbing an uppercut all at the same time. And when Usyk moved up from cruiserweight, the consensus opinion was that he’d make some noise but he’d be too small to get over the hump against someone like Fury.
The more subtly skillful a heavyweight is, and the less likely he is to produce highlight-reel knockouts, the less he’ll attract hype.
The belief in Bakole is completely understandable. And certainly, he’s not just a puncher. He possesses craft. He also possesses a resume, however, that, outside of the Anderson win, is begging to have holes poked in it.
Of course, there’s his 2018 10th-round stoppage loss to Michael Hunter. It’s reasonable to dismiss that as ancient history (Bakole was a relatively skinny 256-pounder), not to mention to factor in the right shoulder injury Bakole suffered in round eight. At the same time, Bakole was trailing before the injury, looked sloppy at various times in the bout, was uneasy when Hunter employed movement, and appeared exhausted by the later rounds.
Who has he beaten since? Mostly-used-up former title challenger Mariusz Wach, entirely-used-up former title challenger Kevin Johnson, Russian gatekeeper-type Sergey Kuzmin, theoretically promising (at the time) French Olympian Tony Yoka, middling Polish prospect Ihor Shevadzutskyi, and 42-year-old Carlos Takam.
Hey, this is the sort of opposition a rising prospect faces. And Bakole passed all of those tests with ease — including the Yoka fight, despite one judge in France scoring it even. I’m not criticizing the matchmaking or discounting his ceiling.
I’m just pointing out that he’s gone from no reputation at all to a reputation as the heavyweight division’s boogeyman, almost entirely on the basis of one spectacular win over an opponent who may himself end up remembered as a flash-in-the-pan hype job.
The hope that Bakole can be the future king of the division is valid. The evidence that he will be is scant.
The Ajagba fight should prove a decent measuring stick. While Bakole brings in a record of 21-1 (16 KOs), the Nigerian Ajagba counters with a similar mark of 20-1 (14 KOs). Ajagba is straight-forward and predictable, but strong and sturdy. His jab has developed into a legitimate weapon (at least against C-level opposition). He’s 30 years old — so there’s no “mostly used-up” or “entirely used-up” characterization to apply.
If Bakole wins, it will probably be the second-best victory on his resume and a sign that he’s more than just another “Derrick Jefferson, I love you!” hype-job.
But if he doesn’t win … well, all aboard the Efe Ajagba casual-fan hype train, I guess.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].
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