David Benavidez has ‘greater incentive’ to win on Saturday

Veteran boxing broadcaster Jim Lampley believes the winner of Saturday’s light-heavyweight clash between unbeatens David Benavidez and David Morrell could find himself catapulted into the sporting mainstream, particularly if their contest is as violent and exciting as many expect it to be.

“Neither man has yet been as fully introduced to the general public, the public beyond the boxing cult,” says Lampley, who will be ringside in Las Vegas providing text coverage for PPV.com alongside Chris Algieri, Dan Canobbio, and BoxingScene’s Lance Pugmire. “But this fight is going to get some attention afterward if there are fireworks in the ring. And they are both regarded as fighters who can produce fireworks. So, if there are three or four knockdowns, and it is, by nature, a violent fight, and both guys flash their credentials as punchers, then, in fact, it’ll get some attention from the generalized media and general sports audience afterward. If that doesn’t take place, if it’s a decision win for one or the other in a fight that does not produce knockdowns and fireworks, then they have not lived up to the most elevated horizons of their expectations and the expectations of the boxing media. And the fight and the fighters will stay more or less within the boxing cult.” 

Fortunately for boxing and for both men, Lampley – who called fights on HBO from 1988 until the network left the sport at the end of 2018 – is among those who fully expects dynamite to detonate in the ring at the T-Mobile Arena, with one possible caveat.

“It could be a boxing technique paint job for the Cuban-trained Morrell,” Lampley told BoxingScene recently. “He has a background that might make it possible for him to lower the temperature, reel back the action a little bit and box his way to a decision. But unless Morrell chooses that path and that path leads him to victory, yes, this is a fight about which we can mostly be excited.”

Despite the potential all-action nature of a matchup with genuine significance at 175 pounds, it could be argued that the contest is flying slightly under the radar – which Lampley ascribes at least partly to the fact that both men are coming off what were, by their standards, relatively underwhelming performances. Morrell outpointed Radivoje Kalajdzic in August, while Benavidez was taken the distance by Oleksander Gvozdyk in June.

“Benavidez is coming off a fight in which he probably disappointed a lot of his audience, but that was easy to see coming,” observed Lampley. “He was fighting, first of all, a guy who knew him well; they had sparred together. Secondly, it was a guy with a Ukrainian amateur background and a lot of broad-based boxing training who knew how to ultimately make it a little bit more of a boxing match than a slugfest. And Benavidez is a fighter you want to see in slugfests because he has spectacular one punch power, as he showed against Demetrius Andrade and other previous opponents. And when you have that kind of one punch power, it defines you, and it’s what people want to see. 

“Mike Tyson had decision wins at various stages of his career that the public ignored, because the image was that he might knock everybody out, and that was what people wanted to see, and what they were told by general media to expect. But people within the boxing cult know that you can’t expect that every time, and the best way to win this fight, particularly for Morrell, might be to turn the temperature down.”

Before moving to 175 pounds, both Benavidez and Morrell plied their trade at super-middleweight; given that he has called fights alongside Roy Jones and Andre Ward, two of the greatest of all time in one or both of those divisions, how does Lampley view Saturday’s boxers in an historical context? 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lampley – whose autobiography It Happened! will be published in April – isn’t prepared to elevate either man to the level of his erstwhile collaborators just yet.

“They’re both a little bit more varied and nuanced than their image as great one-punch punchers and  in that sense, they are something like Roy and Andre,” he observed. “But I’m not yet ready to put either of these people in a class with Roy and Andre for their ability to take the craft of boxing apart piece by piece and put it back in any order they wanted to with equal winning effect. Maybe some people were disappointed to see Roy Jones win a decision, but I wasn’t, because we all knew what he was about. You were not disappointed to see Andre Ward win a decision. It didn’t disturb their narratives at all.”

In contrast, he argues, so much of Benavidez’s attractiveness as a fighter is tied up in his ability to walk down opponents and beat them up, that the Arizonan may have  “created a narrative that might be hard for him to live up to. And the Andrade fight reinforced it. I was blown away. You don’t do that to Demetrius Andrade, or a fighter like Demetrius Andre, so definitively. So that was very exciting; and it’s easy to fall in love with a fighter like that. And the more you fall in love with the puncher, the more you’re inviting yourself to be disappointed when he wins a unanimous decision.”

Cards on the table, how does the veteran, who turns 76 in April, see Saturday’s main event?

“A really good fight and a close to even fight,” he responded. “And I think there are logical reasons for picking either fighter. When I wrote a scouting report for PPV.com and I had to come down to a decision on who wins the fight, what ultimately emerged for me is incentive. Fighters are human beings, and they will commit on a daily basis in training and commit in the heat of battle during the fight according to how far they think that can take them in life and in their careers. 

“There’s Morrell, a Cuban immigrant who has lived in Minnesota, with a southpaw style, who is more technical than Benavidez. Yes, he has power, but he’s not seen as the kind of destroyer that Benavidez is. He might have a certain amount of audience appeal, but not like Benavidez. 

“Benavidez is way up there in terms of what his potential profile can be, and he knows it. He’s a very smart guy, and he’s not at all distanced from what he knows his possibilities can be as an audience attraction in America. So he wants that. He wants to reach out and grasp it, whether it’s as a light heavyweight or whether he considers someday going back up to heavyweight, which was his weight when he was 12 or 13 years old. You know, he’s already been at 230; it’s just a matter of putting the weight back on. And the very first truly exciting and galvanizing Mexican-American heavyweight championship contender – forgive me, Andy Ruiz – is going to be the biggest economic attraction in boxing, one of the biggest economic attractions in the sporting world. And I asked David, ‘Have you thought about that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, I have.’ So who has more incentive? David Benavidez has more incentive. And ultimately, that could conceivably decide a close fight.”

Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcast about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He presently co-hosts the “Fighter Health Podcast” with Dr. Margaret Goodman. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.