After suffering a maiden career defeat more than a year ago, Demetrius Andrade is yet to make a return to the ring, mainly due to his inability to get an opponent.
Rhode Island’s Andrade, 36, was stopped in six rounds by David Benavidez in their WBC interim super middleweight title bout in November 2023.
According to Andrade, it’s just a matter of time for him to secure himself a fight in the coming year.
“I’ve been trying to get back in the ring ever since,” Andrade told Fight Hub TV. “I’ve been trying to line something up with somebody. I’m not one to be all out there in the media trying to stir up anything other than letting the higher-ups, the people in the background, set the things up. And then once I know we got ourselves a deal, I come on the mic and I do what I do.”
Andrade, 32-1 (19 KOs) is a former junior middleweight and middleweight titleholder. He moved up to super middleweight in January 2023, defeating Demond Nicholson via a 10-round shutout after nearly 14 months of hibernation. Andrade would go on to lose a sixth-round stoppage to Benavidez 10 months later.
Andrade said he fought a lot of battles outside the ring before facing Benavidez.
“I lost a close family member that’s close to my heart,” he said. “My little brother almost didn’t make it either, and then I had to prepare for training. And so, like, there’s a lot of fighters and a lot of people out there in life that would’ve passed up the opportunity to fight David or become a three-division world champion because of those type of situations. And you got guys that say, ‘Oh, I’m mentally unstable for this.’
“I take boxing as my way out in life, and I use it to my full ability to set my future and keep me from being contained. I like to have freedom. So that’s what it does for me. So, therefore, yeah, it was rough. At moments in the gym it would just hit me and I would just stop. […] It affected me a lot. I don’t try to use it as an excuse for my performance or nothing. I’m not one of those guys. It’s just now I feel comfortable letting some of the boxing world, the media, know what was happening during that time, because people wanna know what’s going on with Demetrius. They wanna know who I am.”
Coming back into the ring, Andrade, now a promotional free agent, mentioned some big names in the 168lbs division. Among them: Edgar Berlanga, Jermall Charlo, Jaime Munguia and Caleb Plant.
“That’s just that top 10 of fighters who I would like to get in and that make sense. And then I haven’t looked up, like, tune-up fights. I haven’t looked up who’s a good guy to get back in the ring with yet. So, I don’t really know what the pool of fighters are right now, but I’m just ready to get back in the ring with whoever.”
Andrade said he has no plans of returning to middleweight.
“I think there’s nothing for me at 160, nor do I wanna even try to make that weight anymore. I’ve outgrown it. Like, I’m bigger now. We all get older. We don’t get younger. And there’s, like I said, there’s better fights at 168.”
Bernard Neequaye is a sports journalist with a specialty in boxing coverage. He wrote a boxing column titled “From The Ringside” in his native Ghana for years. He can be reached on X (formerly Twitter) at @BernardNeequaye, LinkedIn at Bernard Neequaye and through email at [email protected].
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