His hometown crowd booed Shakur Stevenson’s performance against Artem Harutyunyan on Saturday night at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.
(Courtesy: Mikey Williams/Top Rank)
Shifting the Blame
This was the second consecutive fight that fans had booed Shakur, but in this case, he blamed it on his opponent rather than accepting that he’d not done his part to make it exciting for the fans.
After the fight, Shakur said that Harutyunyan was running from him, which is unbelievable. If he thought Harutyunyan was running, what was Shakur doing when he fought Edwin De Los Santos? He’s not self-aware of his flaws.
WBC lightweight champion Stevenson (22-0, 10 KOs) made it a boring fight by failing to attack his older opponent, who had no power and was no threat to knock him out.
A Cautious Approach
Shakur, 27, didn’t fight like a younger fighter would, going on the attack the way he needed to impress the fans by beating up and knocking out Harutyunyan (13-2, 7 KOs). He fought like a 40-year-old trying to conserve energy.
Stevenson won by a twelve-round unanimous decision, but many rounds were close and could have gone the other way to his opponent. The scores were 119-109, 118-110, and 116-112.
“I want to fight the best fighters in boxing. That’s when you’ll see the best version of me when you put me in the ring with somebody else that wants to fight back and compete,” said Shakur Stevenson in the post-fight interview after his win over Artem Harutyunyan on Saturday night.
I hate to be the one to break this to Shakur, but his performance tonight wasn’t good enough to earn him a fight against Gervonta Davis. Shakur has to do better than that if he wants to fight Tank because he was too cautious and did not let his hands go to prove he deserves that fight.
“I think the boos were because of him. He didn’t try to make the fight,” said Shakur, reacting to being told that some of the crowd was booing his fight towards the end.
“it’s kind of hard to prove it when you don’t have a fighter trying to fight back. He was just trying to survive. I would have wanted him to try a little harder so it would be a fun fight,” said Shakur, blaming his opponent Harutyunyan for failing to prove that he’s ‘That guy’ in the lightweight division. “I did everything I could to get him out of there too.”
Shakur has a long way to go before he’s ready to fight Tank Davis because, based on his performance, he doesn’t rate the fight and has no chance of winning. He wouldn’t even beat Vasily Lomachenko fighting like this.
Top Rank doesn’t have to worry about fans booing Shakur anymore because he’s no longer their problem. His contract expired with his fight against Harutyunyan, and now he can sign someone else. They can worry about his lack of appeal with the and and the networks.
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