RIYADH Season continues on November 22nd. Amongst an impressive gathering of champions and their challengers, Anthony Yarde will challenge David Benavidez for his WBC light-heavyweight title. In their early careers, both fighters had the potential to be what our transatlantic cousins reprehensibly call ‘blue-chip prospects’.
One was protected to a puzzling degree, given his obvious talent, before being slung in at the deep end. The other was handled with rough assuredness, as if the people directing him knew they could afford to steadily increase the resistance they placed in his path.
Anthony Yarde was pushed from the beginning. Frank Warren signed him to Queensberry Promotions on the evidence of a twelve-fight amateur career and immediately began selling him to us. Frank featured him in a 2016 episode of the docuseries Fighter By Trade.
This was a privilege otherwise reserved for world champions Carl Frampton, Lee Selby, James DeGale, and Josh Warrington. It was a public blessing, an indication that this young talent has what it takes to join the ranks of British world champions. An enviable position.
Yarde evolved into an enigma. He and trainer Tunde Ajayi have at various times discarded certain boxing tenets like road work and hard sparring, instead following Tunde’s ‘System 9’, a Mayweather spin-off focusing on repetition and technique. They were, and still are, a rambunctious duo. The ‘Lions in the Camp!’ refrain grated on some and appealed to others.
They stood out, provoking debate with their methods, much like Adam Booth and David Haye in their early years. Beyond dispute, however, was how impressive Yarde looked in those early bouts. Crisp, relaxed punches, twitchy counters, and a slick defence distinguished him. His physique added to the aura. Watching a statue carve a hook into an obscure European’s rib cage is quite a sight. However, from relatively early on, a problem emerged.
Yarde was presented to us as a star. For that to feel legitimate, he needed to look spectacular. A reliable method promoters often use to ensure their prospects look spectacular is to select inferior opposition for them to shine against. Enhancing a prospect’s reputation in this way is fundamental to the sport.
It builds confidence in the prospect as well as excitement in the crowd. Equally as essential is the promoter’s ability to recognise that mercurial moment when a prospect should be ‘stepped up’. Here be monsters.
How many promising careers have been scorched by former champions who turn back the clock for one night, or assassins masquerading as journeymen? The danger worsens as fighters go up in levels, where, after a certain point, there’s a very real possibility of some random fighter standing you on your head or knocking you cold, for not very much money.
Frank chose another route for Yarde. Through a series of ranking bouts for the WBO, he circumnavigated all significant British and European opposition and sent his man to the borders of Kazakhstan, in Chelyabinsk, Russia, to challenge three-time, former unified light-heavyweight champion, the ‘Krusher’ Sergey Kovalev.
Underprepared but willing, Yarde nearly did it. He was trailing when, between the seventh and eighth rounds, Tunde told him emphatically. ‘This guy’s done!’. Yarde responded immediately, chopping away with lead right hands while Kovalev raked him with straight punches on the retreat. In the final minute, he took a deep breath and made his move.
Yarde threw as many hard punches as he could, rocking Kovalev back against the ropes. One or two more might have done it. But in this round, Kovalev exhibited the nous of a seasoned fighter, at first pushing Yarde away, then hitting him low, then grabbing hold at his most desperate. It was enough to deflect and disarm the young challenger.
Tellingly, the last blow to land in the round was a clean Kovalev left across Yarde’s jaw. Kovalev stopped Yarde in the eleventh with the same punch, not unlike the Watson left that floored Benn. While Yarde has since edged a domestic trilogy against Lyndon Arthur and challenged Artur Beterbiev for his world titles, the Kovalev loss is emblematic.
He is willing and brave and athletically gifted, but after a fleeting amateur career and a pro ledger filled with Scrabble-winning names, he is ultimately unrefined. While a then-undefeated Beterbiev finished Yarde in typical fashion, Kovalev, by this point 36 years old, having lost three of his last six fights, still had enough to navigate the fight; surviving, regrouping, and ultimately outlasting Yarde.
A freakishly large, 15-year-old David Benavidez debuted in 2013 in El Chamazal after a similarly brief, fifteen-fight amateur campaign. His opponent was a suitably undersized and aged gentleman named Erasmo Mendoza. Benavidez stopped him in a round and went on to beat 11 of his first 12 opponents inside the distance, garnering deserved attention early on.
PBC signed him in 2015 and, after a succession of impressive wins, Benavidez became the youngest super-middleweight champion in the division’s history, aged 20, even climbing off the canvas in the twelfth to do it. In the eight years since, despite certain setbacks, he has in truth remained a champion.
In 2018, Benavidez was stripped of his title and given a four-month ban for cocaine use. Two years later, he lost the title he’d regained on the scales, weighing 2.8 lbs over the super-middleweight limit. Had it not been for Canelo Alvarez’s late career surge in his weight class, Benavidez would have regained that title a third time.
As it happened, he beat David Lemieux, Caleb Plant, and Demetrius Andrade for interim status, while Canelo became the undisputed 168-pound champion, a journey that ended with him dragging Terence Crawford up two weight classes and inadvertently resurrecting the spectre of Floyd Mayweather. Benavidez abandoned the super-middleweight division without facing Canelo, as many fans wanted, or earning the purse that comes with it.
Benavidez, it looks like, will have to continue forging his own reputation. His performance against Rogelio ‘Porky’ Medina, one fight before he won his first world title, was a brutal display of hand speed that became cartoonish in its final flurry.
Only Caleb Plant heard the final bell as Benavidez scorched his way through super-middle, leaving his opponents breathless and bloody. Intriguingly, both of his light-heavyweight opponents – Oleksandr Gvozdyk and the previously undefeated Cuban, David Morrell – have lasted the distance, suggesting the ‘Mexican Monster’ has his limits.
Whether Yarde is the man to test those limits is another question entirely. In overturning a split-decision loss to Lyndon Arthur with an impressive fourth-round KO and a unanimous decision win, Yarde showed character and an ability to adjust. In his efforts against Kovalev and Beterbiev, he displayed courage and a will to win.
These are the high points of his career, and they will likely prove inadequate preparation for a battle of this kind. Benavidez, the larger, younger, stronger fighter, will walk right up to him and start punching. And when Yarde punches back, Benavidez will return fire.
Benavidez forces his opponents to reciprocate, run, or fold. In the line of fire, he has been knocked down only once, clipped with a counter left by Ronald Gavril as he lunged forward in the twelfth. Incidentally, it was by surviving this that he won his first world title by a narrow margin. He won the rematch conclusively.
Yarde will do well to capitalise on any complacency Benavidez exhibits. It is the mark of durable fighters to assess at some point that their opponent cannot, and will not, hurt them. Yarde is quick and cheeky enough to exploit whichever openings he recognises.
He can get to the target. It is whether his punches bounce off and carry on through that remains to be seen. The longer the fight lasts, the less impact those punches will have. Yarde is not the inexhaustible type. In contrast, Benavidez has shown an appetite for conflict and a strong set of lungs to match those rapid hands. His catch-counter left hook is particularly potent.
So this fight may well be the last peak in the rolling hills of Yarde’s career. A final chance to justify the hype, to determine whether fight fans years from now will remember him as a talented could-have-been, or the man who earned an unlikely victory at the third time of asking.
With Artur Beterbiev fighting elsewhere on this card, Benavidez seems to be entering his and Dmitry Bivol’s orbit. With their third fight surely on the horizon, he may be perfectly positioned to pick us the pieces.
Trilogies tend to take something out of their combatants, and Benavidez has time, size, youth, and momentum on his side to go on to become a longstanding light-heavyweight champion. But better talents than him have been derailed by an underdog with big ideas.
