MEXICAN veteran Miguel Vazquez will come to London on June 28 to take on Ohara Davies at York Hall.
The former world champion fully expects to give Davies a real fight. “I think Ohara is a strong fighter and a challenge for me. I think it’ll be a difficult fight but I’m [confident] I’ll win it,” Vazquez told Boxing News. “I want to get back on track to challenge for a world title. This is an opportunity to get a win abroad and having a win over him would help me achieve this goal. I would like to go on and have wins in other countries.”
Vazquez is coming off a solid victory over Ghislain Maduma in Montreal in March. “It’s always a big challenge to go and fight overseas. The fact that I won this fight abroad gave me a lot of motivation to take the challenge and take this fight against Ohara,” Vazquez said.
Even though his home state is Guadalajara, a hot bed for boxing, he has been to hunt down fights overseas. “Unfortunately many fighters, and I include myself among those, don’t get the opportunities that they deserve, to fight. They don’t get the opportunities to fight locally, they’re forced basically to go and fight abroad. So there’s unfairness on that side, in my opinion,” he says. “In Guadalajara boxing was not really as big as it is now but I had some crowd, some followers that support me but basically I was always the B side. That’s why I had to look for opportunities to fight elsewhere. I don’t have nice memories about it because the promoters never favoured me, never helped me. I was always the local challenger.”
He believes his hard path set him up to become a world champion at lightweight. “I think my long reign was due to my extreme discipline. My secret weapon was that I was over disciplined and that helped me reign so long until I had my defeat against Mickey Bey,” he notes.
Vazquez has been to the UK before, losing to Josh Taylor in Scotland. Taylor, of course, has just become the IBF super-lightweight champion. “It was a unique experience to face such a strong opponent like Taylor and I would be honoured to come back to the UK and fight as many times as I can,” the Mexican said. “He’s a very strong fighter. He has all the tools that a fighter needs.”
Of all the opponents he has fought, and that includes a very young Canelo Alvarez, Vazquez says, “Timothy Bradley has been the most outstanding, technically speaking. But the most powerful was actually Josh Taylor.”
Vazquez added, “I’d actually like to have a rematch against Taylor, it’s a whim, but I would like to have that rematch.”
