Two Champions, Two Very Different Nights
Saturday gave us two world title fights in two time zones, and the two champions walked out of them heading in opposite directions. In London, Daniel Dubois made himself bigger. In Las Vegas, Sebastian Fundora made himself smaller.
One champion closed a rivalry in under six minutes. The other won on the final second of the twelfth round and somehow came out of it with less bargaining power than he went in with.
Dubois Did Not Just Win. He Ended the Rivalry.
I picked Dubois by stoppage in eight to ten rounds in Friday’s split-screen preview. I got the direction right and the timing badly wrong. He needed two.
Dubois dropped Fabio Wardley 17 seconds into the opening round at the O2 Arena with a straight right, kept hammering him against the ropes, and picked up where he left off in the second. Referee Steve Gray waved it off at 2:21, the same moment Wardley’s trainer Ben Davison threw the towel in. The punch numbers are brutal: CompuBox had Dubois landing 60 punches in under six minutes of work, 51 of them power shots. Wardley connected four times in the entire fight.
“I had bad intentions from the beginning,” Dubois said. Wardley did not reach for excuses. “It just didn’t work for me tonight,” he said.
Context matters, because the first fight in May was the opposite of this. Dubois climbed off the canvas twice in Manchester, the first time after 16 seconds, and broke Wardley down in the eleventh. Wardley triggered his rematch clause within a week. Five months later he got five minutes and twenty-one seconds. That is a closed file, not a rivalry.
The Heavyweight Division Finally Has a Shape
The best moment of the night came after the fight, when IBF champion Filip Hrgovic climbed into the ring and asked Dubois a question on live television: “He’s ready to fight me in March, right, Daniel?”
Dubois did not duck it. “I want to get my old belt back and rule the division,” he said. He stopped Hrgovic in eight rounds in June 2024, when the Croatian could not continue through cuts above both eyes. Frank Warren’s “we’ll see” was the honest answer — Hrgovic has Cuba’s Frank Sanchez waiting as mandatory challenger first.
Add the December 11 Fury-Joshua fight in Cardiff — a fight that finally got signed after a decade of talk — plus Usyk hovering as the man who vacated all four belts, and Warren openly saying unification fights are the plan for next year. For the first time in a while, the heavyweights have an actual bracket instead of a wish list.
Fundora Won and Lost at the Same Time
On the other side of the Atlantic, Sebastian Fundora retained his WBC super welterweight title by stopping Ermal Hadribeaj with a left hand at 2:59 of the twelfth round. One second from the scorecards.
The fight was far harder than the odds suggested. Hadribeaj, an Albanian based in Miami who did not turn professional until he was 25, spent the early rounds crouched beneath Fundora’s long arms and looping shots over the top. He was docked a point for holding in the third, which told you how much trouble he was causing the six-foot-six champion on the inside.
Fair enough, and the finish was real. But the reviews were not kind. Terence Crawford, working the broadcast, was blunt: “Boots too fast for Fundora.” He also noted Fundora never threw a right hook all night. Trainer Stephen Edwards went further: “You can have a tough night versus a known killer. But when you have one versus an unknown opponent, you lose a little luster.”
That is the problem. Fundora is next in line for the winner of the Jaron Ennis-Josh Kelly unification, which Eddie Hearn says is targeted for the end of January with all three belts on the line. Fundora’s camp has been asking for a 50-50 split. After Saturday night, that number is a much harder sell — the same squeeze that shaped the division politics I wrote about earlier this month.
Figueroa Lost His Belt on the Scales
The worst story of the weekend belonged to Brandon Figueroa, and it never made it to the ring.
Figueroa weighed 127.4 pounds on Friday for a 126-pound limit — 1.4 pounds over. He did not re-weigh within the permitted hour, so he was stripped of the WBA featherweight title on the scales. The fight against Tomoki Kameda was still supposed to go ahead with only Kameda able to win the vacant belt, and then Figueroa withdrew on Saturday morning after falling ill overnight.
So Kameda, a 42-5 former champion who has not fought in over a year, lost his shot through no fault of his own. Figueroa won that title off Nick Ball in February and never defended it once. Elsewhere: Bakhodir Jalolov stayed unbeaten at 18-0 over Solomon Dacres, and Louie O’Doherty kept his British lightweight titles on a majority draw with Michael Gomez Jr that the O2 booed loudly.
The Filipino Corner
Here is the part I keep coming back to. On November 26 in Tokyo, the Philippines gets two world title shots on the same card, and both fighters are heavy underdogs.
Miel Fajardo (14-3-2, 12 KOs) challenges IBF flyweight champion Masamichi Yabuki (20-4, 18 KOs), who is listed around -550 to Fajardo’s +360 and has stopped six of his last seven opponents. In the supporting fight, 21-year-old Zyvyr Medecilo (9-0, 5 KOs) goes after Takeshi Ishii’s WBA minimumweight title in only his tenth professional bout.
If both win, they would be the first Filipinos ever to claim world titles on the same night, and Medecilo would become the fastest Filipino world champion in history at ten fights. Both train under the same handler, Lennon Tsoi, and both are being written off. I have watched enough Filipino underdogs win in Tokyo to know that is not the same thing as being beaten.
Closer to home, Rowel Rosia stopped Denmark Quibido in the eighth round to take the PBF super flyweight title in Putatan, Muntinlupa City — his first win since 2021. There is also a real grievance brewing: matchmaker Sean Gibbons has publicly attacked BoxRec for refusing to log Marlon Tapales’ and Criz Laurente’s September title wins in Thailand, calling it a site that “just lists what they want to list.” Filipino boxing has always had to fight for its record-keeping as much as its rankings.
What I’m Watching Next
October 24 is the next proper date: Emanuel Navarrete against O’Shaquie Foster in San Antonio for three junior lightweight belts, plus Dalton Smith defending against Alberto Puello in Sheffield. Then October 31 brings Canelo Alvarez against Christian Mbilli in Riyadh, with Carl Jammes Martin meeting David Picasso in a world title eliminator on that undercard. Martin is 28-0 and one win from a world title shot.
For now, the takeaway is simple. Dubois made a statement the division has to answer. Fundora survived a mandatory and gave everyone a reason to doubt him. If you are Filipino, your calendar has two dates circled in red — October 31 and November 26.