Modern boxing cards tend to feature just one or two high-level fights, with the rest of the card padded by prospects and fights with lopsided odds. That is not the case with Saturday's event headlined by the rematch between undisputed light heavyweight champion Artur Beterbiev and former champ Dmitry Bivol.
The card, which takes place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is absolutely loaded with big names in competitive fights. In seven fights with recognizable names, only one features a favorite with larger odds than -300, with the lone fight with wider odds a result of Shakur Stevenson facing a late replacement in Josh Padley.
With such a great card on deck, we decided to take a look through the scheduled fights to identify the reasons you will want to catch all the undercard action, which features world championship fights and fights with the potential to significantly shake up multiple divisions.
Let's take a look at the action.
Daniel Dubois (c) vs. Joseph Parker, IBF heavyweight championship
No offense to either man, but this should not be a world championship fight. Dubois was elevated to world champion after the IBF stripped Oleksandr Usyk shortly after he became undisputed champion in his first win over Tyson Fury. Setting all of that aside, there's plenty to like about this fight between two of the best fighters in the heavyweight division.
Dubois and Parker are both success stories who bounced back from potentially falling into the well of "fringe contenders" who never make good on their talents. In November 2020, Dubois took a knee and accepted the referee counting him out in a fight with Joe Joyce, leading to some claiming he is a fighter who will quit when faced with adversity. In reality, Dubois had his eye socket broken in the fight and was unable to go on. He grinded his way back up the ranks, including surviving three first-round knockdowns by Kevin Lerena to score a third-round stoppage. Dubois then suffered his second career defeat when he was knocked out by Usyk in 2023. He has looked better than ever since the Usyk loss, stopping Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic and Anthony Joshua.
Parker is a former WBO champion who lost his title to Joshua in 2018 and then lost to Dillian Whyte later that year. After pushing back to relevance, Parker suffered his own loss to Joyce in 2022 and that seemed to mark the end of his time at the top end of the division. In 2023, Parker was brought in to face Deontay Wilder on a card seemingly made to set up a Wilder vs. Joshua fight. Given Parker's history of being knocked down and stopped several times in his career, he was expected to get blasted by Wilder's unique power but instead outboxed a surprisingly passive Wilder to score the decision victory. Parker then was matched with Zhilei Zhang and survived a pair of knockdowns for another huge win to position himself as a world title challenger once again.
Carlos Adames (c) vs. Hamzah Sheeraz, WBC middleweight championship
Along with Janibek Alimkhanuly, Adames represents the class of a thin middleweight division. Adames is riding a six-fight winning streak that has seen him score some impressive victories while clawing his way up to a world championship. The division is fairly wide open and now as a champion, Adames is set to make the second defense of his belt as a +235 underdog.
Those odds suggest that while Adames is the present of the division, Sheeraz is the future. The 25-year-old Sheeraz has been impressive in his young career, with 17 stoppage wins, including a current 15-fight stoppage streak. He is also a towering 6-foot-3 in the 160-pound division. Adames is the best fighter Sheeraz has faced and we are all going to learn a lot about how good Sheeraz truly is once the opening bell rings.
Vergil Ortiz Jr. vs. Israil Madrimov, junior middleweights
As mentioned in our look at the biggest storylines of the event, Ortiz vs. Madrimov has all the potential to emerge as the best fight of this stacked card. Ortiz was identified as one of the top prospects in the sport years ago and has made good on his potential by winning the first 22 fights of his career, with only his gutsy win over Serhii Bohachuk this past August going the distance. In that fight, Ortiz was dropped twice but recovered to scrap out a narrow majority decision victory.
In Madrimov, Ortiz faces a man who just took arguably the best fighter in the world, Terence Crawford, the distance and had a legitimate argument for the victory, though he lost a close decision. Madrimov is an awkward fighter in a positive sense, throwing fighters off their rhythm and their every success come with more difficultly than expected. Ortiz can bang and has fight-changing power but Madrimov is going to make him work to find spaces to land those big shots.
Quick notes
- Zhilei Zhang vs. Agit Kabayel, heavyweights: Zhang rebounded from his loss to Parker with a thudding knockout of Wilder, keeping him in the heavyweight mix. Kabayel broke through in his past two fights, defeating undefeated fighters Arslanbek Makhmudov and Frank Sanchez. Heavyweight is in an interesting space with a lot of good fights being made and top fighters sorting themselves out, this pairing is a great example of that.
- Joshua Buatsi vs. Callum Smith, light heavyweights: Buatsi, a 2016 Olympic bronze medalist, has not taken the risks one would like to see a fighter with potentially elite skills take and even passed on an opportunity to fight Dmitry Bivol in 2023. Smith has a lot more wear on his tires, but he has fought some of the best fighters of the era, including Saul "Canelo" Alvarez and Artur Beterbiev. Buatsi is a -205 favorite but this fight has serious upset potential as he tries to take a step up against an experienced former world champion who knows what it's like to face great fighters.
- Shakur Stevenson (c) vs. Josh Padley, WBC lightweight championship: Stevenson is a brilliantly talented young fighter but he is dangerously close to being permanently stuck with the "boring" label after uninspired efforts in his past few outings. He was originally set to fight Floyd Schofield in a sneakily intriguing fight only for Schofield to withdraw from the fight citing illness -- which came after Schofield's father claimed his son had been poisoned in a conspiracy between Stevenson and Schofield's masseuse (Schofield has since walked back those claims). Padley got the call to step up on extremely short notice, having gained some measure of fame by upsetting heavily-favored Mark Chamberlain -- whom Turki Alalshikh claimed to be a big fan of -- last year. Padley is undefeated at 15-0 but only has four stoppage victories in his career while fighting low-level opposition prior to Chamberlain. This is a chance for Stevenson to put on a show against a fighter who is not near his level in terms of skill and does not possess any serious potential to score a knockout. If Stevenson drags the fight out as he has recently, it will be a very bad sign for his chances to ever break out as a major star.
