The Man Everybody Had Written Off Is Now The Man Everybody Wants
Right then. Six weeks ago Filip Hrgovic was supposed to be the body on the way to a coronation.
Moses Itauma dropped him in the second, outboxed him with speed and movement for most of what followed, and the entire sport had already started writing the headline about the youngest heavyweight champion since Mike Tyson took the belt off Trevor Berbick in 1986.
Then Itauma emptied the tank, and the Croatian — on legs that had no business still working — found enough to stop him on his feet in the ninth. That is not luck. That is a professional who has been in with everybody refusing to accept the script.
Now Come The Offers
Hrgovic is IBF heavyweight champion and suddenly he is in the shop window. Turki Alalshikh has reportedly named Hrgovic against Rico Verhoeven as one of seven fights on his wishlist, which in practical terms means somebody has already worked out what it would cost.
Verhoeven is an interesting one. The kickboxing king turned up in only his second professional boxing match against Oleksandr Usyk in May, lost in the eleventh, and was widely credited with giving Usyk one of the hardest nights of his career. The WBC has him at number eight. The other three bodies have not ranked him at all.
It is a huge event fight and a thin sporting one, and that combination is exactly what gets made these days.
Except Frank Sanchez Is Standing In The Doorway
Before any of it, Hrgovic owes the IBF a defence against mandatory challenger Frank Sanchez.
And here is the bit nobody is saying out loud: that is a horrible fight for him. Sanchez is a slick Cuban who does not stand in front of you, does not get drawn into a war, and does not care what the crowd thinks. Hrgovic's entire method is pressure, leverage and grinding a man down. Take away the man to grind and you take away most of what he does.
The Itauma fight showed us Hrgovic's heart. It also showed us his legs at this stage of his career, because there were three or four rounds in the middle where he was running on fumes.
The Fights That Should Be Happening Instead
Let's not beat around the bush. The heavyweight division has four champions and a rematch pending, and the sport keeps trying to sell us crossover nights instead of unifications.
Hrgovic against Agit Kabayel is a proper fight. Hrgovic against Murat Gassiev is a proper fight. Hrgovic against the winner of Daniel Dubois and Fabio Wardley at the O2 next month is the fight that would actually settle something.
Verhoeven-Hrgovic sells more tickets than any of them. That is the whole problem with the modern heavyweight division in one sentence.
Luke’s Verdict
Make no mistake, Hrgovic has earned every bit of the attention. He announced himself properly in that ninth round after a decade of being the best contender nobody would fight.
My call: Sanchez takes him twelve rounds and Hrgovic wins a competitive, ugly, close decision that nobody enjoys. Then he takes the Verhoeven payday and stops him inside eight, because for all the credit Verhoeven earned against Usyk, he is still a boxing novice and Hrgovic hits far harder than the record suggests.
What I would rather see is the unification. What I expect to see is the spectacle. More heavyweight coverage on our news page.