This month, former undisputed lightweight champion American Teofimo Lopez (17-1, 13 KOs) made his debut in the first welterweight division with an early victory over Mexican gatekeeper Pedro Campa (34-2-1, 23 KOs). It is known that Lopez will hold his next fight on December 10 in New York (USA).
Among his potential opponents, the undefeated compatriot Arnold Barbosa Jr. (27-0, 10 KOs) is most often called.
He’s really surethat Lopez would do anything to avoid the fight: “I know he doesn’t want to fight me. He only verbally demands “fatter fish”. There is no bigger one now – the rest are busy. I think the dude just needs to grow up and grow a couple of balls. He screams into the microphone that I’m a bum and a trifling matter. Is it hard to prove it in practice?
Barbosa is not enthusiastic about Lopez’s performance against Campa: “We will not go into details, but what I saw only convinced me that I would beat him. I am not Kampa. With me, everything will be different. We will insist on a duel. He said no one wants to fight him? But here I am, challenging you. so where are you? Honestly? I think that if we fight, then there will be little beautiful boxing. There will be a fight. I don’t like this guy and his team. He is one of the few people I have nothing good to say about. Lopez’s disrespect and lack of manners made it so personal for me now.”
Barbosam claims that “in fact, we did not take fights for a long time, we waited on Teofimo. There were rumors that he would come back to fight me. And only when we realized that it was pointless to wait, we agreed to fight with Danielito Zorrilla, a fighter (at that time) at No. 10 in the WBO rankings. The task is to increase the level of the opposition in each next fight. So it was before, so it will be in the future.”
In July, Barbosa inflicted his debut defeat to the Puerto Rican: video. And Lopez, after defeating Campa, said: “I’m going to beat the crap out of all these guys!”
.
