By Dan Ambrose: David Benavidez vs. Jose Uzcategui fight has been canceled due to the huge backlash from boxing fans about the match that had been in the works for January.
Benavidez, 25, is now looking to fight another opponent in early 2023, but there’s no word who that might be. It’s safe to say that Caleb ‘Sweethands’ Plant and Jermall Charlo won’t be the opponent that Benavidez is fighting next.
Unfortunately, neither of those guys has ever shown serious interest in fighting him for obvious reasons. It’s not good for one’s career to take on the dangerous puncher Benavidez, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see Plant or Charlo sharing the ring with him anytime soon, if ever.
The management for the unbeaten interim WBC super middleweight champion Benavidez (26-0, 23 KOs) perhaps misjudged the boxing public’s willingness to see a fight involving a fighter that had tested positive for PEDs in Uzcategui.
It was terrible timing on Benavidez’s management’s part to reschedule a fight with the 31-year-old former IBF super middleweight champion Uzcategui (32-4, 27 KOs) after news broke of British welterweight Conor Benn tested positive for a banned performance-enhancing drug last October.
Understandably, the boxing public didn’t see the upside in Benavidez facing Uzcategui due to his positive test for the banned substance rEPO, which caused the cancellation of their fight last November.
Fans didn’t see the point why Benavidez would reschedule with a fighter that had tested positive last year. It made no sense, and it was arguably a poorly thought-out idea by Benavidez’s management to go in this direction.
“The planned super middleweight bout between former champions David Benavidez and Jose Uzcategui, a PBC on Showtime main event set to take place in January, has been scrapped,” said Mike Coppinger of ESPN.
“The reason is public backlash surrounding Uzcategui’s positive test for the performance-enhancing drug recombinant human EPO (rEPO) ahead of a planned November 2021 fight with Benavidez.
“Benavidez is seeking a new opponent for a fight in the first quarter of 2023.”
After last year’s cancellation of the Uzcategui fight, Benavidez went on to stop Kyrone Davis and David Lemieux in back-to-back fights.
Assuming that Plant chooses not to fight Benavidez, these would be good options for him:
- Demetrius Andrade
- Edger Berlanga
- John Ryder
- Zach Parker
- David Morrell
- Ali Akhmedov
