By Sam Volz: Vasyl Lomachenko told Devin Haney to his face that he resembled a heavyweight last Saturday night when the huge in size undisputed lightweight champion climbed into the ring following Loma’s impressive come-from-behind victory over a game Jamaine Ortiz at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Many boxing fans have called Haney a “weight bully” due to his massive size for the lightweight division. All Loma was doing by pointing out that Haney looked like a “heavyweight” was telling him like it was.
When you look as big as Haney does in his fights, it’s only natural for boxing fans to point out the huge size disparity between him and his opponents and come to the conclusion that he’s a weight bully. In other words, a fighter that competes in a division well below his natural weight to gain an edge over his opposition.
If Lomachenko would have been disingenuous if he said that Haney looked like a normal lightweight because he clearly doesn’t.
Haney (29-0, 15 KOs) surprisingly got defensive when Lomachenko (17-2, 11 KOs) revealed the truth about his size being out of proportion for the 135-lb division and told him that he’d “show” him when the two meet. However, in the next breath, Haney appeared to backtrack on his bold talk about fighting him by saying, “We’ll see when we go to negotiate it.”
“Is this lightweight? No, it’s heavyweight,” said Vasyl Lomachenko to Devin Haney while being interviewed by ESPN’s Bernardo Osuna inside the ring following Loma’s win over Jamaine Ortiz last Saturday night.
“In the ring, I’ll show you,” said a defensive-sounding Haney.
“Okay, I’ll be ready,” said Lomachenko.
If Haney does take the fight, it’s going to be interesting to see how skeletal he appears at the weigh-in for the fight. For Devin’s last contest against George Kambosos Jr on October 16th, he looked like he was ready for Halloween, appearing like one of the zombies from the 1968 movie, ‘Night of the Living Dead.’
It must have been pure hell for Haney to make the 135-lb limit for the Kambosos fight. Had this been a high-caliber fighter that Haney was fighting instead of Kambosos, he probably would have lost that fight because he didn’t look impressive.
