By Scott Gilfoid: This Saturday night Showtime will be televising what should be an exciting fight between American heavyweights Deontay Wilder (30-0, 30 KO’s) and Malik Scott (36-1-1, 13 KO’s) from the Coliseo Ruben Rodriguez, in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. The fight is a WBC heavyweight eliminator bout scheduled for 12 rounds with the winner becoming the mandatory challenger for the WBC strap.
The WBC title is currently vacant, but Chris Arreola and Bermane Stiverne will be fighting for the belt on June 1st of this year in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. Whoever comes out on top in that fight, they’ll have to fight the Wilder-Scott winner before the end of 2014. That’s what the WBC wants, so they’ve got little choice but to agree to it or risk having their strap stripped from them.
Surprisingly, the Deontay-Scott fight will be the co-feature bout on the undercard of a much lesser fight between Danny Garcia and Mauricio Herrera. I see that as a miscalculation by Golden Boy Promotions, who perhaps are under the impression that Garcia has a bigger fan base than the 6’7″ Deontay. But I don’t see that as the case, and I definitely don’t see the the Garcia-Herrera fight being nearly as interesting as the Wilder-Scott fight in terms of excitement for fans.
The Herrera vs. Garcia fight is a sick mismatch between an unbeaten world champion and a challenger [Herrera], who has lost 2 out of his last 4 fights. Heck, I’d rather see Garcia fight the guys that Herrera was beaten by – Karim Mayfield and Mike Alvarado – than watching Garcia destroy Garica. I mean, it kind of doesn’t make any sense at all when you think about it.
Garcia fights a struggling guy with 2 recent losses instead of fighting the guys that beat Herrera. It’s weird match-making if you ask me, and that’s why I feel that the Garcia vs. Herrera fight should be an undercard fight rather than the main event. Who wants to watch a mismatch? We just finished seeing one last night between Golden Boy Promotions fighters Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Alfredo Angulo, and now we’ve got to sit through another mismatch in the main even next Saturday between Garcia and Herrera.
If the 6’7″ keeps knocking guys out and gets his record to the 50-0 mark with 50 knockouts, his days of fighting on undercards will be like a bad dream. People will shake their heads in remembering how a talent like Deontay Wilder had to fight on the undercard of horrible fights like Garcia vs. Herrera. Without a doubt, Deontay will be the A side attraction in the near future while Garcia would be the undercard fighter on his card. I just hope that Golden Boy doesn’t keep Deontay as an undercard fighter for too much longer.
Scott, 33, is kind of in a tough situation this Saturday. He doesn’t have the power to stand in the pocket with Deontay, and I guess no one does because of his tremendous power. But Scott is going to be at a tremendous disadvantage in this fight because he doesn’t have the kind of power that will gain the respect of Deontay, and keep him off of him for any length of time. As such, Scott has to hope that Deontay will tire out from punching him and moving around the ring so that he can try and drown him in the 2nd half of the fight.
The problem is, Deontay’s power is too good for Scott to try and wear him out by taking his shots for any length of time. Heck, if Deontay can tee off on Scott for 1-2 rounds, the fight won’t see the 3rd round. Scott will get hit with something way too powerful and he’ll go down like a sack of potatoes on the canvas and not get up. Unlike his controversial loss to Dereck Chisora last year, there won’t be any controversy surrounding Scott’s knockout loss to Deontay.
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