Humberto Soto suffers knee injury, June 27th fight is off

By Boxing News - 06/03/2015 - Comments

soto423464By Dan Ambrose: 35-year-old former two division world champion Humberto Soto (65-8-2, 35 KOs) won’t be fighting on June 27th. He was scheduled to face replacement opponent Jose Felix Jr., but on Tuesday, Soto reportedly suffered a knee injury, causing him to pull out of the fight.

Soto, #7 IBF, #7 WBC, was previously scheduled to face Frankie Gavin and Raymundo Beltran, but both of those fights went down the drain due to various reasons. Soto’s fight against Felix Jr. was an effort to salvage a bad situation, but now even that fight isn’t going to take place.

It’s just rotten luck for Soto, who was hoping to pick up a good win so that he could move up the rankings and get an eventual world title shot against one of the 140lb champions.

The Soto-Felix Jr. fight was supposed to have taken place this month on 6/27 in Carson, California.

“Soto is not going to fight,” said Golden Boy Promotions vice president Eric Gomez said to Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “He messed up his knee jogging on Tuesday. He was training. He got X-rays and he has strained knee ligaments, and the doctor told him he needs to rest it for a month.”

Soto had a high visibility bout scheduled last month against Frankie Gomez on the Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. James Kirkland card on May 9th on HBO Championship Boxing from the Minute Maida Park in Houston, Texas. The Soto-Gomez fight was the co-feature bout on the card, and it would have been a perfect opportunity for Soto to get a lot of attention after his impressive 10 round unanimous decision victory over John Molina Jr. last year in September.

Unfortunately for Soto, Frankie Gomez came in way over the light welterweight limit, and it was too much weight for the fight to go ahead. Soto would have wound up fighting a welterweight in Gomez had he gone through with the bout. Who knows how much weight Gomez would have rehydrated to?

It’s quite possible that Soto would have been fighting a middleweight-sized Gomez by the time the two fighters stepped foot inside the ring. Given that Soto started his career out at featherweight, it wouldn’t have been a good idea for him to go through with the fight and give up so much weight.

After the Soto-Gomez fight was canceled, Soto was then scheduled to face Raymundo Beltran on the June 27th Timothy Bradley vs. Jessie Vargas card on HBO from the StubHub Center in Carson, California.

It was a great fight on paper, and it would have been interesting to see how Soto would have done against the hard hitting Beltran. Unfortunately for Soto, Beltran tested positive for a banned substance after his recent win over Takahiro Ao last month, resulting in Beltran not being able to take the fight with Soto due to an impending suspension.



Comments are closed.