Badou Jack – James DeGale on Jan.14 at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY

By Boxing News - 11/11/2016 - Comments

James DeGale and Badou Jack

By Allan Fox: WBC super middleweight champion Badou Jack and IBF champion James DeGale will be facing each other on January 14 on Showtime Championship Boxing from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Dan Rafael is reporting the news. It’s still not official though. There’s still some red tape that needs to be cleared up on the New York State Athletic Commission-approved insurance policy.

This is a great fight for the boxing world to have DeGale (23-1, 14 KOs) and Jack (20-1-2, 12 KOs) facing each other to eliminate one of the champions to unify the division. The two fighters fought on the same Showtime card seven months ago on April 30 at the Armory in Washington, DC.

DeGale battled 12 rounds to beat Rogelio Medina by a 12 round unanimous decision. For his part, Badou fought to a controversial 12 round draw with former IBF champion Lucian Bute. This is the same Bute that DeGale had beaten by a 12 round unanimous decision last year in November in Quebec City, in Quebec, Canada. Bute fought DeGale tough, but lost the fight by the scores of 117-111, 117-111 and 116-112.

The fight was closer than the scores handed down, as many boxing fans thought the two had fought close enough for it to have been scored a draw. You can argue that DeGale did enough to win the fight, but definitely the scores should have been closer than the ones the three judges handed down for the fight. They gave Bute almost no credit for all the punche s that he had landed in the contest.

DeGale and Badou need this fight to help turn them into bigger names, because right now neither of them have been able to win over a large fan base. DeGale is a road warrior with the way he frequently travels outside of his home country of the UK.

Despite winning a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics for UK, DeGale hasn’t been embraced in the same way by British boxing fans as 2012 Olympic gold medalist Anthony Joshua. It’s hard to know why. DeGale has won only lost once during his 7-year pro career in losing a contested 12 round majority decision to George Groves in 2011. There were more than a few boxing fans who felt that DeGale had enough to get the win in that fight if not a draw. The London crowd was firmly on the side of Groves on that night at the O2 Arena.

The winner of the DeGale vs. Badou fight will need to face #1 WBC Callum Smith in what will be a very tough fight.

DeGale and Badou both would like to fight unbeaten middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin if he were willing to move up in weight to fight them at super middleweight. Thus far, Golovkin has shown no interest of wanting to move up in weight to take on either of them. It would be a good fight if he would. Golovkin wants to clean out the middleweight division before he looks to fight the top guys at 168 like DeGale or Badou Jack.

Based on how they did against a common opponent in Bute, you would have to favor Degale over Badou. However, Badou is good at cutting off the ring and pressuring his opponents, as we saw in his wins over Anthony Dirrell and Groves. Jack’s pressure style of fighting will make it tough on Degale for 12 rounds. He’ll need to come up with some kind of game plan to deal with his pressure. It’ll be hard for Degale to stay on the move for 12 rounds to avoid getting caught u in a war with Badou.

DeGale can’t afford to lose his big chance of making a name for himself. He’s worked hard to get to this point. If he loses to Jack, he’ll need to rebuild his career, and there may not be a path for him to get back to the top. He’ll have a hard time against WBO champion Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez and #1 WBC contender Callum Smith.