By Allan Fox: Next month, undefeated welterweights Keith Thurman (20-0, 18 KO’s) and Diego Chaves (22-0, 18 KO’s) square off on July 27th at the At&T Center in San Antonio, Texas for the interim WBA welterweight title. The winner of the fight will be in the position to face the winner of Saturday’s fight between WBA welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi and Adrien Broner.
For Thurman, this is a dream come true because he would like nothing better than to get a shot at knocking off Malignaggi, who he exchanged words with last March after Thurman’s shutout win over Jan Zaveck, or Broner.
The bigger fight for Thurman would obviously be against Broner because he’s thought of as a future mega star in the sport. Whether Golden Boy Promotions would allow Thurman to face Broner is another matter.
The Thurman-Chaves fight is an interesting one because it matches two fighters with pretty even power. Chaves can punch about as hard as Thurman, but he’s not quite as big or as fast as him. Going into this fight it would seem like Thurman has most of the advantages because he looks like the better fighter on paper. Both guys have limited experience, however, and we could see anything happen in this fight. Thurman is supposed to win, but sometimes when you get a fighter with a soft resume like the one that Thurman has, you see upsets.
In Thurman’s last fight against Zaveck, Thurman looked really good early in the fight when he was nailing Zaveck with some big shots that had a clear effect on him. However, as the fight wore on, Thurman seemed to lose some of the pop on his punches and he was not going after him like he had in the early part of the fight.
Luckily or him, Zaveck didn’t have much power to try and turn things around because it would have been interesting if he had something to worry the tired Thurman with.
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