(Photo credit: Will Hart/HBO) By Chris Williams: In what shapes up to a 50-50 fight, #3 WBC Mike Perez (20-0-1, 12 KOs) and Bryant Jennings (18-0, 10 KOs) weighed in on Friday for their WBC heavyweight eliminator bout on Saturday night on the undercard of the Gennady Golovkin vs. Daniel Geale clash at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The Cuban Perez weighed in at 242.2 pounds. At 6’1”, Perez is stocky and powerful looking. He doesn’t appear to be that height. He’s probably closer to 6’0” than 6’1”, but it really won’t matter much because his opponent, 29-year-old Bryant Jennings, is only 6’2”, but with an incredibly long reach of 84.”
That’s a longer reach than IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko. Jennings doesn’t have Wladimir’s power, speed or jab though. Jennings weighed in at 222.6 pounds.
Perez will enjoy a roughly 20 pound weight advantage in this fight despite being shorter than Jennings by 1-2 inches. There’s no doubt that Perez is the bigger puncher of the two. He can throw a lot of punches when he wants to, and that could be a problem for Jennings, because that’s his whole game – throwing a lot of punches. Jennings doesn’t have the huge power that other heavyweights have, so he wins his fights by throwing combinations and jabbing.
Jennings not going to beat a skilled fighter like Perez by jabbing him for 12 rounds, so he’s going to need to get in the trenches and try and beat him that way. If the same Perez shows up on Saturday that beat Magomed Abdusalamov last November, then Jennings is going to be in trouble because Perez can really punch and he’s capable of throwing of punches in every round without tiring. Perez carries his power late into his fights and he’s unrelenting.
At the fighter meetings, Perez said “Every morning you had to make weight,” in talking about his time in fighting in Cuba in the amateurs. “If you didn’t, you had to pay or not eat. It was tough.”
“What is good about Bryant Jennings? I don’t know. I see nothing.”
Perez has looked impressive during training camp, and he’s a lot more mentally engaged for this fight than he was in his last bout against Carlos Takam last January. He’s trained by Adam Booth, and he’s shown a lot to him to make him think he’s capable of not only beating Jennings, but also defeating WBC heavyweight champion Bermane Stiverne to capture the WBC title.
Jennings said “I bring a better me. A better me will defeat the best. I have a size advantage. I have a reach advantage. I had an advantage, period. I do know how to win. I know how to adjust. That’s me. That’s my style. That’s how I’ve come about to this point right now.”
In talking about his recent win over Artur Szpilka, Jennings said “It was very easy. It wasn’t difficult. It was literally a man against a child.”
There’s a bit of a difference between Szpilka and Perez. Szpilka is a guy that struggled recently to defeat Mike Mollo.
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