By Dan Ambrose: Floyd Mayweather Jr. had no luck in getting WBA welterweight champion Keith “One Time” Thurman to agree to fight unbeaten 2012 U.S. Olympian Errol Spence (17-0, 14 KOs) on September 12th, so instead of Spence facing Thurman, he’ll be taking on #8 IBF contender Chris Van Heerden (23-1-1, 12 KOs) in a scheduled 10 round bout on September 11th on the undercard of the title fight between WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson and Tommy Karpency at the Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto.
The Spence-Van Heerden fight will be televised on Premier Boxing Champions on Spike TV. This will enable the 25-year-old Spence to get some badly needed publicity.
The hard hitting southpaw Spence is seen by many as the future No.1 fighter in the 147lb division after Mayweather and Pacquiao both retire. Spence is ready to start making his claim to that position once he can get the top fighters to agree to fight him.
It’s too bad Thurman didn’t want to step up and take the fight with Spence, because it would have made for an interesting fight to see how Thurman could handle Spence with his heavy hands and high accuracy. Thurman has twice worked himself up to a rage recently when questioned about fighting Spence, and there are more than a few boxing fans who think that Thurman is afraid to fight Spence.
Spence gave Mayweather some hard sparring several years ago, and he really impressed Mayweather from their workouts. Kenny Porter, the trainer/father of former IBF welterweight champion Shawn Porter, says that Spence knocked Adrien Broner silly during one of their sparring sessions and they had to stop the session because of how hurt Broner was. Kenny said that Broner didn’t want to leave the ring after the sparring session was stopped.
Spence looked amazing in his last fight in stopping junior middleweight Phil LoGreco via a 3rd round knockout in his last fight on June 20th on the undercard of the Broner vs. Porter fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Spence stole the show with his performance.
In Thurman’s recent fight against Luis Collazo, Spence had this to say about Thurman “I’d merk that boy.” Spence definitely sees weakness in Thurman, and he must have been really interested after seeing Thurman get hurt by a body shot from Collazo at one point in the fight. Thurman barely avoided going down.
Van Heerden has wins over guys like Kaizer Mabuza, Matthew Hatton, and Ray Narh. Van Heerden is a southpaw with excellent talent. However, he’s never beaten anyone good as of yet, so it’s going to be interesting to see how he does against a fighter as good as Spence. Van Heerden was beaten by Nikola Stevanovic in 2010.
If Spence can destroy Van Heerden as easily as he did his last opponent Lo Greco, it’s going to be a very good sign of how quickly he’s progressing. Spence is ready for the big fights right now, but it looks like they’re taking it slow with him to build him up slowly rather than putting him in with the top five contenders right now.
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