By Dan Ambrose: Light welterweight knockout artist Lucas Matthysse (37-4, 34 KOs) plans on returning to the ring in early 2017 in March or April, according to Ringtv.com. The 5’6” Matthysse will now be fighting in the 147lb division. That might not be the best thing for Matthysse, because he’s not a very big fighter.
We’ll have to find out how well he can handle the bigger welterweights. Golden Boy needs to keep Matthysse away from the bigger welterweights like the 5’9” Errol Spence Jr., Jessie Vargas and Kell Brook. Those guys are like big junior middleweights in size.
Matthysse might match up better against some of the smaller guys in the division like Andre Berto, Shawn Porter and Keith Thurman. Ultimately, I see this move up in weight to the 147lb division as being bad news for Matthysse. He won’t have the size or the boxing skills to handle the bigger fighters in that division, and the increased punching power that they throw with.
The 35-year-old Matthysse has been out of the ring since suffering an eye injury in his fight for the vacant World Boxing Council light welterweight title against Viktor Postol in October 2015. Matthysse was stopped in the 10th round when he suffered the eye injury.
Matthysse’s left orbital bone was fractured by a hard punch from Postol. In looking at the punch in replay, it appears to be that hard of a shot from Postol. It was a case of Matthysse coming forward just as Postol threw the shot, which magnified the power on the punch. Postol is not a big puncher by any stretch of the imagination. Matthysse was by far he stronger puncher of two in that fight, but he was giving away five inches in height to the 5’11” Postol, and that was just too much for him to handle.
There was talk of Matthysse fighting as early as May of this year on the undercard of the mismatch between the hulking middleweight Saul Canelo Alvarez and his undersized welterweight counterpart Amir Khan, but Matthysse’s injured eye wasn’t yet ready for him to fight again at the time.
Matthysse’s eye is said to be healed now, and he’d back in training, according to Golden Boy Promotions president Eric Gomez.
Gomez said this to ringtv.com about Matthysse’s comeback in 2017 from his eye injury:
“He’ll come back in the first quarter of next year. He’ll come back in March or April. He’s training again. He feels good now. He feels 100 percent with his eye. We’re looking to bring him back in the first quarter of next year. He’s doing light training. He says he feels great. He will be coming back.”
It would be wise for Matthysse to take things slowly when he does comeback net year, because he’ll have been out of the ring for a year and a half by the time he fights. That’s a long time for any fighter o be out of the ring, especially one as old as the 35-year-old Matthysse. In his case, it’s even worse because he’s coming off of an eye injury.
It sometimes takes a while for fighters to regain their confidence after an eye injury. There are also the problems with swelling. Who can forget how Antonio Margarito came back after a year out of the ring due to an eye problem in facing Miguel Cotto in a pay-per-view fight. Cotto’s shots immediately caused Margarito’s surgically repaired eye to swell up and close.
The fight eventually had to be stopped due to Margarito’s eye swelling completely closed. A lot of boxing fans felt unhappy about the fight, because Margarito never took a tune-up fight after he came back from his eye injury. He went straight into the Cotto rematch.
Had Margarito fought a couple of tune-up bouts, he would have found out himself that it was still too early for him to return to the ring. The fans would have been better off if Margarito had tested his eye out before facing Cotto. The fans would have found out that Margarito’s eye wouldn’t hold up.
Matthysse needs to be brought along slowly by Golden Boy. It would be a shame if they throw him in the ring with someone good, and he ends up losing the fight due to his surgically repaired eye closing up on him.