By Mark Eisner: WBA heavyweight champion in recess Manuel Charr (32-4, 18 KOs) emerged from a 3 1/3 year layoff to obliterate a badly out of shape 306-lb Christopher Lovejoy (19-1, 19 KOs) on Saturday night at the Sportstudio Baaden in Cologne, Germany.
After an uneventful first round, the 36-year-old German-based Syrian Charr tore into the mountainous Lovejoy with a storm of shots in the second round to score a stoppage.
https://twitter.com/TimBoxeo/status/1393662236556677121?s=20
Charr landed a nice shot to the midsection of the out-of-shape-looking Lovejoy and then poured it on with a blizzard of punches until the American fell down. The referee Juergen Langos then gave Lovejoy a count and the fight was halted. the time of the stoppage was at 1:09.
Moments after the fight was stopped, Charr attempted to do a cartwheel and clumsily fell on the canvas. Somehow this went well with the type of fight that it was tonight. The match was perfect in how badly flawed it was.
In the opening round, Lovejoy looked terrified, moving away constantly from Charr, showing no interest in wanting to mix it up. As far as I can tell, the closest thing that Lovejoy came to throwing a punch is when he shoved Charr to keep him off.
There was no offense at all from Lovejoy, who didn’t appear to have put much effort into training for the fight judging by his physique. It was surprising because Lovejoy had come into the fight with a perfect 19-0 record and a fair amount of hype. But shockingly, Lovejoy made Charr look good tonight, and that was hard to do.
With the win, Charr was being mentioned by the commentators as a potential opponent for the winner of the August 14th fight between champions Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury. It’s hard to imagine the winner of that fight wanting to take on the 36-year-old Charr, but you never know.
It would be interesting to see Charr getting the Joshua vs Fury winner for the shock value because the boxing world would be stunned if that happened.
It’s more likely we’ll see Charr take on WBA ‘regular’ champion Trevor Bryan so that he can regain his strap. With Charr being out of the ring for close to four years with injuries and such, the World Boxing Association demoted him to WBA champion in recess.
It’s unclear where Lovejoy goes from here. I mean, there are no words that can describe how badly he performed and looked tonight.
ILL BE BACK 😤😤 #RIGHTBACK pic.twitter.com/vbmbAPtyvY
— Christopher Lovejoy (@LovejoyBoxing) May 15, 2021