By Brian Webber: Unbeaten Frank ‘The Ghost’ Martin (17-0, 12 KOs) weighed in at 135 lbs, while his opponent, 2016 Olympian Artem Harutyunyan (12-0, 7 KOs), came in at 134.5 lbs on Friday’s weigh-in for their WBC lightweight title eliminator this Saturday night on July 15th at The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.
The Martin-Harutyunyan event will be shown live on Showtime at 10:00 p.m. ET/7:00 p.m. PT.
In the chief support weights, the powerful light welterweight Elvin Rodriguez weighed in at 141.8 lbs, and his opponent, former WBC champion Viktor Postol (31-4, 12 KOs), came in at 141.6 lbs.
Martin, 28, is trying to lock himself into a position to get a shot at the WBC 135-lb by facing the highly skilled 2016 Olympic bronze medalist Harutyunyan, ranked #8 with the WBC.
Devin Haney holds all the belts right now, and he hasn’t revealed his intentions in terms of whether he’ll stay at 135 to defend his undisputed championship or vacate to move up to 140.
Martin is just trying to make sure that he’s in the slot to fight for the WBC title eventually. That’s probably his best bet right now to get an opportunity in a reasonable time frame.
‘The Ghost’ Martin is coming off a career-best victory over Michel Rivera in his last fight in December.
Brian Custer: “Can you give us a sense of what your camp has been like because you’ve got a person like you of your talent, and next to you, you have the welterweight champion of the world in Errol Spence Jr. Then you look over here and now all of a sudden you’ve got Anthony Joshua with you. To your right, you’ve now got Ryan Garcia, and by the way, you’re being trained by the best trainer in boxing. What’s that camp like every day.”
Frank Martin: “It’s crazy. Everybody is in there working. It’s a lot of energy to feed off of in the gym,” said Frank Martin about his trainer Derrick James having a huge stable of talented fighters in the gym, like Anthony Joshua, Errol Spence Jr, Jermell Charlo & Ryan Garcia.
“Now everybody has got fight dates, everybody is working hard, and everybody is locked in and feeding off each other. It’s been dope to have everybody at the gym and having Errol at the gym and having everybody else in the gym. I feel like we feed off each other. It’s dope to have that atmosphere.”
Brian: “And not to mention our guy Jermell Charlo, another undisputed champion as well in this stable.”