By Scott Gilfoid: The fight that boxing fans have been demanding is finally here with unbeaten WBO super featherweight champion Adrien Broner (23-0, 19 KO’s) facing Britain’s Gary Sykes (20-2, 5 KO’s) on the undercard of Amir Khan vs. Lamont Peterson II on May 19th at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
But seriously, no one is asking for Sykes to be the opponent for Broner, because he’s not a top tier fighter and he stands no chance whatsoever. It’s really bad when you have a champion facing a 2nd tier fighter like this, but this is a move that Golden Boy Promotions is making in order to interest more UK boxing fans, because Sykes is from England.
There will already be a lot of British fans watching the card to see how Khan does, so it looks like Sykes was Golden Boy Promotion’s way of throwing a bone to the Brits. I guess they must have been short on cash to lure a better fighter than him because they probably could have dragged over Ricky Burns or Kevin Mitchell if they would have pulled out a big wad of green stuff. With the right amount of money, they could have gotten practically anyone, but why in the heck did they chose this guy? I don’t understand at all.
If you’re going to chose someone from the UK, you got to at least snatch a fringe contender, don’t you? Why Sykes? I mean, I think I’ve overdosed in watching his fights in the past couple of days and I don’t like what I’ve seen with Sykes getting smashed in one round by a domestic level plodder Gary Buckland and then beaten again by the guy in a rematch. Just so you know, Buckland would be lucky to make it through one round with Broner.
That’s how much of a mismatch the Sykes vs. Broner fight is. Broner is going to have to carry the guy for a few rounds and toy with him so that boxing fans have something to see. I don’t want to see one of those 10 second knockouts where Broner comes out and knocks Sykes out with the first punch he throws in the fight, but that’s the danger here. You comb through the 2nd tier and you grab a fighter like Sykes, who was recently KO’d in the 1st round, and put him in with an even better fighter like the Mayweather-esque Broner.
Golden Boy wants to make a star out of Broner, but this isn’t th way to do it. You got to put him in with quality opposition to do it. Broner has destroyed his last few opponents Vicente Rodriguez, Jason Litzau and Eloy Perez, and those guys are arguably worlds better than Sykes. Broner might as well fight one of those guys again because it would be a heck of a lot better than to see him destroy Sykes in one round. I hate 1st round knockouts but this fight has a quick easy KO written all over it. Broner is the best in the super featherweight division, whereas Sykes is I don’t know what, maybe a closer to being a 3rd tier fighter than a 1st tier.
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