Stripped for picking the wrong opponent
Denzel Bentley walks into the ring on Saturday without the belt he spent years chasing. The WBO took his middleweight title away because he agreed to face Shane Mosley Jr instead of its mandatory challenger, Yoenli Hernandez.
The Battersea fighter says he would have taken the Hernandez fight next year. What he wanted was to honour the Mosley date first, either as a voluntary defence or as a non-title bout. He told Sky Sports his team made a solid case to the sanctioning body and that most of it was brushed aside. He also pointed out that WBC champion Carlos Adames has been allowed to box a non-title fight, and says he is being criticised amid a wider campaign against Zuffa as a promoter.
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A dangerous night in the Copper Box
Bentley and Mosley Jr share the co-main slot on Zuffa Boxing 12 at London’s Copper Box Arena, underneath Chris Billam-Smith against Cheavon Clarke. Mosley Jr, son of the former champion of the same name, arrives off a stoppage of Serhii Bohachuk and sits at No 6 in the WBO’s own rankings. Bentley reckons that résumé would make this a respectable title defence if the belt were still his.
He expects a fight that turns into a dogfight at some point, and says the whole saga has given him extra fuel.
The year Bentley couldn’t get a delivery job
This is not his first setback. Bentley is a three-time British middleweight champion, lost his first world title shot, then worked his way back to win the WBO interim belt, later upgraded to the full title. Before the interim fight against Endry Saavedra he spent 16 months out of the ring with no income and few sponsors. He tried to sign up for Amazon delivery work, the zero-hours kind where you download an app and take shifts, but there were no slots in his area.
He says he rarely stops to think about that journey, and that looking at it now makes it feel remarkable.
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