It’s being reported that William Zepeda aggravated a previous hand injury in his recent bout with Tevin Farmer and will be out 6 to 8 weeks. This means that Zepeda’s talked-about February fight with WBC lightweight champion Shakur Stevenson in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia will be pushed off the board yet again.
Ugh.
Can we just put a bullet in the head of this ailing donkey of a Shakur-Zepeda matchup already? Please?
The stars are clearly not aligning for this one and it would be for the best if both fighters could just move on.
To be honest, though, it seems as though Team Zepeda has worked pretty damn hard to make sure those stars never aligned.
Seriously, how odd is it to have to work so diligently to try and wrangle a top contender into a title fight with the champ? The WBC has been trying to get Zepeda into a bout with Stevenson since late 2022, when they offered the Mexican a 135 lb. title eliminator in early 2023 versus the lightweight-bound former featherweight and super featherweight titlist from Newark, New Jersey.
At the time, Zepeda’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya turned down the fight, saying via social media that he needed “more exposure for Zepeda to create a super fight with Shakur.”
Fine.
Fast forward to July of 2024 when the WBC ordered Stevenson to make a mandatory defense of his WBC lightweight title versus no.1 contender Zepeda.
De La Hoya had spent weeks before the order hyping his fighter as the all-action anti-Shakur. He even directly addressed Stevenson with a menacing video prior to Zepeda’s bout with Giovanni Cabrera on July 6, saying, “So, Shakur, you say nobody wants to fight you, well check out William Zepeda Saturday night on DAZN…He’s BEGGING to fight you.”
After the WBC decree, however, De La Hoya’s tune changed completely.
“William Zepeda is so bad ass he has four sanctioning bodies to choose from,” the Golden Boy owner and founder said via Twitter/X. “Nobody will tell him who he must fight next.”
He would follow that up with a further burial of Stevenson-Zepeda on, apparently, moral/ethical grounds.
“Shakur Stevenson, you’re a free agent, you’re a great fighter, a great talent, but not for me,” De La Hoya said in one of his Clap Back Thursday video segments on social media. “I believe that when somebody says you’re not fighting for the public, I cannot promote.”
Okay.
But then word got out in August, after Stevenson signed a promotional deal with Matchroom Boxing, that a Stevenson-Zepeda bout was back on the table, slated for an October date in Saudi Arabia.
De La Hoya met that breaking news story with a terse “Stop with the fake news” tweet, linking back to the news article that made the claim.
It was also leaked to press around this time that Zepeda wouldn’t be fighting anyone anytime soon because he wanted to spend time with his pregnant wife as she approached her due date.
He’d go on to fight Tevin Farmer on November 16.
Ummm…
Then Stevenson-Zepeda– again– became a thing. This time for real, in February. Except…now, not.
Zepeda’s reported hand injury will put off that Shakur bout until god-knows-when. He’ll be stepping into his recovery time after being dropped by Tevin Farmer in a much closer than expected split decision win on the Golden Boy Latino Night card in Saudi Arabia where all kinds of weirdness happened, like drug testing for his bout being conspicuously absent and the interim WBC title bout being downgraded to a 10-rounder from the customary 12-rounds.
Stevenson, meanwhile, has been recovering from his own September hand injury which forced him to withdraw from his October 12 Matchroom debut on the Artur Beterbiev-Dmitry Bivol undercard in Riyadh against Joe Cordina.
While there still seems enough interest in Stevenson vs. Zepeda by some event organizers (maybe just Saudi boxing figurehead Turki Alalshikh and Team Shakur), it’s probably time to cut losses on this pairing and move on. From the mixed signals and intermittent backtracking it’s pretty clear that somebody on Team Zepeda does NOT want this Stevenson fight, regardless of the validity of this recent reported hand injury.
It’s not fair to the fighters nor to the fans to keep pushing this Shakur-Stevenson storyline when it seems like there may never be a payoff. The fight is not so big that it demands years of Mayweather-Pacquiao “will they/won’t they” drama. Honestly, it makes absolutely no business sense, anyway, to even have this fight in Saudi Arabia. But that’s a topic for another day.
In the meantime, let’s just put this matchup out of its misery and everyone can get on with their damn lives.
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Paul Magno has over forty years of experience in and around the sport of boxing and has had his hand in everything from officiating to training. As a writer, his work has appeared on Yahoo Sports, Fox Sports, Fight Hype, Max Boxing, Boxing.com, Inside Fights, The Queensberry Rules, Overtime Heroics, Bleacher Report, and Premier Boxing Champions. He is currently the owner and managing editor or The Boxing Tribune. You can follow his Twitter/X account, @boxing_tribune, for breaking boxing news, analysis, and sometimes NSFW commentary. For Advertising, Inquiries, etc., send him an email here: paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com