Showtime has added a second women’s fight to the Claressa Shields vs. Ivana Habazin event on Friday, January 10, at Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, N.J., as WBA super middleweight champion Alicia “The Empress” Napoleon-Espinosa (12-1, 7 KOs) will face undefeated IBF champion Elin Cederroos (7-0, 4 KOs) in a 10-round unification.
If Shields and Napoleon win their respective bouts on January 10, they are expected to face off for the undisputed middleweight world championship in 2020 with all four of Shields’ 160-pound titles on the line.
The telecast will also feature a WBA super lightweight world title eliminator between Shohjahon Ergashev (17-0, 15 KOs) and Keith Hunter (11-0, 7 KOs). The winner becomes the mandatory challenger for WBA super lightweight world championship currently held by Mario Barrios.
Now how is this even coming off? The last we heard Shields brother assaulted a trainer at the weigh in, and hurt the man with his cheap back of the head shot. From what was told to us, this punk assaulted a 73 year old man. So what if any was Shield reparations to the trainer? To the fighter? To the network etc? Why was there no suspension and why no fine? And how is it she is fighting a couple of months after she made this whole mess? And where is the commission? Don’t they have anything to do? Also all these belt orgs do they not think assaulting an old man requires penalties? And what happened to her punk brother? At the very least she must forfeit her entire pay, to the assaulted parties. Man cancer has infected this whole damn circus????
Its strange indeed that there are zero news on the net after Oct. 17th. At that time, it was made public that Artis Mack was formally charged with one count of assault, but to my knowledge, no further news ever came out.
Both, the commission as well as Shields are refusing to take any responsibility for the incident.
From what I understand, Habazin had to train without Bashir for the upcoming fight.
Its a bizarre story and one can only hope that Bashir will fully recover + get fully compensated for everything he had/has to go through.
As far as Shields goes, I hope she will run into someone sooner than later who will bully her the same way she bullied herself through life so far.
I absolutely refuse to support any card that has shields on it. I encourage all boxing fans to completely disregard anything she and her team do.
SHO has cleary turned a blind eye regarding that incident. The only reason Shields is even being aired by them is because they have a good relationship with her promoter and she’s the only Olympic gold medalist boxer for the US in the last fifteen years. Take those two factors away and Shields likely fights on TV cards but on the untelevised portion.