Fight week is here, and O’Shaquie Foster is not mincing words. The two-time WBC super featherweight champion sat down with Timothy Bradley Jr as the first-ever guest on Bradley’s new show, Into The Storm, ahead of Saturday’s unification fight with Emanuel Navarrete at the Frost Bank Arena in San Antonio, live on DAZN. And Foster said the quiet part out loud: this fight took years to make because Navarrete did not want it.
“He been ducking me for a while now,” Foster said. “To even make this fight happen, we had to put the pressure on him. But for sure, he been ducking me for years now.” His explanation was simple. “He know I come to fight. He know I’m not a small 130-pounder.” Foster said he has studied Navarrete’s record top to bottom and there is nobody on it who brings what he brings, because Navarrete’s team kept him in front of fighters who come straight forward or straight back, where Navarrete does his best work.
Respect for the Danger, Zero Fear of the Style
Do not mistake the confidence for carelessness. Asked to rate Navarrete’s danger on a scale of one to ten, Foster put him at a nine. “This is a super dangerous fight. I’m looking at it like it’s my most dangerous fight of my life, and I’m training like it,” he said, after a camp he counted at eleven to twelve weeks. But stylistically, he insists he has seen this movie before. The wild, looping, unorthodox punches remind him of Rey Vargas and of Jon Fernandez, the long, rangy puncher he beat for the silver title. “The angles, the wild throwing, I feel like I’ve seen that several times now.”
“They Haven’t Seen the Best of Me Yet”
Foster told Bradley the only camps where he came close to one hundred percent were the Rey Vargas and Stephen Fulton fights, and even then, the best version of him has not shown up. “We haven’t seen the best of me yet,” he said. “I definitely think Navarrete will bring the best out of me.” This is a fighter who studies Floyd Mayweather, Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Leonard, who calls God his psychologist when self-doubt creeps in during fight week, and who shrugs at his three losses. “The 0 can be an illusion,” Foster said. “If you don’t go through something in this sport, you’re not going to go far.” Bradley, for his part, already has Foster at number ten on his pound-for-pound list, and told him a win Saturday should put him on everybody’s.
Foster’s Prediction — and Ours
So how does it end? Foster answered that himself. “I believe I can beat Navarrete, and I believe I can do it in a dominant fashion. A super dominant fashion,” he said. “I can make it an easy night and just box his head off, but I’m looking to come in and make a statement.” After Saturday, he wants to go undisputed at 130 before moving up, and be remembered as the man who never ducked anybody.
Rnd5Media is standing with Ice Water. Navarrete’s volume is real, but volume against a bigger, slicker counter-puncher who has had twelve weeks to solve it is a problem, not a weapon. Our pick: O’Shaquie Foster wins, and wins clear — a dominant decision, with a late stoppage in play if Navarrete’s pressure walks him onto the counters all night.
Video: Timothy Bradley Jr on YouTube
