Brian Norman Sr is done making easy predictions, and MillCity Boxing found out exactly where his honesty starts and stops. Start with the heavyweights: Sr says Fabio Wardley got caught cold by Daniel Dubois — hurt by literally the first hard right hand Dubois threw, before he was warmed up. What finished him, in Sr’s telling, was memory. Dubois had already stopped Wardley back in May, and a fighter who has been buzzed like that hears one thing when it happens again: not again. Sr congratulates Dubois and hopes Wardley takes time off and comes back better.
Then the topic turned to Sebastian Fundora’s 12th-round stoppage of an undefeated opponent. Sr’s read: Fundora does not carry one-punch knockout power, but the straight left that changed the other man’s entire game plan proved there is real pop at the end of those long punches — and the fight was not close. Fundora said afterward he would do the same thing to Josh Kelly and to Jaron “Boots” Ennis. Sr’s response: “He’s supposed to say that” — and yes, he believes Fundora means every word.
Terence Crawford’s assessment, raised by the host, is that Boots is too fast for Fundora. Sr calls that fair — then changes the variable. His factor is not speed, it is rough: at Fundora’s length, timing disrupts speed, and Boots’ real edge would be physical roughness. But when the host pressed for an actual winner, Sr shut the door repeatedly. “I do not know. I cannot pick a winner in the Fundora fight,” he said. “We ain’t never seen Boots fight nobody that goddamn tall.” His only lean: if it ends inside the distance, Boots knocks Fundora out — not the reverse — and Fundora is a far better fighter than the kid Brian Mendoza and Erickson Lubin tested years ago.
The one clean pick to come out of the segment was Josh Kelly. Pressed by the host on Kelly, the call was plain — Boots beats Kelly easy — and when the host tried to attach that confidence to Fundora, Sr shut it down on the spot: that is not who he is talking about. Kelly may move like Karen Chukhadzhian, the man who gave Boots his toughest test, but nobody at the table was moving off the Kelly pick. That is what a real breakdown sounds like: a hard “I don’t know” where the tape runs out, and a firm call where it doesn’t.
Video credit: MillCity Boxing.
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