You cannot cut it closer than this. Sebastian Fundora was one second — literally one second — from hearing the final bell when a left hand put Ermal Hadribeaj flat on his back and ended the argument for good. Official time: 2:59 of the 12th round, Saturday night at The Chelsea inside The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. The WBC junior middleweight title stays with “The Towering Inferno,” and he kept it the hard way.
Video credit: DAZN Boxing.
Hadribeaj deserves his own paragraph, because for half the night the mandatory challenger looked like a genuine problem. The unbeaten Albanian (23-1-1, 8 KOs) crowded the 6-foot-6 champion from the opening round, took away the reach, and made it an inside fight whether Fundora wanted one or not. He paid for the tactics — referee Thomas Taylor took a point from him for holding in the third, and another in the 11th — but the strategy worked long enough to make the champion uncomfortable and the rounds close.
The second half was a different fight. Fundora (25-1-1, 17 KOs) started digging to the body and letting the uppercuts go, and the numbers tell the takeover: per CompuBox, he outlanded Hadribeaj 124-70 over the final six rounds. The challenger kept walking forward, but the holding got more desperate, the legs got heavier, and the champion’s shots started landing in bunches. By the championship rounds it looked headed to a clear scorecard win.
Instead, Fundora closed the show. With the clock nearly gone in the 12th, the left hand landed clean and Hadribeaj went down flat — the DAZN clip above, all 22 seconds of it, is the whole story: the challenger on the canvas, the referee waving it off, Fundora standing tall in the corner. That’s how you close a show, indeed.
Afterwards, Fundora told DAZN’s Chris Mannix he wants the winner of Jaron “Boots” Ennis vs. Josh Kelly in 2027 — for the undisputed crown at 154. That is exactly the fight this site has been circling all week: Bernie Tha Boxer already told Mill City Boxing that Boots beats Fundora for undisputed, and now the champion himself is asking for the winner by name. A fourth successful title defense, finished with a second to spare, is a strong way to make that case. But a man who needed until 2:59 of the 12th to separate from his mandatory should expect the Boots believers to feel just as confident this morning.
One second from the cards. Zero doubt on the canvas. At 154, the road to undisputed still runs through the tallest man in the division.
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