Zab Judah did not sound surprised. “I told you,” he told MillCity Boxing, laughing — another one he called. He called O’Shaquie Foster phenomenal, a force to be reckoned with, and said the run Foster is on is great for the sport right now.
His breakdown of the finish was a boxing lesson. Emanuel Navarrete, Zab said, fought a hell of a fight and did not stop punching until the last bell — but in the 12th round he got desperate. He was punching and dropping his hand instead of bringing it back to his face, and Foster countered him clean for both knockdowns. Zab aimed that straight at young fighters coming up: when you get behind and the desperation comes, you still have to be careful. And he gave Navarrete his full respect for it anyway — “heart of a lion” was the phrase, for pressing go when plenty of fighters would not.
Then came the cold water, and it is what makes Zab’s voice worth hearing. Pound-for-pound top 10 after one win like this? “Maybe number 11,” Zab said. Foster made the roster — he is the sixth man on the bench, as Zab put it — but one fight over Navarrete does not move him in with the elites. Keep shining, keep doing what he is doing, and do not let people dictate what he should do.
On the fight everybody now wants to talk about, Zab was just as plain: “There’s levels to this.” A Shakur Stevenson fight is a different kind of fight. Shakur, in Zab’s words, is a “AAA fighter” with all of the fundamentals of the ring — and he is saturated at 140, looking toward 147, while Foster is coming up from 130. In a first fight between them, Zab said, Shakur would probably be the bigger guy with the size and the more power, and you cannot just hand Foster force-of-nature status jumping up two weight classes against a guy like that.
Zab closed the loop on Lomachenko the same honest way: Loma is a dog, always has been, with excellent hands, excellent feet and over 300 amateur fights, and he could be a force at 130. He even said Loma might still be the betting favorite against Foster despite Foster holding the belts — and that if Foster had knocked Navarrete out cold instead of dropping him late, we would all be having a different conversation about his money and his narrative today. That is a legend scoring the moment without inflating it. Foster’s time, Zab said, is here. The top 10 door is just not open yet.
Video credit: MillCity Boxing.
