Finally, we have a four belt champion and the winner of the first World Boxing Super Series as Oleksandr Usyk gave the performance of his career with a dazzling and dominant victory over Murat Gassiev in Moscow via a unanimous decision.Usyk's win annexed the WBA and IBF cruiserweight titles from Gassiev added them to the WBO and WBC championships that he already held and left no doubt that he is the best cruiserweight in the world.
I thought the fight was a pick em level fight, but I leaned Gassiev by a hair.
I was quickly proven wrong as the speed and quickness of Usyk left Gassiev befuddled and confused for the evening and on the occasion that the power-hitting Gassiev did connect, Usyk took those hammers extremely well in winning a 118-110 decision on my card.
Usyk was the tournament's top seed and won all three of his tournament events in his opponent's home country defeating Marco Huck in Germany, Mairis Briedis in Latvia and then Gassiev in Russia in the final.
The rumored next fight for Usyk is Brit Tony Bellew, a former cruiserweight champ with two wins over former heavyweight champion David Haye in Bellew's last two fights.
Hopefully, that fight will be at cruiserweight, where it would be nice to see Usyk make a few defenses of the unified title and not have the title break back into four pieces after a move to heavyweight.
I'd like to see Usyk in a rematch vs Mairis Bredis, who Usyk defeated in the semi's by a narrow majority decision before he leaves for the bigger division.
I scored their fight a draw so this would be far from a sure thing for Usyk.
As for the WBSS, they couldn't have asked for more from their first tournament.
They had every major cruiser and most of the best in the world, were able to put together exciting and compelling bouts and unified all the titles.
Every tourney won't be able to do that, as their super middleweight bracket has shown and they won't be able to attract all the champions every time, as their 2018-19 brackets have shown.
The cruiserweight champions were all European attractions, so there was not a need for an American presence- eventually, they will need one.
The WBSS still will need to prove that they will be able to bring the best fighters in from the three main American promoters (they have yet to pull a major star from Golden Boy, PBC or Top Rank), and they have to hope Eddie Hearn's streaming service DAZN catches on as season two's contests will be exclusive to that outlet, but still I have to say the WBSS is an early success story, let's hope that this can be sustained.
On HBO, the main event was the return of exciting banger Jaime Munguia in the first defense of his WBO junior middleweight title against former champion Liam Smith in Las Vegas.
I haven't had a chance to watch Munguia's unanimous decision win, so I'll edit this later when I have.
Alberto Machado won every round over Rafael Mensah in the dull opener to retain a minor title.
Machado was arguably the most screwed over fighter by the WBA after he won their top title with a stunning KO of favored Jezreel Corrales, only to be dropped to their "regular' title in order to have the top "vacant" title (which really wasn't) filled by Gervonta Davis.
Machado knocked Mensah down at the end of the first round and had he had a few more seconds, might have ended the fight there.
Instead, we received eleven more rounds of a tedious beating.
I scored Machado a 120-107 winner.
In the challenge, Ramon Malpica scored 4 points to my 3 and cut my lead to 25 at 115-90...
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