On a night many felt would offer up the sternest challenge of his career to date, Shakur Stevenson made a mockery of that pre-fight billing by cruising past a sluggish Teofimo Lopez in staggering ease at Madison Square Garden.
This was supposed to be a true 50-50, with Stevenson – already a three-weight world champion – bidding to rule a fourth up against Lopez, the reigning WBO and Ring Magazine super-lightweight champion with sizeable scalps on his resume in Vasiliy Lomachenko and Josh Taylor.
Yet astonishingly, it proved one of the simplest evenings of the challenger’s career.
Over the course of 12 remarkably comfortable rounds, of which perhaps he lost one or two at most, Stevenson toyed with Lopez on his way to a whitewash, claiming a unanimous-decision victory thanks to three identical judges’ scores of 119-109.
Brooklyn native Lopez, who staked a claim to being in the top 10 pound-for-pound list heading into this grudge match in New York, failed to get close to him all night, steaming in square-on far too often and paying the price as a result.
Stevenson will surely be stunned by the ease at which he controlled the range perfectly throughout, while picking a disjointed and clumsy Lopez off on the back foot.
He may go by the moniker of The Takeover, but Lopez was the one ransacked here by a fighter who may well go down as a generational great when it’s all said and done.
Shakur Stevenson cruised past a sluggish Teofimo Lopez in New York on Saturday night
