Jr. featherweight, here he comes.

That’s the assumption as the live and televised boxing weekend in the States finished its extra innings in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. The now undisputed bantamweight champion, Naoya Inoue, strongly hinted before his latest knockout win that he was not long for 118 lbs. 

Aside from an unlikely fight with Jr. bantamweight king Juan Francisco Estrada, what would there be to stick around for? 

Inoue’s 11th round knockout of Paul Butler wasn’t so much the completion of a journey as an epilogue to one. Inoue was already widely seen as the world’s best bantamweight. Without COVID, Inoue might have had the WBO belt Butler wore a couple years earlier. A unification bout with John Riel Casimero was scuttled due to the virus and Casimero lost the belt outside the ring. It would have been more entertaining for fans if he had not. 

Let’s be clear. Inoue-Butler wasn’t a particularly entertaining fight. No one thought Butler had a realistic chance to win and both Butler and Inoue fought like they knew it too. 

Butler threw around 300 punches over the course of the fight and few with bad intentions. Butler landed, according to Compubox, a little less than 3 ½ per frame for a total of 38. 

Inoue, who more than doubled Butler in output and nearly quintupled him in estimate of landed blows, was good enough to win but not as destructive as has been his norm. Faced with an opponent taking an entirely inoffensive approach, Inoue seemed at times to be looking for a highlight reel ending. He mocked Butler at times for stretching out the inevitable, even pulling a hands-behind-the-back homage to Roy Jones. Still, Inoue didn’t appear to have the same retributive fire he carried against an Emanuel Rodriguez, the precision and focus of his win over Jason Moloney, or the purposeful explosion of the Nonito Donaire rematch.

Those were fights where Inoue appeared to want to make a statement. Tuesday was a fight where he came to complete a task. To Inoue’s credit, he eventually found a veteran who came to survive and didn’t let him. The task, becoming the first undisputed bantamweight champion since Enrique Pinder some fifty years ago, and becoming the first Japanese fighter to unify all of the alphabet crowns in a weight class since they started to splinter as we know them in the 1960s, is complete.

There are heavier tasks ahead.

Futures: Inoue, if he lands at Jr. featherweight in 2022, arrives at a fun time. There are, at least for now, two unified titlists in the class. Stephen Fulton (WBC/WBO) may be headed to featherweight though if that’s for a fight or a permanent future remains to be determined. Murodjon Akhmadaliev (WBA/IBF) is recuperating from injuries and may have some mandatory obligations first. Both are undefeated. 

Both would be excellent matches. 

So would fights with guys like Ra’eese Aleem, Luis Nery, and even rhetorical rival and COVID-aborted opponent John Riel Casimero. Inoue, still only 29, is far from done. He’s a great fighter, maybe the best Japan has produced since Fighting Harada. 

Maybe even better than that.

Jr. featherweight has enough talent to provide Inoue a ceiling, a platform, or both. Can he handle the physical strength of an Akhmadaliev? How would Inoue handle the versatility, length, and size of Fulton? Some of those answers will come. From this corner, Inoue-Fulton might be the most desirable fight boxing could deliver in the ring in 2023. 

For now, if this is the end of Inoue’s bantamweight run, take a moment to reflect on just how dominant it has been. Over a 9-0 run in the division, Inoue has:

  •     Scored eight knockouts.

  •     Posted seven wins over fighters ranked in the top ten by TBRB or the Ring. Neither is a perfect rankings metric but it says something positive that Butler was the only one of those seven wins ranked outside the top six in the class by either body.

  •     Lost one round on one scorecard in the Jason Moloney fight and three, four, and six rounds in a unanimous decision over Nonito Donaire in their first fight. That’s a total of 141 rounds scored across three judges per fight at bantamweight and he won over 90% of them.  

  •     Handed Jamie McDonnell, Juan Carlos Payano, Emanuel Rodriguez, and Moloney their first knockout losses.  

  •     Dealt Donaire his only two losses in the bantamweight division and became only the second man to stop the future Hall of Famer (and with different officiating in the first Donaire fight he gets a knockout in the eleventh round there too with a broken nose and orbital bone).

It’s as dominant a run in any weight class as there is in boxing right now. It’s also a historically significant run at bantamweight, though where it ranks will be easier to judge over time. Inoue has been a great bantamweight, accomplishing a clean out of the division that no one else has in multiple generations. One suspects that how he performs in higher weight classes could enhance how he is regarded all-time at bantamweight down the road.

At just 24-0, Inoue’s whole career to date is also impressive. After the Butler win, Inoue is:

  •     17-0 (15) in title fights (19-0, (17) including WBA sub-title fights)

  •     11-0 against fighters ranked top ten by TBRB or Ring. Inoue has faced and defeated top ten men from 108-118 in 46% of his pro starts.  

  •     8-0 against fighters ranked in the top five of their weight class by TBRB or Ring with six of those eight ranked top five by both. Inoue went the distance with only one of them (Donaire) and scored a knockout of all of them.

What Inoue lacks for is a volume of fights, but he makes up for it in maximized minutes. The biggest miss of his career is he didn’t face any of the central figures in what has been a golden era at super flyweight. He appeared on the first “SuperFly” card, sharing the bill with Roman Gonzalez, Srisaket Sor Rungvisai, Estrada, and Carlos Cuadras but was off to bantamweight shortly after. 

Donaire was likely as formidable at bantamweight as any of those four would have been but one opponent is never the same as another. That four-way rivalry really came together in 2017. Inoue outgrew it, literally. There will always be a ‘what if’ there.

What he missed in that loaded field Inoue may find at Jr. featherweight. The next couple years could see an already great fighter further tested, enhanced, and solidified for all time. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun to see what comes next.

Cliff’s Notes…

Whether one thought he won or lost against Sandor Martin on Saturday, it’s surprising to see how lost Teofimo Lopez looked at times. This is a fighter who three fights ago showed up with the game plan and talent to defeat Vasyl Lomachenko. Nothing has looked right since…Terence Crawford looked like Terence Crawford in stopping David Avanesyan on Saturday. Crawford fought relaxed, took a few shots, and then iced his man. It’s formulaic at this point and likely will remain so until he faces Errol Spence. It might stay that way then too. It’s why it’s the fight everyone most wants to see. That said, Spence may want to make sure Crawford’s gloves are a little better assembled if they ever square off…Luis Lopez fought through about as nasty a series of fouls as can be recently recalled to win a belt at featherweight this weekend. It’s hard to win on the road. The way he did it was gritty stuff.  

Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com