After sharing the ring with Shakur Stevenson, Teofimo Lopez believes he is aware of methods to defeat the unbeaten Newark southpaw and has shared that information to future opponents of the newly topped super-lightweight world champion.
Stevenson grew to become the third-youngest four-division world champion in boxing historical past when he dethroned Teofimo Lopez and captured the WBO super-lightweight strap with some of the dominant performances of the yr so far.
Yet, in an interview with Boxing Highs, Lopez defined that he doesn’t assume his current opponent fully believes in himself and denied that he might have been stopped if Stevenson determined to push the tempo down the stretch.
“I think that Shakur is a great candidate and a great fighter, yes. Do I think that he believes in himself wholly? No.
“Just hitting me with jabs alone and left-hooks, where I was catching him in the majority of the fight, that doesn’t win you fights. I am kind of flattered that Andre Ward and Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford thought that Shakur could finish me. Nah, nobody can stop me.”
Lopez then went on to disclose that he feels as if the best way to beat the well-schooled Stevenson is by ‘fighting dirty’.
“It is not Shakur’s so-called fault, but in the fight he was stepping on my foot and elbowing me in-between those moments when we were clinching, but that is just what it was.
“He knows how to do one thing and one thing for sure – that is to create enough space to be where he needs to be at defensively. That, I can give him, he is very defensively sound.
“You have just got to make it a dirty fight, for anybody that wants to face him, you have just got to make it real dirty.”
