Before a former YouTuber faced off with a former heavyweight champion, two former mixed martial arts champions did battle in a boxing ring.
Anderson Silva, at age 50, sent Tyron Woodley to a 0-3 pro boxing record, knocking out the former UFC welterweight champion at 1 minute and 33 seconds of the second round.
Silva, a southpaw competing in his sixth pro fight – but in his first since losing a unanimous decision to Jake Paul in 2022 – stuck his left hand out as a decoy, blinding the much shorter Woodley to the right uppercut and hook that he used to end the fight. Woodley beat the count but was not ready to continue after the knockdown, as the corner stopped the fight.
With Silva at age 50 and Woodley at 43, it was not surprising that the fighters started their six-round bout at a slow pace, which elicited boos from the crowd at Kaseya Center in Miami.
Woodley, who hadn’t fought since his sixth-round knockout loss to Paul in 2021, took the fight on just three weeks' notice.
Silva says his next move is to report to police academy to begin a job with the Beverly Hills Police Department, but he says he isn’t done just yet with boxing. If he had his wish, the longest-reigning UFC champion in history would face the man who ended his reign back in 2013, Chris Weidman.
“I know you hurt your arm – I’m waiting for it to get better,” Silva, whose boxing record is now 4-2 (3 KOs), said in reference to Weidman. "Let’s show how ex-UFC fighters can do a good job in boxing."
Opening up the main card, 2024 U.S. Olympian Jahmal Harvey made the most of his biggest stage since the Paris Games, displaying his technical proficiency in a one-sided unanimous decision over Kevin Cervantes.
All three judges scored the junior lightweight fight 60-53, all in favor of Harvey, a 23-year-old from Oxon Hill, Maryland, who improved to 2-0 (1 KO). Cervantes, a Colombian who had been off for more than two years prior to his previous fight, a first-round stoppage of Juan Obregon in September in Mexico, dropped to 5-1 (5 KOs).
Harvey jumped on Cervantes in the first minute, ripping him to the body to open up hooks to the head. Harvey switched stances to southpaw afterwards and scored a knockdown moments later with a combination punctuated by a left hand to the head. The knockdown counted, though it appeared Cervantes was more off-balance while throwing his own shot.
Harvey stepped up his intensity in the second round, rocking Cervantes with a counter uppercut out of the southpaw stance before switching to orthodox to land a similar punch later in the round.
Harvey’s eagerness to score a knockout on this platform was evident as he tried to push the issue in the third, but Cervantes showed enough competitiveness to slow Harvey’s aggression. Though the fight had “distance” written all over it heading into the sixth round, Harvey never stopped pushing for a knockout, landing uppercuts and overhand rights that exacerbated the swelling around Cervantes' eyes but that weren't enough to finish the bout inside the distance.
“I’m pleased with my second pro fight. I went out and dominated every round. I thought I got carried away at moments. I was trying to get him out of there but couldn’t,” Harvey, who lost in the Olympic quarterfinals, admitted.
Ryan Songalia is a reporter and editor for BoxingScene.com and has written for ESPN, the New York Daily News, Rappler, The Guardian, Vice and The Ring magazine. He holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at ryansongalia@gmail.com or on Twitter at @ryansongalia.
