With the 2025 boxing calendar now halfway complete, BoxingScene is checking in with its staff to identify the early front-runners for our annual awards. Today, we consider Fight of the Year.
More BoxingScene 2025 midyear awards:
Tris Dixon: While I found Chris Eubank Jnr-Conor Benn incredibly dramatic, part of it was looking-through-your-fingers dramatic, and so I’m leaning towards Kenshiro Teraji and Seigo Yuri Akui. That fight had just about everything.
Lucas Ketelle: It hasn’t been a stellar year for exciting fights, but so far, the flyweight unification bout between Kenshiro Teraji and Seigo Yuri Akui has been the best. Teraji stopped Akui in the final round in a thrilling, reckless affair. The bout had the unhinged and unpredictable feel often associated with the best fights of the year. The only knock is that U.S. fight fans might not have watched it. It took place early in the morning on a Thursday in Japan.
Another notable fight was on ProBox TV as Mayelli Flores Rosquero won a split decision over Nazarena Romero for the WBA women’s junior featherweight title. The bout was a back-and-forth action fight that showcased will as much as skill.
Jake Donovan: We’ve been blessed with several “10/10” fights already. Kenshiro Teraji’s dramatic 12th-round stoppage of Seigo Yuri Akui, however, is the only one where I felt like I just witnessed THE choice for this category the moment it was over.
Eric Raskin: It makes such a big difference to watch a great fight live, not knowing the result. Perhaps this is unfair to the Eubank-Benn battle, but I watched it later in the night, knowing the outcome, and it didn’t particularly move me.
On the other hand, I watched live as Naoya Inoue got off the deck and overcame several other scary spots to impose his will on Ramon Cardenas, and as a result I was fully invested throughout the drama and the threat of a massive upset. It’s not a properly controlled comparison, but nevertheless, Inoue-Cardenas entertained me more than any other fight in the first half of the year.
Elliot Worsell: It wasn’t a “great” fight in the typical sense, and I’m only mentioning it because all the right answers have been said, but I did like the way Fabio Wardley vs. Justis Huni played out and then finished. It was dramatic, unexpected, and unique among all the other eye-catching fights this year. It was also a reminder of why we watch the sport.
Lance Pugmire: “The Amazing Boy” Kenshiro Teraji’s stirring, brutal rally to stop Seigo Yuri Akui was everything a Fight of the Year should be. Plenty of action, an admission, “I wanted to quit” by the winner and a heroic effort from the defeated. Will be difficult to beat by year’s end.
Owen Lewis: I’ll second Eric’s vote for Inoue-Cardenas. Critics of this choice might say that the fight was one-sided for all but one or two of the eight rounds that it lasted. But Cardenas dropping Inoue with a hard counter, putting one of the top three fighters in the world in real peril, was the most shocking boxing moment of the year to date. The violence of the next several rounds, too, was astonishing.
And context matters – we’d just been slapped in the face with the hyped-on-paper, dire-in-practice Times Square card. Inoue-Cardenas was a breath of the freshest imaginable air, especially given how large an underdog Cardenas was going in. I’m not sure we’ll get another fight that boxing fans so unanimously rejoice at for another several years, much less for the rest of 2025.
