Jai Opetaia is undefeated and the lineal cruiserweight champion while his opponent has lost three times before, but Opetaia knows it will take an excellent performance to give Brandon Glanton his fourth defeat.
“He’s tough. He’s gritty. And he wants to win,” Opetaia told Dan Rafael of Fight Freaks Unite. “He's got a fucking big engine. He keeps walking forward and he's just ready to have a crack. He’s dangerous the whole fight. So you got to be switched on. You got to be ready to fucking get in the trenches – and we are.”
Opetaia has demonstrated his own power of late, winning his past four bouts by knockout or technical knockout, albeit against opponents who weren’t considered among the top tier at 200lbs: Jack Massey, David Nyika, Claudio Squeo and Huseyin Cinkara. Still, while Opetaia has 23 KOs in his 29 wins, he knows that power alone can’t win this fight. He has to be wise about when and how to apply it.
“We box smart, we do our thing. And you just make him walk on the shit, bro. He’s just going to fucking do what we do, and that’s the science of the sport,” Opetaia said. “Our skill levels are completely different, but he’s big, he’s strong. It doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist to see our styles and how this fight matches up.”
Glanton, 21-3 (18 KOs), is a fan-friendly fighter whose history of entertaining battles includes victories over Efe Apochi and Aleksei Egorov, and a defeat to Chris Billam-Smith. (His other losses came via split decision to the 19-0 David Light and majority decision against the 3-0 Soslan Asbarov.)
It’s no surprise, then, why Glanton was selected as the opponent for Opetaia’s debut with Zuffa Boxing, which will headline on March 8 on Paramount+ from the Meta Apex in Las Vegas, Nevada.
This will be Opetaia’s eighth defense of his lineal and Ring Magazine championships, as well as the sixth defense of his IBF belt (split between two reigns). And he remains hopeful that he will land unification bouts with the other cruiserweight titleholders, including the winner of the May 2 pay-per-view main event between WBA/WBO titleholder Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez and WBC light heavyweight titleholder David Benavidez.
“That is my goal: It’s undisputed by the end of the year, and then whatever happens after that, bro, let’s go,” Opetaia said. “But there’s obviously a lot of moving parts for a plan like that to happen, and they all got to line up. And at the end of the day, all I’ve got to do is keep winning. I’ve got a job to do on the eighth.
“I keep talking about all these other fights, and they all sound good coming out of my mouth. But unless I take care of business on the eighth of March, it is all imagination. It’s all just talk and it sounds good, but we’ve got a fucking hard test on March 8. So I don’t want to lose track of that.”
David Greisman, who has covered boxing since 2004, is on Twitter @FightingWords2. David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.
