Marco Huck, cruiserweight king of the early 2010s – now a 41-year-old heavyweight – returned to the ring for the first time in more than 19 months Saturday in Halle, Germany, and all of those details seemed to season his unanimous decision win over Vaclav Pejsar.
The result was announced in the ring, but no scores were provided.
Huck, 44-5-1 (28 KOs), a Serbian who has long called Berlin his home, hadn’t fought since outpointing the 19-5 Evgenios Lazaridis in June 2024. That bout came on the heels of a nearly four-year layoff, meaning Huck has fought just three times in almost seven years.
“I wanted to keep the fight from going the distance, but ring rust played a lot of effect in this fight,” Huck said in the ring afterward, as translated by the DAZN announcer. “And respect to my opponent.”
Huck was visibly slower and paunchier than in his heyday, but some of the hard-won skills and instincts still rose to the surface. He opened by searching with his jab, eventually landing a straight right hand to the body that seemed to startle Pejsar. In the second round, Pejsar engaged, looking after his body work – and it opened up a space for him to land a crossing right hand upstairs. Huck, perhaps frustrated, tangled with his opponent inside and shoved him to the canvas. When Pejsar rose and pressed him, Huck responded with a couple of heavy right hands and a left hook.
Both men began to open up in the third, Pejsar jabbing, Huck answering with a right to the body, Pejsar upping the ante with a series of combinations and Huck responding with a hammering straight right and, later, a sizzling left hook.
In the fourth, Pejsar led with his power, prompting Huck to dust off his jab again. It may have caught Pejsar off guard in the waning moments when Huck then fired several right hands up top and finished the round with a right uppercut that rattled Pejsar’s chin.
Huck began subtly assuming control in the fifth, taking what Pejsar gave him by changing levels and working around and through his guard: a looping left hand around the glove, a straight right between the leather, followed by a crunching left when Pejsar dropped his hands. Huck’s stamina and reflexes may no longer be what they were, but his punch variation, ring IQ and power put him on the right side of the judges.
Huck slowed in the sixth and seventh, alternating between baiting his opponent and seemingly catching his breath. Pejsar didn’t bite, pumping 1-2s in Huck’s direction – but rarely with conviction or malice. Although a strong and sturdy 41-year-old from Czechia, Pejsar punched in slow motion and took a paint-by-numbers approach.
Huck returned to his jab in the eighth, and that seemed to jimmy the lock on Pejsar a bit, as Huck followed the stick with power, then swarmed his foe early in the round to draw the first real reaction from the Heristo Arena crowd. Even so, Pejsar was unhurt – then and throughout the fight – and Huck lacked the conditioning to press the issue.
“I couldn’t really keep the pace as high as I wanted,” Huck said. “He came back quite often.”
In the ninth, Pejsar landed the occasional jab and random body shot, and Huck slipped in a hard uppercut to briefly draw a chant of “Huck! Huck! Huck!” from the Halle faithful. But every sporadic bit of activity from either fighter dissolved into periods of, essentially, paint drying. Huck’s jab and relative elusiveness – a head tilt when Pejsar swung wildly – likely won him the 10th (if he happened to need it), but even the fight’s final round was incapable of moving the night’s needle much beyond the level of white noise.
The loss dropped Pejsar to 26-23 (21 KOs).
Huck, meanwhile, says he isn’t done. A former two-time cruiserweight titleholder who made eight successful defenses of his belt in his first reign, Huck promised the wait to see him in the ring again will be a much shorter one than those around his recent fights.
“Next time I will come back a better fighter,” he said. “I will come back faster than you might think. I’m healthy, I’m not injured, so I’ll be back soon.”
Jason Langendorf is the former Boxing Editor of ESPN.com, was a contributor to Ringside Seat and the Queensberry Rules, and has written about boxing for Vice, The Guardian, Sun-Times and other publications. A member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, he can be found at LinkedIn and followed on X and Bluesky.
