Sebastian Fundora is headlining a pay-per-view from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Saturday. He’s the A-side in the main event, a -380 favorite at FanDuel Sportsbook.
Brian Mendoza is fighting on the same PPV, but not as a headliner. He’s a B-side on the undercard, a +245 underdog at FanDuel.
And this all makes perfect sense. Of course Fundora is at the top of the card. Of course Mendoza is as mid-card as a mid-carder could be.
But try explaining any of this to a time traveler who just got here from April of 2023.
On the night Mendoza reduced Fundora from six-and-a-half feet tall to about six-and-a-half inches tall – erasing Fundora’s zero, his next-big-thing marketing and his momentum with a single three-punch combination – it would have been tough to predict that they’d later be where they are now.
Yes, three years is a long time. Yes, Fundora was only 25 at the time he got timber’d. Yes, Mendoza was something of a gatekeeper before he produced that career-best win. So I’m not saying it would have been impossible to foresee the current situation.
But it would have seemed unlikely.
And it would have seemed that way in large because this sport turns us all into prisoners of the moment.
All sports do, actually. I hear basketball podcasters declare a team dead because they had one lousy night or NFL analysts pronounce a team to be Super-Bowl-bound because they played lights out in Week 4.
But it’s more extreme in boxing because one fight often is a fighter’s entire year. And it’s more extreme in boxing because sometimes a loss isn’t represented by numbers on a scoreboard, but rather by a semi-conscious fighter flopping about on the ground as blood pours down his face.
That’s why we become such prisoners of the moment. That’s why we react the way we do.
But Fundora and Mendoza, three years on from the latter vaporizing the former, should serve as potent reminders that these reactions are often overreactions. These two junior middleweights who will stand in the same ring at different times on Saturday night exist as perfect examples of how one result in boxing does not determine your fate.
Mendoza, who next faces Yoenis Tellez, got opportunities to capitalize on his seventh-round KO of Fundora but couldn’t rise to them.
The first one came against Tim Tszyu, the key supporting character in this Fundora-Mendoza drama.
It was six months after Mendoza’s win over Fundora, and for the first half of the fight in Broadbeach, Australia, the gutsy American gave about as good as he got. Down the stretch, however, Tszyu pounded him mercilessly with right hands, nearly forcing a stoppage in the 11th before ultimately winning by wide scores.
It wasn’t a bad performance by Mendoza, by any means. At least not relative to how highly regarded Tszyu still was at the time.
But it was a momentum killer. With one grueling loss, Mendoza was right back to where he’d been coming into the Fundora fight: a gatekeeper. A fringe contender. A “tough out”. Worthy of respect, but not worthy of a promotional push.
So for his next fight, Mendoza was back to being an undercard fighter. A deep undercard fighter. A before-the-pay-per-view-starts undercard fighter. This after a late shuffling to the March 30, 2024 PBC card in Las Vegas, a situation that again involves Fundora, again involves Tszyu and also involves Keith Thurman, the opponent Fundora will be taking on on Saturday.
That event was to be headlined by Tszyu vs Thurman, but Thurman had to withdraw on 11 days’ notice with an injury. Fundora was slated to take on Serhii Bohachuk in a supporting bout.
And now Tszyu needed an opponent. Mendoza, coming off his clear-cut defeat by Tszyu, wasn’t a viable candidate. Fundora, despite having been inactive for a year since getting knocked out by Mendoza, was. So “The Towering Inferno” slid into the main event, leaving Bohachuk in need of an opponent, and fortunately, Mendoza had been training (as a sparring partner to Tszyu) and answered the call.
Fortunately for Bohachuk, that is.
Not so fortunately for Mendoza, who, on the Amazon Prime pre-show leading into the PPV, found himself overmatched, and unable to cope with Bohachuk’s relentlessness. Mendoza won just two rounds out of 12 on one card and three rounds on the others, and suddenly he was 0-2, with 24 punishing rounds logged, since sparking Fundora 51 weeks earlier.
Wisely, Mendoza took a couple of steps back after that. His team gave him a nice, long break – more than 15 months off. And when he returned, it was in an eight-rounder in Mexico against Jesus Antonio Rojas, a slightly sub-.500 fighter who’d lost three straight. Mendoza did as he was expected to, stopping Rojas early in the fourth round.
He’s now 32 years old, with a record of 23-4 (17 KOs), as he prepares to take on Tellez, a well-regarded Cuban prospect who is on his own bounce-back path after an upset loss to Abass Baraou in August.
Tellez vs Mendoza is a solid undercard bout between two junior middles in desperate need of a win, and it has the potential to steal Saturday’s show, provided that Mendoza is still more or less the same fighter he was against Fundora and against Tszyu.
As for Fundora, all signs suggest he’s not the same fighter he was three years ago against Mendoza. He’s a significantly scarier one.
Atop the card two years on on which Mendoza got derailed by Bohachuk, Fundora got his career back on track and then some against Tszyu.
The only thing trickier than facing a 6’5½”, 154lbs southpaw is taking on a 6’5½”, 154lbs southpaw on short notice after preparing to take on an orthodox fighter of orthodox height.
Tszyu learned that lesson, as well as a lesson about rotten luck and about there being a time and place to fight through adversity. The Aussie started well, but an accidental elbow from the world’s pointiest-elbowed junior middleweight tore open a nasty gash on Tszyu’s scalp late in the second round, and instead of pushing for a no-contest and a chance to fight another day, Tszyu fought at a disadvantage through constant blood loss – and Fundora shined. Fundora’s face was a mess by the time it was over, too, but he showed toughness and determination and emerged at the end of 12 grueling rounds with a career-best split decision win.
Fundora was back – but there were doubts and asterisks. Could he have beaten Tszyu without the cut? Was he still the same seemingly chinny guy that Mendoza tuned up?
A mismatch in March 2025 against Chordale Booker was never going to answer those questions, but Fundora did what he was supposed to, dominating the fight and stopping Booker in the fourth.
That set the stage for a rematch with Tszyu in July – as good a fight as any to erase all doubts and asterisks created by their first meeting. What we got was the most fearsome version of Fundora that we’ve seen yet – a relentless, versatile, aggressive monster who’s hard to square with the bespectacled, khakis-wearing, soft-spoken young man we see when Fundora reluctantly hits the pre-fight promotional circuit.
Fundora obliterated Tszyu in their rematch to improve to 23-1-1 (15 KOs), knocking him down in the first round and forcing a surrender at the end of the seventh.
It was hard to believe Tszyu was facing the same opponent he’d been rather unlucky to lose to the first time, never mind the same fighter Mendoza had once splattered. Tszyu was as impressed as anyone, expressing with some degree of astonishment afterwards: “He’s one tough motherfucker. Victory belongs to Sebastian Fundora. He was just the better man. He’s tall as fuck.”
And now he’s a heavy favorite to defeat the veteran Thurman, while Mendoza is a sizable underdog deeper down the card.
Hey, things change. Recall that when Mendoza knocked Fundora out in 2023, it was on Showtime. By the end of that year, boxing on Showtime did not exist. And by early the next year, the Showtime network didn’t even have its own standalone app. Type “showtime.com” into your web browser now, and you’ll be redirected to “paramountpluswithshowtime.com”.
So it is by no means unnatural for one fighter who was at the lowest of lows three years ago to now stand so much taller, literally and figuratively, than the fighter who was at the highest of highs at his expense three years ago. What goes up must come down, and what goes down can potentially come back up.
But it’s still a bit jarring to see Fundora and Mendoza sharing a card again, positioned so differently on it that you’d think “Mendoza KO 7 Fundora” had never happened.
It did, of course. But one result doesn’t determine a fighter’s fate. Not if they refuse to let it. And not if they landed one fleeting, magical three-punch combination and don’t have it in them to reproduce it.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
