Mike Heck<\/a> reported that while Silva was originally slated to face another former UFC star in Chris Weidman, a change was needed due to Weidman suffering an injury.<\/p>\nBoth Silva and Woodley were highly successful MMA fighters who held titles in UFC.<\/p>\n
Silva, 50, was the UFC middleweight champion from 2006 to 2013, making him the longest-reigning champ in the history of the promotion.<\/p>\n
The Brazilian superstar went 34-11 with one no contest during his MMA career, although most of those losses came at the end of his career, as he was 33-4 at one point.<\/p>\n
Woodley, 43, was a UFC welterweight champion, holding it from 2016 until 2019 when he dropped it to Kamaru Usman.<\/p>\n
Overall, Woodley went 19-7-1 overall, and like Silva, he experienced some late-career struggles by losing his final four fights.<\/p>\n
After excelling in MMA, both Silva and Woodley turned to boxing, and they were each opponents of Paul.<\/p>\n
Silva beat boxer Julio C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez Jr. and former UFC star Tito Ortiz in boxing matches in 2021 before losing to Paul by unanimous decision in 2022.<\/p>\n
More recently, Silva fought another former UFC star in Chael Sonnen to a draw in an exhibition fight last year.<\/p>\n
Woodley’s only two career boxing matches were against Paul. The first fight was a close one that Paul won by split decision in August 2021. Four months later, Paul won the rematch by knockout.<\/p>\n
Given their similar level of experience in both MMA and boxing, Silva vs. Woodley figures to be a highly competitive matchup.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Paul will face the biggest challenge of his career by a long shot against a former world heavyweight boxing champion in Joshua, who is five inches taller than Paul and holds a significant weight advantage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pair of former UFC stars will clash in a boxing match on the undercard of the upcoming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":["post-299594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}