When Rico Verhoeven vacated his GLORY heavyweight title and left the kickboxing promotion in free agency, he didn\u2019t have to wait long for the offers to start piling up.<\/p>\n
Going undefeated for over a decade with a multitude of title defenses immediately made Verhoeven a hot commodity, which is why the UFC openly pursued him after he expressed an interest in possibly transitioning to MMA. Verhoeven has spent years training alongside UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall so it was easy to see why the UFC wanted to retain his services.<\/p>\n
But ultimately, Verhoeven passed on the UFC\u2019s offer and instead he opted for a move into boxing where he was first in talks for a fight against Anthony Joshua before eventually inking a deal to take on Oleksandr Usyk, who is the No. 1 heavyweight in the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been one hell of a ride, I can tell you that,\u201d Verhoeven told MMA Fighting. \u201cI really felt like my GLORY contract was coming to an end and I was like we did it all. Kickboxing, it was just played out. From there on, we just started looking around and seeing what other opportunities were there. We were looking at UFC, we were looking at a big crossover in boxing and both options were on the table. The boxing opportunity looked more interesting so that\u2019s the road we took.\u201d<\/p>\n
Verhoeven was excited about potentially facing Joshua but the British heavyweight endured a personal tragedy when he was involved in a car accident in Nigeria where two of his friends were killed.<\/p>\n
That obviously nixed Joshua coming back any time soon and Verhoeven decided to pivot to a new opponent when he pitched the idea for the Usyk fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in Spain for training camp for that specific fight,\u201d Verhoeven explained. \u201cI just continued camp, came back to the gym, discussed with the team like \u2018yo guys, this is the update, what can we do?\u2019 Maybe we could fight somebody else? But who? Who do we want to fight? I don\u2019t know and then my trainer Peter Fury said \u2018what about Oleksandr Usyk?\u2019 Yeah, why not? I think it\u2019s a great idea. It makes sense. Undisputed kickboxer against undisputed boxer. I think there\u2019s a story there. So we discussed it, we loved the idea and I said let me talk to them, present it and let them know I have an idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just hear \u2018I love it.\u2019 Yes! Let me talk to Usyk and let\u2019s go from there. I think a week and a half goes by, calls me back, \u2018I talked to him, he said he\u2019s down for it, he loves it as well.\u2019 What? OK, let\u2019s go! The rest is history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ranked at the top of the heavyweight division, Usyk holds a perfect 24-0 record with notable wins over Joshua, Daniel Dubois and Tyson Fury. Despite giving up size to virtually every opponent he faces, Usyk\u2019s technical skill has made him one of the toughest matchups in the entire sport of boxing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a dauting task to face the best heavyweight in the sport in only your second professional boxing match (his first came with a knockout win back in 2014) but Verhoeven was up for the challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love it,\u201d Verhoeven said. \u201cThe bigger the challenge, the better. For me, I don\u2019t feel like I have to defend myself. The thing is people do not know the story. They don\u2019t know who I am. They don\u2019t know my back story. I\u2019ve been with the Fury\u2019s for over 15 years already. How could they know? It is always so easy because everything and everyone gets put into boxes. My box is the kickboxing box. Rico, that\u2019s your box. You\u2019ve been a champion, you did that amazing but stay in that box. Why? I like to think outside of the box.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to box. I like MMA. I like acting. I like to try stuff. Sometimes you try something and you\u2019re like nah, that wasn\u2019t for me. But at least I tried. With this, I\u2019ve been boxing for such a long time. For me, it just made sense and then fighting right away for the WBC world championship, makes it even bigger and even better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because he was so dominant during his kickboxing career, Verhoeven was almost always a massive favorite in most of his fights, especially in the last few years he spent competing in GLORY.<\/p>\n
For the first time in a long while, the 37-year-old fighter is now a decided underdog going up against Usyk but he actually loves that role.<\/p>\n
Verhoeven strangely loves that he\u2019s being counted out already as if he has no chance to pull off the upset.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe target has been on my back as long as I can remember,\u201d Verhoeven said. \u201cThe target is not on my back this time. I can cause for an upset. I can cause for a surprise.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to bring something to the table that he hasn\u2019t seen before. I\u2019m going to move and I\u2019m going to do things and I\u2019m going to attack in a certain way that boxers just simply don\u2019t do.\u201d<\/p>\n
As far as the future goes, Verhoeven isn\u2019t thinking past Saturday when he faces Usyk in Egypt but he still sees a lot of opportunities awaiting him but becoming a champion in only his second boxing match is all he can think about right now.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m jumping into this and I\u2019m giving it everything that I have got,\u201d Verhoeven said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be one hell of a fight. I\u2019m ready to shock the world. I think it\u2019s time to find out who is the baddest man on the planet. So after I beat Oleksandr Usyk, let\u2019s see who\u2019s next. Because I\u2019m ready to find out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Rico Verhoeven vacated his GLORY heavyweight title and left the kickboxing promotion in free agency, he didn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,802,1920,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-687442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687442","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=687442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}