O’Shaquie Foster believes Shakur Stevenson’s reported switch to Zuffa Boxing represents a ‘duck move’ after the pair confronted each other in the ring on Saturday night.

Foster, an old sparring partner and friend of Stevenson’s, beat Ray Ford – Shakur’s stablemate – via 12-round decision to retain his WBC junior lightweight title before calling out Stevenson, who was ringside in Houston, Texas.

Foster, 25-3 (12 KOs), claims that Stevenson had agreed to a fight if he could beat Ford. Thus, directly after his majority decision victory was confirmed, Foster invited Stevenson, who most recently competed as a junior welterweight, to join him in the ring.

“I wanted him to know that I wanted him next, that’s why I went straight to where he was sitting,” told Ariel Helwani.

“I told him I was going to do that to his ‘son’ [Ford], I told him now the daddy’s next. I was telling him to get in the ring, to come see. I couldn’t hear what he was saying back, but I told him to get in the ring.

“I saw him taking off his jewellery and raising his hand like he was going to put them in my face and stuff. That’s when I said, ‘We ain’t gonna do none of that.’ Before it even got to being disrespectful, I had to make it known, don’t start being disrespectful. If we have a fight we’re going to have to have another fight.”

It then emerged on Monday that Stevenson was planning to join forces with Zuffa Boxing. In Foster’s mind, that makes it difficult to tempt Stevenson into the ring.

“I really don’t know what’s going to happen if he’s going to go that route,” he said. “We all know that’s a super duck, that’s a duck move. He gave his word and he ain’t standing on it.

“He gave his word: If I beat his ‘son’ [Ford], he’ll give me the opportunity… I just want to fight. In the ring he said, ‘We next’ and I asked him to shake on it, but he didn’t want to shake on it. That told me right there that he wasn’t too serious.”

The spat between the pair dates back to the turn of the decade when Stevenson and Foster sparred “a lot”.

“He’s a two-faced snake,” Foster said of Stevenson. “We were cool back then but when certain stuff transpired we had a little falling out. Then he came back round, trying to be cool, trying to be friends, trying to get me go over there and spar… then his little man [Ford] comes out and says he wants to fight me and he [Stevenson] is behind the scenes telling him he’s going to help him, be his main sparring partner. It was just a bunch of snake stuff…

“He know what happened in that gym… He got run out of that gym. The gym got too hot and that’s part of the reason he ran out of the ring, I was cooking.”

Stevenson and his co-promoter Antonio Leonard have, predictably, claimed that the opposite is true. 

“He can say what he want,” Foster said. “We know what happened… Y’all know a liar when you see one.”