Teofimo Lopez returns in a world title opportunity against Rolly Romero on August 22, and with the fighters having a personal relationship with one another over the years, Teofimo Lopez Sr gets asked about what it\u2019s like that they\u2019ll now be heading into combat with a family friend. Teofimo Sr, however was more preoccupied with other ideas.<\/p>\n
Teofimo Sr on their relationship with Rolly, which quickly spirals into explaining away his son\u2019s loss to Shakur Stevenson<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a time where Rolly said he would never fight us but, you know, nobody wants to fight Rolly so we stepped in for a world title after a loss, a bad loss that my son wasn\u2019t even that fight. It was a horrible fight, it was more mental, and it had a lot to do with the way they don\u2019t give my son credit for all the things that he has done. Not putting him in the P4P list, that you could say he was two-time undisputed\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cThat hurts a boxer, mentally. My son is like that, he takes that personal. And he just gave the fight to Shakur. He didn\u2019t even slip, he didn\u2019t do the things he does in boxing. You heard me, man. I was going crazy, I couldn\u2019t believe what he was doing. He was fighting him to the right the whole night, stepping out and getting hit with that jab all night, and that\u2019s not my son. That was a gift.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut this is not a race, man. This is a marathon and let\u2019s see what happens five years from now. Let\u2019s see who\u2019s up top.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s good for Shakur, but at least we know how to lose. I feel bad for Shakur when he loses, and he\u2019s a boring fighter, nobody going to see him, and we\u2019re going to the top. Let\u2019s see who\u2019s up on top five years from now. We\u2019re going for a real title right now, we\u2019re fighting the champion. We\u2019re not fighting for a vacant belt like Shakur does. He got two vacant belts.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s only won two world titles with real champions. So this will be our third title fight, for three divisions with a world champion. First was Loma, Josh Taylor, and now it\u2019s going to be Rolly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting back to the actual question about his relationship with Rolly<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, in the game of boxing there\u2019s no friends. When the time\u2019s up, everybody wants to know who\u2019s best. I want my son to fight the best and Rolly beat Ryan, so it\u2019s time for us to step up and start what we started. This was our dream since our son was little and I knew he was going to make it to the top.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Rolly\u2019s sparring with Teofimo<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son got the best of Rolly in that sparring, and then they worked a couple of more sparrings. But that was about like seven years ago, so they was really young\u2026It was a long time ago, so they\u2019re different fighters now, they\u2019re more experienced. Let the best man win.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Teofimo Lopez returns in a world title opportunity against Rolly Romero on August 22, and with the fighters…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,711,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-795425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}