{"id":507705,"date":"2026-04-01T20:49:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T20:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/507705\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T20:49:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T20:49:10","slug":"tony-yoka-and-the-curse-of-being-the-poster-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/507705\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Yoka and the curse of being the poster boy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 10pt;\">It then got worse the following year when Yoka lost again, not once but twice. His first loss that year came against his countryman Carlos Takam, who beat him by 10-round split decision, while the second was inflicted by Belgium\u2019s Ryad Merhy, who also edged him on a split. These, admittedly, were both close fights and close decisions, but still Yoka, given his credentials and early hype, should have been beating men like Takam and Merhy, many felt.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It then got worse the following year when Yoka lost again, not once but twice. His first loss&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,16174,101,20710,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-507705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-lawrence-okolie","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tony-yoka","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}