{"id":647460,"date":"2026-06-19T16:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T16:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/647460\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T16:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T16:44:08","slug":"shakur-stevenson-names-the-fighter-who-can-beat-naoya-inoue-hes-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/647460\/","title":{"rendered":"Shakur Stevenson names the fighter who can beat Naoya Inoue: “He’s the truth”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shakur Stevenson<\/a> has named the most likely fighter to defeat Naoya Inoue<\/a>, who remains unbeaten after having become a two-division undisputed champion.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Monster\u2019 unified all four major belts at 118lbs before moving up to super-bantamweight, where he has made seven straight defences of his undisputed crown.<\/p>\n

His most recent outing, against three-weight world champion Junto Nakatani, resulted in a unanimous decision victory at a sold-out Tokyo Dome<\/a> last month.<\/p>\n

Many would therefore regard Inoue as the sport\u2019s No.1 pound-for-pound fighter, with the Japanese star having also won world titles at flyweight and super-flyweight.<\/p>\n

At 33 years old, though, it is difficult to predict how much longer he will remain at the elite level, especially if his next assignment happens to be against Jesse \u2018Bam\u2019 Rodriguez.<\/p>\n

The 26-year-old American became a three-division world champion last week, dethroning Antonio Vargas with a sixth-round stoppage<\/a> at 118lbs.<\/p>\n

As the newly-crowned WBA bantamweight champion, there is now talk of him either unifying the division \u2013 perhaps against WBO titlist Christian Medina \u2013 or moving up to 122lbs in preparation for the potential Inoue showdown next year.<\/p>\n

Either way, Stevenson has told The Agnew Podcast<\/a> that he believes Rodriguez stands the best chance at toppling Inoue.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s the truth. If anybody can do it \u2013 with them type of skills, I think \u2018Bam\u2019 can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevenson went on to admit that, in the amateurs, he was introduced to the fight of his life against Rodriguez\u2019s last opponent.<\/p>\n

In the end, he edged a split decision against Vargas, who subsequently competed at the 2016 Olympics and showed, even against \u2018Bam\u2019, that he is capable of posing problems to elite fighters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shakur Stevenson has named the most likely fighter to defeat Naoya Inoue, who remains unbeaten after having become…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-647460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647460","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=647460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}