Natasha Jonas is possibly the most extraordinary boxer in Britain at the moment.
This Saturday in Manchester, she will fight for her third version of the world light-middleweight title in a consecutive sequence of fights that is remarkable. Some in the boxing game call it super-welter, by the way.
Jonas jumped up in weight over 20 pounds, leaping over three full divisions to win the WBO version of the title in February; seven months later she added the WBC version and on Saturday she fights Marie Eve Dicaire for the IBF version.
Back in 2012, Jonas lost at the London Olympics to Katie Taylor and, four years later, she watched the Rio Olympics from her home in Liverpool; she had retired and had a child. Her boxing days and nights were over.
She is now 38, she returned to the ring in 2017, got to six and zero and then was stopped. It looked like any boxing dreams were finished for good. However, Jonas continued to believe and fight. In 2020 she fought a draw with Terri Harper for the WBC super-featherweight title and the following year lost a narrow points decision to Katie Taylor for all four of the lightweight world titles.
At the end of last year, Jonas joined with Boxxer’s Ben Shalom, and they found a plan, they forged a bond and Shalom delivered. It was a bold plan, by the way.
“There were no gaps or opportunities at the lower weights – she had to go up. I asked her, she said, ‘Yes,’ and this crazy journey started,” insisted Shalom. In 2020, Jonas was under 130 pounds for her draw with Harper and in February, she could have weighed as heavy as 154 pounds when she won her first title.
On Saturday, Jonas will fight Canada’s Eve Marie Dicaire. It is a real test. Dicaire is a much bigger and far more dangerous and experienced opponent than the two women Jonas beat this year on her title run. Jonas knows it is a hard fight and she also knows that a win will lead to a super fight and a record payday.
Taylor is looking for an opponent for a fight in front of 80,000 at Croke Park in Dublin next year; Claressa Shields insists that she can still make the light-middle limit and wants to fight in Britain again. And, on Saturday night in Abu Dhabi, Northampton’s Chantelle Cameron fought for all four of the light-welterweight belts and easily beat Jessica McCaskill. Taylor, Shields and Cameron are all big-money options. Also, Harper is now the WBA light-middle champion and that rematch for all four belts would do great business. First, however, Jonas needs to beat Dicaire.
Also on Saturday night, in a fight that is close to invisible, Battersea’s British middleweight champion, Denzel Bentley, meets unbeaten Kazakh, Zhanibek Alimkhanuly, for the WBO middleweight title at the Palms in Las Vegas. It is one of the boldest world title fights in recent years; Alimkhanuly is an avoided fighter, a world amateur champion and has devastating power.
However, Bentley is fearless and, having started his career in easy fights, is now deep into a long and hard sequence that started under Covid restrictions in 2020; he had two fights with the current British super-middleweight champion, Mark Heffron, to win the British title at middleweight, was stopped by Felix Cash to lose his British title, won a split against Linus Udofia to regain the title and defended in a shoot-out with Marcus Morrison in September.
Bentley starts as an underdog, sure, but he fought as an amateur for the Fisher club in southeast London and back in 1986, Lloyd Honeyghan, another Fisher boy, stopped unbeaten and untouchable Donald Curry in Atlantic City to win the unified welterweight title. The Honeyghan win remains the greatest overseas win by a British boxer in a world title fight. “I know what Lloyd did,” said Bentley. “I’m going in there to win the title – I’m not here to make up the numbers.”
The night before Jonas and Bentley are in their very real tests, Sunny Edwards defends his IBF flyweight title for the third time inside a year, when he meets Felix Alvarado in Sheffield. Edwards might just be the best active British world champion. He is considered the top flyweight in the world and the reluctance of his rivals to agree terms to fight him is testimony to his abilities.
Edwards is now unbeaten in 18 fights and has threatened to go up in weight in pursuit of the type of fights that, so far, this year, have been missing from the boxing landscape of the men’s side of the business. Edwards can lead a mini-revolution in the lighter weights. Edwards against Alvarado is the type of precious and dangerous fight that kept the British boxing business going in the Seventies and Eighties. Little Sunny deserves to be a major star.
