Teofimo Lopez rejected the final offer from his promoters at Top Rank to defend his title against Subriel Matias on March 15 on ESPN PPV in Las Vegas.
According to Keith Idec, Top Rank’s offer to WBO welterweight champion Teofimo (21-1, 13 KOs) for the match against former IBF 140-lb belt Matias (21-2, 21 KOs) was over the his “minimum contract.” Teo remains intractable, his worst enemy, since his career goes down.
It’s unclear what kind of money Lopez, 27, was expecting for the Matias fight, but whatever it was, Top Rank wasn’t going to offer it. It would have been a risk for Teo because he has not done well in the last four years. Teo sounded and looked like a complete case from 2021.
Lopez, a native of Brooklyn, New York, has ALWAYS struggled against pressure fighters throughout his nine-year pro career, and he could have fallen against the heavyweight Matias.
Subriel’s power would have been 100% pure hell for Teofimo, and he could have mentally crumbled as he did in his 12-round split decision loss to George Kambosos Jr. in 2021.
Is Lopez’s asking price too high?
“Teofimo Lopez turned down Top Rank’s final offer, ‘well above his contract minimum,’ according to what he told me, ahead of a deadline late last night for a WBO title fight in 140 pounds vs. Subriel Matias. Lopez and Matias would fight in an ESPN PPV main event on March 15 in Las Vegas,” Keith Idec said on X.
Top Rank was supposed to be upset by Lopez’s recent fight against reporter Steve Claggett (39-8-2, 22 KOs) last year on June 29. Teofimo absorbed a lot of punishment from Claggett, ending up with a very swollen face in the process of winning a tougher-than-expected 12-round unanimous decision.
It is believed that Top Rank had fed Teo opponent Claggett as a confidence booster after his controversial win over Jamaine Ortiz in their previous fight on February 8 last year.
Many boxing fans believe that the judges gave Teofimo a gift decision in that fight, and feel that Jamaine was robbed. I watched the fight and it had Ortiz winning 9-3, and it wasn’t even remotely close. He dominated Lopez even more than Kambosos had.
Some believe that Teofimo’s career highlight, a narrow 12-round majority decision over Vasily Lomachenko in November 2020, ruined him as a fighter, leaving him a struggling fighter, unable to fight at the levels which he had shown before. Lomachenko did something to Teo, and he’s been mediocre ever since. What did Loma do to him in that fight to turn him into what he has become?
