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Key events
Tokyo Dome’s primary tenants are the Yomiuri Giants of Nippon Professional Baseball, who have played their home games there since it opened in 1988. The Giants hosted the Hanshin Tigers yesterday, giving organizers approximately 13 hours to change the building for today’s boxing card. Here’s a fun time-lapse video showing the conversion.
Some early drama in the penultimate prelim before tonight’s main event. WBA world bantamweight champion Takuma Inoue (19-1, 5 KOs), Naoya’s younger brother, has was knocked down in the first round against former world title challenger Sho Ishida (34-3, 17 KOs) in their scheduled 12-round bout. A perfectly placed left from Ishida sends Inoue to the canvas, but he easily beats the counter and doesn’t look hurt.
Seigo Yuri Akui just retained his WBA flyweight title with a unanimous decision over Taku Kuwahara. The three ringside judges gave the scores 117-111 (twice) and 118-110 in a rematch of their 2021 Japan title fight, which Akui won by TKO in the 10th round.
Akui really hit the gas during the second half of the bout, which was contested at a lively pace. A promising start to a stacked TV undercard.
Preamble
Hello and welcome to the Tokyo Dome for tonight’s blockbuster between Naoya ‘Monster’ Inoue and Mexican challenger Luis Nery. A sellout crowd of around 55,000 is expected as boxing returns to the Big Egg for the first time since February 1990 when a 42-1 underdog named James “Buster” Douglas knocked out the then undefeated heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in one of the great upsets in all of sports.
Inoue (26-0, 23 KOs) is no Tyson. He is even better, both in terms of performance and appetite for destruction. Since winning his first world championship at 108lbs in his sixth pro fight in April 2014, the 31-year-old knockout merchant from Kanagawa Prefecture has added belts at 115lbs, 118lbs and 122lbs while amassing a 21-0 record in world title fights. including 19 coming in the distance. Most recently, Inoue became the undisputed champion in two different weight classes in a span of 378 days, knocking out Paul Butler in December 2022 to consolidate all four bantamweight titles, then stopping previously undefeated Stephen Fulton in his junior featherweight debut and fully unified the 122lbs belts with a stoppage of Marlon Tapales in December. He is only the second Japanese man to win titles in four different weight classes after the great Kazuto Yoka.
Neri (35-1, 27 KOs) is a former two-division world champion who held the WBC bantamweight and junior featherweight titles. The 29-year-old southpaw from Tijuana lost his bantamweight strap after missing weight by quite a bit for his 2018 rematch against Shinsuke Yamanaka, earning him an indefinite ban in Japan which was canceled earlier this year. After becoming a two-division champion with a unanimous decision in 2020 over Aaron Alameda, he suffered his first and only professional loss the following year with a seventh-round knockout in a title unification fight with Brandon Figueroa. He has since bounced back nicely with four straight wins – including a spectacular 11th-round knockout of Azat Hovhannesyan last February in one of the best performances of the year – but he will leave tonight as a 10-1 underdog on merit.
We’ve got three world title fights on the televised undercard before tonight’s main event, which is set to start around 8:30pm local time (7:30am EDT/12:30pm BST). Lots more to come between now and then!
Brian will be here soon. Meanwhile here’s Thomas Hauser’s flashback in Canelo Álvarez’s defeat of Jaime Munguía over the weekend.
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