After sharing the ring with Shakur Stevenson, Teofimo Lopez believes he knows how to defeat the unbeaten Newark southpaw and has shared that knowledge to future opponents of the newly crowned super-lightweight world champion.
Stevenson became the third-youngest four-division world champion in boxing history when he dethroned Teofimo Lopez and captured the WBO super-lightweight strap with one of the most dominant performances of the year thus far.
Yet, in an interview with Boxing Highs, Lopez explained that he does not think his recent opponent completely believes in himself and denied that he could have been stopped if Stevenson decided to push the pace down the stretch.
“I think that Shakur is a great candidate and a great fighter, yes. Do I think that he believes in himself wholly? No.
“Just hitting me with jabs alone and left-hooks, where I was catching him in the majority of the fight, that doesn’t win you fights. I am kind of flattered that Andre Ward and Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford thought that Shakur could finish me. Nah, nobody can stop me.”
Lopez then went on to reveal that he feels as though the way to overcome the well-schooled Stevenson is by ‘fighting dirty’.
“It is not Shakur’s so-called fault, but in the fight he was stepping on my foot and elbowing me in-between those moments when we were clinching, but that is just what it was.
“He knows how to do one thing and one thing for sure – that is to create enough space to be where he needs to be at defensively. That, I can give him, he is very defensively sound.
“You have just got to make it a dirty fight, for anybody that wants to face him, you have just got to make it real dirty.”
