A war is about to begin in the welterweight division.
In the main event of GLORY 16 DENVER, the GLORY Welterweight Championship Title will be on the line for the first time. Contesting it are Karapet Karapetyan (86-11-1, 28 KO’s) and Marc De Bonte (43-9-2, 4 KO’s), two of the division’s most technical fighters.
De Bonte was awarded the shot when he missed out on the GLORY 13 TOKYO welterweight tournament due to injury. He hasn’t fought since GLORY 6 ISTANBUL in April last year and he is very keen to make up for lost time.
“I wasn’t able to fight in the tournament because I was injured, but GLORY promised me a title fight when I was ranked #2 so now here I am,” he says.
“At the moment I am sitting at #6 in the division but that’s only because I haven’t been active while the other guys have. It makes me a bit annoyed actually, I see fighters above me that I know I can beat.”
The division’s #1 is Nieky Holzken (84-11, 44 KO’s), sidelined by a shoulder injury shortly after he won the GLORY 13 TOKYO tournament in December by dominating Karapetyan then stopping Canada’s ‘Bazooka’ Joe Valtellini (11-2, 10 KO’s) in the third round.
Valtellini now sits at #2 in the ranks and both he and Holzken are in line to face the winner of this weekend’s title bout. The top end of the welterweight division is about to become a war zone; De Bonte can’t wait.
“Holzken isn’t the absolute #1. He hasn’t fought me yet. He’s actually declined to fight me a couple of times, even before GLORY. Maybe it’s not Holzken, it might be his management. He beat Karapetyan in 2010 for a world title,” says De Bonte.
“I was up for that fight but they went with Karapetyan, said he was a better opponent. Three months later I beat Karapetyan on points so I came back and said now we have to fight. It never happened.
“I have beat a lot of opponents that he has beaten, I deliberately challenged them all so that I got in position to challenge him. But the fight never happened and so I don’t think he can be called the real #1 right now, until he fights me.
“Valtellini is good but inexperienced. And I don’t think he’s really fought any top guys,” he adds.
“Murat Direkci was overweight and old, fighting one weigh class higher than usual, and Karim Ghajii was like 32, no longer in his prime. So when he faced a guy in his prime like Holzken, it looked completely different.”
De Bonte sees Holzken and Karapetyan as main challenges in the division. He thinks his own fight with Karapetyan this weekend will look different to the one Holzken had with him in December, acknowledging that Holzken has more stopping power.
“Holzken has bigger knockout power than me. That gave him the advantage, he caught Karapet early in the fight and took the power out of him. It can be hard to recover from that,” he says.
“I think our fight will be more technical. I have the power advantage over Karapetyan but I don’t think he is a guy who gets knocked out. Holzken has a big left hook but Karapetyan was able to get up and carry on, you don’t see that often.
“He’s got really good cardio, he is really tough and he keeps you busy for every minute of every round. He’s very good at using his reach and his range, if you look what he did to Kyshenko. He had him exactly where he wanted.
“Kyshenko talked too much before that fight, I saw this interview where he was talking about how he came here to be champion of this weight class and he was better than everyone. He had a pretty big mouth. I was training with Karapetyan for that fight. I told him to kick his ass.
“Me and Karapetyan train a lot together in Holland actually, a few times a week usually. We’re friends but this is a fight and afterwards we will be friends again.”
GLORY 16 DENVER takes place Saturday May 3 in Denver, Colorado and airs LIVE across the US on SPIKE TV.
