Watching Adonis Stevenson handle Sakio Bika by unanimous decision Saturday in their WBC light-heavyweight title bout in Quebec City, it was difficult to ignore the past and future of Andre Ward.
The East Bay fighter announced Thursday that he?ll be fighting for only the third time since 2011 when he takes on a yet-unidentified opponent June 20 at Oracle Arena in Oakland. It?s a certainty the opponent won?t be anyone approaching the likes of the fearsome Stevenson, and it?s doubtful that the opponent even will be the caliber of Bika, one of the five men Ward has beaten at Oracle.
Stevenson (26-1, 21 knockouts) didn?t become the first man to stop the rugged but unspectacular Bika (31-7-1), but the massive left-hander did put Bika on the canvas twice, the second a clean knockdown with a straight left in the ninth round.
The fight certainly didn?t seem as close as the 116-110, 115-110, 115-111 scorecards, although Bika may have won all of the final three round as he finally got inside to do some damage against his larger opponent.
Stevenson has become one of the gauges for Ward?s future, along with fellow light-heavyweight belt-holder Sergey Kovalev (who keeps calling out Stevenson) and middleweight king Gennady Golovkin. Not surprisingly, however, Ward was mentioned not much, if at all, during Saturday?s telecast on CBS, which is the parent network of Showtime.
Ward has been an HBO fighter and color analyst in the past four years, and thus the tendency of Saturday?s telecast to ignore him ?despite the presence of his longtime trainer Virgil Hunter as one of two commentators alongside blow-by-blow announcer Kevin Harlan.
Hunter was working alongside Paulie Malignaggi, who has become the best TV analyst in the sport since the death of HBO?s Emmanuel Steward, and it took a while for Hunter to get his bearings. But eventually he and Malignaggi managed to obscure bombastic blow-by-blow man Kevin Harlan with excellent teamwork to dissect the reasons Bika?s strategy was perpetually inadequate against Stevenson.
?He?s not gonna win the fight on the outside,? Malignaggi noted, after Hunter had remarked that the 20-foot ring probably was large enough to enable Stevenson to keep Bika at arm?s length.
?It takes a while to solve the Bika problem,? said Hunter, who was confronted with that challenge when Ward solved it in November 2010. That was a title bout that kept Ward active while potential opponents were falling out of Showtime?s 2009-2011 Super Six tournament that made Ward the king of the super-middleweights and a star in the sport.
But since beating Carl Froch in the Super Six final and knocking out light-heavyweight king Chad Dawson the following September, Ward has fought only once, in November 2013, as a contract dispute with promoter Dan Goossen wasn?t resolved until after Goossen died last September.
Stevenson?s performance against Bika wasn?t much more spectacular than Ward?s, though he did one-up Ward with his one-round K.O. of Dawson in 2013.
Ward?s HBO commentary hasn?t been quite as sharp as Hunter?s was Saturday, all the more reason to be eager to see the unbeaten fighter in the ring once more.
Hunter and CBS/Showtime managed to keep Ward out of the conversation Saturday, but he?s one of the most important light heavyweights in the world despite having not fought at 175 as a pro.
We still don?t know what sort of opposition Ward?s new promoter, JayZ, can rustle up, because Ward is the entertainer?s only boxing client for Roc Nation Sports. But whoever it is, the opponent will be tempting to ignore.
Ward has been inactive so long that he has fallen out of The Ring magazine?s top 10 pound-for-pound rankings, where he stood second as of his last bout. But you can bet that the elite light-heavyweights haven?t lost track of him.
