NEW YORK (AP) — Teofimo Lopez delivered some of his best performances against boxers the experts thought would beat him.
Shakur Stevenson is another one of those fighters. Undefeated and sometimes looking untouchable, the southpaw is the favorite Saturday night when he faces Lopez at Madison Square Garden in a bid to win a title in a fourth weight class.
Lopez (22-1, 13 KOs) has been watching Stevenson (24-0, 11 KOs) for years — both were 2016 Olympians who were early in their careers when they fought as pros at MSG for the first time on the same night in 2017 — and knows his opponent is skilled. But the 140-pound champion also knows what he has done when the odds are against him.
“I believe all of it is a gimmick when it comes to Shakur,” Lopez said. “I believe there’s this idea what they want out of Shakur as far as the general public and the boxing community sometimes, and I’ve had many, many analysts that have been boxing or seen boxing for as long as I’ve been born, if not more, and they got it wrong every time. So that’s the part that I love as a fighter, because we get to display and the hands do the rest of the talking.”
Their bout for Lopez’s WBO belt tops another quality “Ring Magazine” card that will stream on DAZN. Both fighters come off victories in previous Saudi-backed promotions, with Lopez beating Arnold Barboza last May in Times Square, a couple months before Stevenson beat William Zepeda at Louis Armstrong Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to defend his lightweight title.
This event goes back to a traditional boxing venue and organizers say MSG will be sold out for the showdown of local fighters, with Lopez from Brooklyn and Stevenson from Newark, New Jersey.
The fighters traded insults about family members at their press conference Thursday and multiple brawls broke out when they weighed in Friday, with Madison Square Garden warning that anyone fighting at one of its events may be “banned for life.”
Stevenson is listed at -325 at the BetMGM Sportsbook, making him more than a 3-to-1 favorite. But Lopez was the underdog when he beat Vasiliy Lomachenko in a 135-pound title bout in 2020, and again when he knocked off then-unbeaten Josh Taylor to win his 140-pound belt in 2023.
Stevenson, while conceding that Lopez is a good fighter, noted that Lomachenko was small for the lightweight division and Taylor, by the time he fought Lopez, had perhaps outgrown junior welterweight.
“I mean, it’s easy to perform when you’re fighting against a little guy, or the other guy is a guy that’s struggling at the weight class in Josh Taylor,” Stevenson said. “So I’m not worried about that. Those guys aren’t me.”
Stevenson is one of boxing’s best defensive fighters, sometimes criticized for making boring fights by being too cautious. He seemed willing to trade more against Zepeda, saying he strayed a bit from the instructions from Terence Crawford, the recently retired great who has been with him in preparation for this fight.
Crawford was the headliner when Lopez and Stevenson fought in undercard bouts at MSG on May 20, 2017. Now they are the main event after Bruce Carrington (16-0, 9 KOs) and Carlos Castro (30-3, 14 KOs) fight for the vacant WBC featherweight championship; and unbeaten Keyshawn Davis (13-0, 9 KOs) faces Jamaine Ortiz (20-2, 10 KOs) in a 140-pound bout.
Lopez edged Ortiz two years ago and acknowledged that he’s gotten up for some fighters more than others.
“It would seem that way for sure, you know what I mean? You go off the records, you go off the looks of what the media has out there, the stakes and all that, but I think it’s just me trying to find my footing in all this,” Lopez said.
He believes he took another step toward that by giving up alcohol and marijuana last year as his New Year’s resolution, after realizing someone who has asthma and stayed away from smoking as an amateur shouldn’t have been doing it as a pro.
So Lopez is feeling better outside the ring and now has the type of fight that has usually brought out his best inside it.
“I believe that Shakur has the skillsets to bring out that version of me for sure and I do believe that Shakur may think, at least in his mind, as far as that goes that he can hang in there with a fighter like myself,” Lopez said. “I think he bit more than he could chew for sure and I can’t wait to display that and show him that when it comes to fight night.”
AP boxing: https://apnews.com/boxing
FILE – Shakur Stevenson, left, throws a punch at Oscar Valdez during the WBC-WBO junior lightweight title boxing bout Saturday, April 30, 2022, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, file)
FILE – Teofimo Lopez, right, punches Scotland’s Josh Taylor during the ninth round of a welterweight title bout, Saturday, June 10, 2023 in New York. Lopez won the fight. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, file)
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Hospitals in Gaza said Israeli strikes killed at least 29 Palestinians Saturday, one of the highest tolls since the October ceasefire aimed at stopping the fighting.
A day after Israel accused Hamas of new ceasefire violations, strikes hit locations throughout Gaza, including lethal ones on an apartment building in Gaza City and a tent camp in Khan Younis, officials at hospitals that received the bodies said. The casualties included two women and six children from two different families. An airstrike also hit a police station in Gaza City, killing at least 14 and wounding others, Shifa Hospital director Mohamed Abu Selmiya said.
The series of strikes also came a day before the Rafah crossing along the border with Egypt is set to open in Gaza’s southernmost city. All of the territory’s border crossings have been closed throughout almost the entire war. Palestinians see Rafah as a lifeline for the tens of thousands in need of treatment outside the territory, where the majority of medical infrastructure has been destroyed.
The crossing’s opening, limited at first, marks the first major step in the second phase of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire. Reopening borders is among the challenging issues on the agenda for the phase now underway, which also include demilitarizing the strip after nearly two decades of Hamas rule and installing a new government to oversee reconstruction.
Still, Saturday’s strikes are a reminder that the death toll in Gaza is still rising even as the ceasefire agreement inches forward.
Nasser Hospital said the strike on the tent camp caused a fire to break out, killing seven, including a father, his three children and three grandchildren. Meanwhile, Shifa Hospital said the Gaza City apartment building strike killed three children, their aunt and grandmother on Saturday morning, while the strike on the police station killed at least 14 — officers, including four policewomen, and inmates held at the station. The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said Palestinian civilians were also killed in the strike.
Hamas called Saturday’s strikes “a renewed flagrant violation” and urged the United States and other mediating countries to push Israel to stop strikes.
Israel’s military, which has struck targets on both sides of the ceasefire’s dividing line, said its attacks since October have been responses to violations of the agreement. It said in a statement that Saturday’s strikes followed what it described as ceasefire violations a day earlier, when the army killed at least four militants emerging from a tunnel in an Israeli-controlled area of Rafah.
Gaza’s Health Ministry has recorded 509 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since the start of the ceasefire on Oct. 10. The ministry, which is part of the Hamas-led government, maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts.
Magdy reported from Cairo and Metz from Jerusalem.
A Palestinian man surveys the damage to an apartment building after an Israeli military strike killed several people in Gaza City Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
A Palestinian man carries the body of Sham Abu Hadaiyd, who was killed in an Israeli strike on a tent in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Mahmoud Al-Atbash mourns the bodies of his two daughters, Zeina and Maryam, who were killed in an Israeli military strike, at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
Relatives carry the bodies of members of the Al-Atbash family, who were killed in an Israeli military strike, at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
Palestinians survey the damage to an apartment building after an Israeli military strike killed several people in Gaza City Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
Palestinians mourn over the body of a person who was killed in an Israeli strike, as they sit on a cart during his funeral outside at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians walk amid buildings destroyed by Israeli air and ground operations in Gaza City, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
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