Promoter Bob Arum is confident his Top Rank matchmakers can rebuild heavyweight Jared Anderson to bring him back after suffering a fifth-round knockout of Martin Bakole on August 3rd.
Can the highest rank rebuild their crafted warrior?
It will take time to rebuild Anderson, as his loss to Bakole was brutal. It showed that his punch resistance is not at the level it should be for him to be a high level fighter.
Top Rank was grooming Jared to become America’s #1 heavyweight to turn him into a star. They watched him closely and took no chances after former IBF heavyweight champion Charles Martin hurt him in 2023, and journeyman Jerry Forrest did the same in 2022.
Arum says it was not Top Rank’s choice to match the 24-year-old Anderson (17-1, 15 KOs) against the powerful 6’6″ Bakole (21-1, 16 KOs) for the Riyadh Season Card at BMO Stadium last August. His Excellency Turki Alalshikh approached Anderson and offered him the fight against Bakole, and he agreed to take it.
The highly-ranked Bakole destroyed Anderson immediately, falling three times in a fifth-round knockout loss. It wasn’t terribly competitive as Bakole had too much power for Anderson, who was knocked down in the first round after being stunned by an uppercut, and twice more in the fifth.
“It was the dumbest fight Jared could have taken,” Bob Arum said Fight Freaks Unitetalking about Jared Anderson choosing to face Martin Bakole on August 3rd.
“He (Jared) never fought a guy like that, so the fact that he was taken apart and knocked out was not surprising. So, don’t put it on my matches. We were against that fight. But again, when they wave money at these kids, they insist on taking it,” Arum said.
It is unclear how much money Turki Alalshikh paid Anderson to take the fight with Bakole, but it may have been worth it to him if it was substantial. The way Anderson looked in his fights against Martin and Forrest, he was going to be found out sooner or later anyway. Those fights showed that Anderson doesn’t have the punch resistance to take hard punches at the professional level.
In Anderson’s recent match against Ryad Merhy on April 13, he looked timid, retreating when attacked and fighting much like a bigger version of Shakur Stevenson. The way Anderson reacted when Merhy pushed him had the look of a fighter who had a weak chin he was protecting.
Is Anderson worth saving?
It may not be possible for Top Rank to rebuild Jared Anderson because he was flawed from the start, and they cannot false star based on matching him against craftsmen and older washed up fighters.
Some would argue this is what Top Rank was doing Edgar Berlanga before he started to struggle when they advanced him by matching him against C-level fighters instead of the D-level guys. Creating pseudo-stars to sell to the public doesn’t work if they can’t even handle B-level opposition.
Some fighters can be turned into minor stars with poor matchups. Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis is a perfect example of that. He fought exclusively marginal opposition his entire career, yet he became a PPV attraction. That’s what’s wrong with boxing. Promoters create fake stars, sell their mismatches to the public and get poor products.
Anderson will likely never rise above the level of an undercard fighter, and he can’t win a world title or challenge for one. With young heavyweights like Daniel Dubois around, Anderson can’t wait to see off the current crop of aging fighters, Oleksandr Usyk, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, to capture a belt.
