Australian heavyweight Demsey McKean is looking to bounce back from his lone career loss when he fights Moses Itauma on December 21 at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The bout was added to the blockbuster card added by the rematch between RING Magazine heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk and number one contender Tyson Fury.
The 34-year-old McKean, from Ipswich in Queensland, will return after more than a year on the sidelines following his 12th round stoppage loss to Filip Hrgovic at the O2 Arena in London, England last August.
A nagging hand injury kept him out of the ring for the rest of the year and a planned fight in March or April never happened. Still, the six-foot-six southpaw stayed in the gym.
“I’ve been in the gym pretty much all year,” McKean (22-1, 14 knockouts) told The Ring. “I’ve been sparring, I’ve been in the gym every day, so it’s not like I’m jumping off the couch. We’ve been looking for fights all year and facing setback after setback, which is something I’m not used to, that’s for sure. But now I have a date, which is perfect, and we have a full 10-week training camp to grind into. We are in a very good position at the moment. We have been working on technique and we are 10 weeks out.
Slovak-born Brit Itauma (10-0, 8 KOs) has made an impression since turning pro at the start of last year. The 19-year-old southpaw has an aggressive, explosive style that has dropped all eight of his knockout victims before the end of the second round. With some fans and pundits touting the flashy prospect as the future of the division, McKean will be there to prove them wrong.
“He has talent to burn,” McKean admitted. “He’s a smart southpaw and he’s pretty quick, but he’s also quite young, so he’s going to be immature, inexperienced, and we’re going to look to capitalize on those things.
“But he’s quite good. I think he’s one of the better prospects right now for a heavyweight. He comes with his own assets, but he certainly hasn’t fought anyone in his 10 fights. The 10 fights he had weren’t against anyone of note at all. They were happy to sit there and collect their pay. The majority of them didn’t even throw a punch back. It’s going to be very different against an experienced southpaw who is in top form and who is going to throw some punches back.”
McKean is correct in saying that Itauma’s resume lacks depth. The most notable name on his ledger is faded former fringe contender Mariusz Wach, whom he faced in his last outing in London in July and him twice. The 44-year-old Pole has lost four of his previous six matches dating back four years, although in fairness he has only been stopped once in that time. Still, it’s hard to know how much to read into Itauma’s early win against Wach.
The McKean fight should tell us a lot more about Itauma, who the Queenslander thinks may struggle to find quality sparring for this camp.
“When I was in the UK there was no southpaw sparring,” says McKean, who was based in Essex for a few years. “I think Moses was the only southpaw in the UK and his gym was not too far from the Matchroom Gym when I trained there. I know he sparred with Jordan Thompson for a while before he fought Jai Opetaia and they struggled to get southpaw sparring. That’s when I left too and they had that fight. They asked me to come back for sparring, which wasn’t going to happen.
“There’s no southpaw sparring in the UK so they’ll probably have to fly in some. But here in Australia we have heaps. We have Jai Opetaia, he just fought this week, but once he rests, we’ll probably get some rounds in with him by the end of camp. We have Floyd Masson, Luke Modini, Kris Terzievski from Melbourne, Liam Talivaa, we have another amateur guy who just turned pro and is almost exactly the same as Itauma, he likes to come forward, he is a southpaw and he is six-foot-three. We actually have a lot of south legs in south east Queensland and from Melbourne that we can fly up when we need to. Jackson Murray is another. There are many. We don’t have to look too hard for good quality sparring.”
But the real story of the fight may well come down to which boxer adapts best to their fellow left-hander’s stance.
“Everybody hates southpaws and we all hate each other, I’m pretty sure,” McKean laughed. “This is also a new challenge for me, but as I said, we have 10 weeks to prepare for this. We’ve actually known for quite some time that we’re going to fight Moses, so we’ve also been working quite a lot on southpaw tactics, so at least we had a good lead. It will be a little different if we take the fight on short notice, like four or five weeks, but we have more than enough time to be able to prepare for it.
“I consider myself a 10-round fighter and he’s never gone that distance. He’s been six rounds and that’s about it. With his style, he’s a six-round fighter, and it’s hard to keep it going over 10 rounds.
“We’ll see how the fight plays out, but I’m pretty confident with our game plan.”
