Light heavyweight world titleholder Artur Beterbiev’s defense against Joe Smith Jr. will take place on Dec. 15 at Madison Square Garden in New York, their promoters told ESPN.
The fight will take place on the undercard of unified middleweight world champion Canelo Alvarez’s rise in weight to challenge secondary super middleweight titlist Rocky Fielding in the first fight of the record five-year, 11-fight, $365 million deal Alvarez signed last month with sports streaming service DAZN.
Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn, who has his own deal with DAZN to put on monthly fights, co-promotes Beterbiev and has signed Smith to a three-fight co-promotional deal with Joe DeGuardia of Star Boxing. Both promoters told ESPN that the fight will take place on the Alvarez card.
Hearn promotes Fielding and has some slots on the Dec. 15 show that belongs to Alvarez promoter Golden Boy.
Beterbiev (13-0, 13 KOs), 33, a Russian native fighting out of Montreal, made his first title defense Oct. 6 in Chicago on Hearn’s first United States-based DAZN card and knocked out England’s then-undefeated Callum Johnson, the mandatory challenger, in the fourth round of an action-packed shootout in which Beterbiev survived a second-round knockdown.
Smith (24-2, 20 KOs), 29, from New York’s Long Island, had an offer to challenge light heavyweight titlist Dmitry Bivol on HBO on Nov. 24 but opted for the fight with Beterbiev instead because it was worth far more money, not to mention that his handlers consider it a more winnable fight.