Featherweights Bryan De Gracia and Eduardo Ramirez will meet in world title elimination bout announced Monday that is a late addition to Saturday’s Brian Castano-Erislandy Lara card at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
De Gracia-Ramirez will open the Showtime-televised tripleheader (9 p.m. ET). The fight was added to the card when the original 12-round opener between junior lightweights Ricardo Nunez and Edner Cherry was canceled. The fight was called off because former world title challenger Cherry collapsed during a training session last week and was in no condition to go through with the fight.
De Gracia (24-1-1, 20 KOs), 25, of Panama, will be fighting outside of his home country for the first time. He has won four fights in a row by knockout since his lone defeat, a 10-round decision to Jorge Sanchez in May 2017.
Ramirez (21-1-3, 8 KOs), 26, a southpaw from Mexico, will come into the fight having won his most recent bout by first-round knockout of journeyman Carlos Jacobo in November in Mexico, but he is 1-1-1 in his last three fights. The loss was a lopsided decision to then-featherweight world titlist Lee Selby in London in December 2017.
Ramirez was supposed to challenge Selby for the title but could not win it because he came in at 128¾ pounds, well over the 126-pound featherweight limit.
De Gracia and Ramirez will vie for the opportunity to become the mandatory challenger for secondary featherweight titlist Xu Can (16-2, 2 KOs), 24, of China, who won a unanimous decision to take the belt from Jesus Rojas on Jan. 26 in Houston.
In the main event, secondary junior middleweight world titlist Castano (15-0, 11 KOs), 29, of Argentina, will make his second defense against former world titleholder Lara. The fight will be the first for the southpaw Lara (25-3-2, 14 KOs), 35, a Cuban defector living in Houston, since losing a split decision and his title Jarrett Hurd in their unification fight that was the 2018 fight of the year.
In the co-feature, Cuban heavyweight contender Luis “King Kong” Ortiz (30-1, 26 KOs), a 39-year-old southpaw fighting out of Miami, will face Christian Hammer (24-5, 14 KOs), 31, a Romania native fighting out of Germany, in a 10-round bout.