Zuffa Boxing 12 lands at the Copper Box Arena in London on Saturday, November 7, with an all-British cruiserweight main event that has been a decade in the making. Former WBO cruiserweight champion Chris Billam-Smith (22-2, 14 KOs) meets Tokyo Olympian Chev Clarke (12-2, 9 KOs) over 10 rounds. The card streams on Paramount+ in the United States and Canada and airs on Sky Sports in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The history is the hook. Clarke beat Billam-Smith twice in the amateurs, including the final of the 2016 national elite championships. That result put Clarke on the Great Britain squad and on the road to the Olympics. Billam-Smith went the other way, turning professional on small hall shows and working his way up to British, Commonwealth, European and world titles.
Billam-Smith says the amateur results belong to a different fighter. “Now I’m on the front foot punching short. It’s literally the opposite,” he told Sky Sports. He has also leaned on his record against British opposition, telling the Standard, “Against domestic opponents, I’ve cleaned up over the years.”
Clarke has heard all of it. At the fight week faceoff he said that “even after this when I beat him, I’ll still be overlooked.” In his sit-down with Zuffa Boxing he promised, “It’s going to be a spectacle.”
Both men come in off stoppage wins on the same night. At Zuffa Boxing 7 in Bournemouth in June, Billam-Smith stopped Ryan Rozicki in the seventh round. In the co-main event, Clarke climbed off the canvas twice in the fourth round and stopped Jack Massey in the seventh. That win halted a slide for Clarke, who had dropped consecutive decisions to Leonardo Mosquea and Viddal Riley.
There is a bigger prize behind this one. Zuffa Boxing cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia is the name Billam-Smith keeps coming back to. “It’s a fight that makes sense with us both being at Zuffa,” he told the BBC. Billam-Smith enters as the betting favorite. Clarke enters with two wins over him that no oddsmaker can take away.
The co-main event is a 10-round middleweight fight between Denzel Bentley (22-3-1, 18 KOs) and Shane Mosley Jr. (23-5, 15 KOs). Bentley makes his Zuffa Boxing debut days after being stripped of the WBO middleweight title for declining a mandatory defense against Yoenli Hernandez. Mosley Jr., the son of the Hall of Famer, gets a former champion on his home soil.
The rest of the main card has unbeaten American heavyweight Da’Mazion Vanhouter (13-0, 10 KOs) against Ivan Balaz (9-1, 7 KOs) over eight rounds, Scottish middleweight Sam Hickey (6-0, 3 KOs) against Amaury Massenaux over eight, Kayla Allen (1-0, 1 KO) against Julia Igel (5-2, 4 KOs) over six at super lightweight, and cruiserweight prospect Lucas Roehrig (9-0, 5 KOs) against Connal McDonald (5-1, 1 KO) over eight.
The prelims are led by a real fight. Zach Parker (26-2, 18 KOs) makes his Zuffa debut against unbeaten southpaw Umar Dzambekov (14-0, 10 KOs) in a 10-round light heavyweight bout. Featherweight Masood Abdullah (13-1) faces Adan Palma over eight rounds, and Vinnie Kemp meets Liam McElhinney in a four-round middleweight opener.
Prelims begin at 12 p.m. ET, 5 p.m. in London. The main card follows at 2 p.m. ET, with main event ring walks expected around 5 p.m. ET. The full bout sheet is posted on the official Zuffa Boxing 12 fight card.
