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Patrick Teixeira has a new fight date after watching the past two fall through for reasons well beyond his control.
The former WBO junior middleweight titlist has been added to the already announced April 9 Golden Boy Promotions show at Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas. Teixeira will face New Jersey’s Glen Tapia in a scheduled ten-round junior middleweight bout as confirmed to BoxingScene.com by Patrick Nascimento, Teixeira’s career-long manager.
BoxingScene.com has confirmed that Teixeira-Tapia will not be part of the main card airing live on DAZN, which is headlined by a scheduled 12-round bout above the lightweight limit between Ryan Garcia (21-0, 18KOs) and Emmanuel Tagoe (32-1, 15KOs). The junior middleweight bout will instead headline the preliminary undercard which will stream on Golden Boy’s YouTube channel preceding the DAZN telecast.
Teixeira (31-2, 22KOs) has not fought since a twelve-round loss to Brian Castano last February 13, which ended his WBO junior middleweight title reign after 14 months though without a successful title defense. The 31-year-old southpaw from Sao Paulo, Brazil was due to next face Russia’s Magomed Kurbanov, only to lose out on two separate fight dates.
The bout was first due to take place last December 11 in Ekaterinburg, Russia, with both boxers making weight. Kurbanov complained of feeling ill of fever-like symptoms after the weigh-in, spending the rest of the day and evening in isolation. His fever accelerated to the point of having to withdraw the morning of the fight.
Efforts to reschedule the fight for March 26 proved futile upon Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The war prompted all four major sanctioning bodies—including the WBO, whose regional title was at stake—to withdraw its approval of any fights taking place in Russia during such time, prompting event handlers to cancel the show as a whole.
Nascimento and Golden Boy have since worked nonstop to secure a fight date with Teixeira for the sake of not allowing two consecutive training camps to go to waste. Such an approach is understandable for the sake of the fighter, though his latest opponent is not well-received by the general public.
Tapia (24-5, 16KOs) will enter on the heels of a first-round knockout of Thailand’s Narong Bunchan last September in Dubai. The win—which took place at super middleweight— was the first for Tapia since March 2015. Wedged in between that six-year gap are four damaging defeats, including a sixth-round stoppage at the hands of Gabriel Rosado in October 2017, his last fight to have taken place in the U.S.
A medical suspension was in place following the loss to Rosado—his third inside the distance over that four-fight stretch—but was lifted on July 12, 2018 according to official records obtained by BoxingScene.com. Four of the five defeats suffered by Tapia occurred inside the distance. The lone exception was a lopsided ten-round decision to Ireland’s Jason Quigley in March 2017.
Teixeira claimed an interim version of the WBO junior middleweight title following a career-best, twelve-round points win over Carlos Adames in November 2019. An upgrade to full title status was granted on December 5, 2019, on Teixeira’s 29th birthday and during the annual WBO convention upon confirmation that Jaime Munguia (39-0, 31KOs) officialy vacated his title to instead campaign at middleweight.
Jake Donovan is a senior writer for BoxingScene.com. Twitter: @JakeNDaBox