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Nico Ali Walsh is confident of a bright future in the sport.
However, he didn’t feel good about advancing that far without first revisiting his past.
The lone fight to go the distance in the young career of Ali Walsh saw the 22-year-old middleweight struggle at times in a four-round, majority decision win over Reyes Sanchez. The fight took place last December 11 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, coming at the end of a troubling training camp that resulted in immediate changes within his team soon after that night.
Two knockouts have since followed as he enters his third fight of 2022. It comes in the form of a rematch with Sanchez (7-2, 3KOs), taking place this Saturday at Pechanga Arena in San Diego.
“Honestly, that was the only bad performance of all my fights,” Ali Walsh told BoxingScene.com. “Most of the time, people who win with a bad performance just chalk it up to winning and never giving the guy another shot. Me going back and righting that wrong is the best way to go about things.
“That whole camp, that whole period was really bad. There were a lot of things going on in that camp. I kept things afloat on heart and instinct.”
It was by design that the rematch takes place at Pechanga Arena, once known as San Diego Sports Arena which hosted the first leg of the Muhammad Ali-Ken Norton trilogy. Their 1973 meeting saw Norton break the jaw of Ali—the late, legendary grandfather of Ali Walsh—en route to an upset win. Ali would go on to twice avenge the defeat, though his Hall of Fame career ended with an 0-1 mark in San Diego.
Nearly 50 years, there comes the chance for the third-generation boxer to exorcise two demons in one night.
“I’m fighting in the same arena that my grandfather had his jaw broken and lost to Ken Norton that night,” noted Ali Walsh, whose young career has paid homage at every turn to the former three-time heavyweight champion. “For me, it’s a chance to break that curse of the bad experience my grandfather had and me fighting the one guy I couldn’t knock out, all in the same place.”
There is also, of course, the part where Ali Walsh gets to prove he’s in this for the long haul.
Having recently celebrated his one-year anniversary in the pro ranks, the rising middleweight has thrived under exceedingly high pressure. All of his fights to date have aired on an ESPN platform, with this weekend’s contest opening an ESPN-televised tripleheader.
Ali Walsh returned barely six weeks after the points win over Sanchez—who was 6-0 at the time—with a second-round knockout of Jeremiah Yaeger this past January. That fight was followed by a first-round knockout of Alejandro Ibarra on April 30 in Las Vegas. The expectation is to extend the knockout streak and upward trajectory in his continued improvement.
“The fight with Sanchez was in December. The next fight was in January. The difference in those two fights were crazy,” pointed out Ali Walsh. “The difference between December and April was insane. Needless to say, you will see the major difference between then and in this fight.”
Headlining the show, two-division and reigning WBO featherweight titlist Emanuel Navarrete (35-1, 29KOs) defends against Mexicali’s Eduardo Baez (21-2-2, 7KOs).
Jake Donovan is a senior writer for BoxingScene.com. Twitter: @JakeNDaBox