Light heavyweight Seanie Monaghan (18-0, 11 KOs) will fight Anthony Caputo-Smith (14-1, 10 KOs) this Saturday night at the Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas in a contest scheduled for 10 rounds.
The Irish-American, who signed with Top Rank Promotions in the summer, will make his first appearance on HBO when he appears on the first televised fight of the pay-per-view telecast headlined by the Juan Manuel Márquez vs. Timothy Bradley fight.
“All packed up and ready for JFK in the morning, Vegas better be ready for Team Monaghan!” tweeted the 32-year-old on Monday night ahead of leaving for Sin City.
The Irish Voice caught up with Monaghan, who is ranked number 10 by the WBA and 11 by the IBF, a few weeks back and he said his camp was going extremely well. The Long Beach, Long Island native was happy with how his weight was coming down, and he said that he had done some hard rounds of sparring with Curtis Stevens, who himself is preparing for his own big fight against middleweight sensation Gennady Golovkin.
Monaghan, who is trained by Jim Higgins, went on to say that he also had some contact work with Joseph Williams and Marcus Browne.
Last week, Monaghan, who was last in action on April 14 when he TKO’ed Dion Stanley in the first round, held a workout for the media at the Mendez Boxing gym in Midtown Manhattan and was in bullish form ahead of his fight. Caputo-Smith has a decent record on paper, but a lot of his wins have come against less than top-tier opposition.
“I have seen a couple of Caputo-Smith’s DVDs. He is going to get hit with something real hard. I am not going to try to knock him out, but he will end up walking into something. He can’t help himself,” Monaghan said.
“He’s a big guy, so when I do hit him with something hard he is going to go down real hard. And make a lot of noise doing it!” he said.
Monaghan, who draws a huge crowd of passionate fans when he fights in New York, went on to tell the press he was surprised at how many of his supporters are heading to the Thomas and Mack Center to support him.
“There are way more Long Beach Irish fans than I thought traveling to Las Vegas for this fight. They are going to drink that place dry. Then eat all their food. That’s a Wynn-Win Seanario, baby!” The HBO PPV card opens with the Monaghan fight at 9 p.m. EST.
In other news, it looks like middleweight Matthew Macklin (29-5, 20 KOs) will take on Willie Nelson (21-1-1) in his next fight. Though nothing was officially confirmed by DiBella Entertainment as the Irish Voice went to press, it is expected that the Irishman from Birmingham will fight Nelson, who is moving up from the light middleweight division, in early December.
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