Alistair Overeem wants a boxing match, and he has picked both the opponent and the date. The former Strikeforce champion used his Instagram stories to call out Rico Verhoeven, proposing the two heavyweights meet on the December 11 Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua card at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales.
“Stop hiding,” Overeem wrote. “Let’s make history.”
The message followed a separate social media post in which Overeem talked about his interest in moving into boxing, as Guilherme Cruz reported for MMA Fighting. Fury vs. Joshua streams live on Netflix, which would put a Dutch kickboxing grudge match in front of about as large an audience as boxing can offer right now.
Verhoeven already knows what that kind of stage feels like. He made his boxing debut this past May in Egypt against heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk and lost by an 11th-round stoppage that plenty of people considered controversial. That he got to the 11th at all against Usyk, in his first pro boxing fight, says a lot about how seriously he took the switch.
Before that night, Verhoeven had gone more than a decade without a loss in kickboxing, holding the GLORY heavyweight title the whole way. His résumé is the reason Overeem’s name keeps attaching itself to his.
The fight that never happened
These two were supposed to fight in 2021. Overeem withdrew with an injury, and the matchup never got rescheduled. He did return to kickboxing a year later and beat Badr Hari on the scorecards, but that win was later overturned because of a doping violation.
In MMA, Overeem’s late UFC run was better than people tend to remember. Between 2018 and 2021 he won four of his last six fights in the Octagon, every one of them by knockout, including a first-round finish of Sergei Pavlovich. Across his whole UFC tenure he beat former and future champions Fabricio Werdum, Frank Mir, Brock Lesnar, Junior dos Santos and Andrei Arlovski. That’s a list most heavyweights would trade a kidney for.
Nothing in the reporting suggests Verhoeven has answered, and no promoter has attached either man to the Cardiff card. For now this is one fighter’s Instagram story and a date on the calendar.
My take: it’s a funny thing for Overeem to tell Verhoeven to stop hiding when Overeem is the one who pulled out of the 2021 fight, and when his last kickboxing win came off the books over a doping violation. Verhoeven, meanwhile, just spent 10-plus rounds in with Usyk. If anyone has earned the right to be picky about his next boxing opponent, it’s the man who went to Egypt and took that fight. Still, I’d watch it. Two big Dutch strikers who were supposed to settle this five years ago, finally doing it under a stadium roof in Wales, is a better idea than half the undercard fights that get made on purpose. The ball is with Verhoeven, and December 11 isn’t far off.
