Joseph ‘JoJo’ Diaz went to Newcastle, England, as one of the heaviest favorites on the BKB 60 card and left with his first bare-knuckle loss. Brian Hyslop dropped the former IBF super featherweight world champion in the opening round on Saturday, survived Diaz’s rally over the next four, and was handed a split decision after a long wait for the scorecards. Bloody Elbow reported that Diaz closed at better than -700.
The knockdown set the terms early. Diaz got up and worked his way back into the fight, and by the middle rounds he was finding his shots. But the bout never settled into anything clean. Hyslop was docked a point for holding, and Diaz lost one of his own for landing punches on the break, which tells you how much of the fight was spent tied up rather than trading in open space. When the cards were finally read, two of the three judges had Hyslop.
None of it came out of nowhere. The two had to be kept apart at Friday’s weigh-ins, and that friction carried straight into the Trigon, BKB’s ring, which is small enough that a fighter willing to grab and smother can drag a far more polished boxer into a brawl. Paulie Malignaggi has complained about exactly this after he was stopped in a BKB title fight in his last outing. Hyslop leaned into it, and it worked.
How Diaz got here
Diaz was a marquee signing for BKB earlier this year, a real world champion choosing bare knuckles at a point when plenty of former titleholders would have kept chasing paydays in gloves. His debut in July went the way everyone expected, a first-round stoppage that made the move look easy. He has also talked about how his longtime coach Freddie Roach reacted to the switch, a story Bloody Elbow covered ahead of this return. The oddsmakers clearly believed the July version of Diaz was the one showing up in Newcastle.
The matchmaking angle got flipped, too. During fight week, Diaz brought up Lee Selby as a possible next opponent. After the decision, it was Hyslop who called out the Welshman in his post-fight interview.
Quick take
I wouldn’t call this a fluke, and I wouldn’t bury Diaz over it either. He got caught early, got up, and spent four rounds trying to solve a man whose plan was to make the ring smaller than it already is. Elite boxing skills rely on space and distance, and the Trigon offers very little of either, so fighters like Hyslop will keep banking on the clinch until someone figures out how to punish it from inside. That’s Diaz’s homework now. And the Selby fight he was angling for on Thursday belongs to the guy who beat him on Saturday.
