DONEGAL MIDDLEWEIGHT JASON Quigley will headline a Golden Boy card live on ESPN on 18 October, The42 can confirm.
The 27-year-old says he’s ready to put on a boxing clinic at the Fantasy Springs Casino in California after excitably indulging in a brawl on his comeback from injury back in March.
An opponent for Quigley’s Thursday night fight will be announced in the coming weeks, but with the fall-through of his prospective bout with Japanese 160-pound star Ryota Murata last month, the former European amateur champion and World Championships silver medalist is simply rearing to get back in the ring.
And the fact he’ll top a bill on ESPN once more could be of special significance for the boxer whose last main-event slot on the Worldwide Leader resulted in an egregious injury which cost him a year of his career: that night, in March of 2017, one pundit in particular lambasted Quigley’s performance while unaware that he was carrying a broken right hand from the second round onwards.
Teddy Atlas’ role with the network has since been diminished due to a series of brash, on-air outbursts, but he did provide assistant commentary for Portlaoise man TJ Doheny’s world title victory live on ESPN+ last month.
Should the 62-year-old get the call again in October, Quigley intends to right some of last year’s wrongs.
“I hope Teddy Atlas is on board for ESPN as well!” laughs the world-ranked boxer-puncher. “I really do hope that he’s covering this next fight. I’ve nothing to prove to Teddy…but I do at the same time!
“Nah, I don’t feel I need to prove a point to him or anything — not in the slightest — but I kind of want to prove something to him after what he was saying last time, if you know what I mean.
“You never know, we might bump into each other again,” chuckles the Ballybofey man, who politely attempted to set the record straight with Atlas when they crossed paths in Las Vegas two months after the famed trainer dragged him through the mud for eight agonising rounds.
But the funny business ends there: in October, he will mean simply business.
Quigley [14-0, 11KOs] made his return following a year-long absence in Boston three months ago, scything down the previously unstopped Daniel Rosario — but not without a couple of trips to the trenches en route.
The Golden Boy-promoted standout admits that the sheer excitement of throwing proper punches for the first time in so long caused him to abandon his gameplan in at least a couple of rounds; the devil on his shoulder told him to go hell-for-leather and got its way intermittently.
The finish on that occasion was a picture-perfect blend of wildmanship and pugilism, but in two months’ time Quigley intends to rely solely on the latter in order to achieve the required result.
Jason Quigley KO's Daniel Rosario in R6. RIP Liver function. #GBPonESPN pic.twitter.com/QhTYHLDR4h
— caposa (@Grabaka_Hitman) April 1, 2018
“What I’m looking for is improvement,” Quigley says.
Every day that I go into, I try to become a better person, a better fighter — a better everything. And looking at my next fight, that’s exactly what I want to do as well: I want to become a better version of myself than I was in my last fight.
“That’s why I haven’t taken any breaks or gone off for a quiet rest by myself: I’ve kept on it, I’ve kept working, I’ve kept improving on things.
“To be honest, that last fight was a very strange one for me because I think I was more excited about actually having a fight again than I was about taking care of business. I kind of nearly forgot about performance and things like that.
It was nice to get in there and let my shots go on somebody again because, to be honest, even in training I was very sceptical of letting my right hand go. Obviously, you’re going to be like that after the injury and surgery that I had. But once I realised I could use it in that comeback fight, I think I became almost too trigger-happy — I got a wee bit overexcited about pummeling through him and probably threw too many power shots!
“I was just so happy to be in there fighting again — not boxing. You could see that in the performance. It was a strange feeling for me.
“But it’s a completely different focus, now, leading into my next fight. It’s not like, ‘Aw, I’m back.’ Now, it’s back to business.”
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