David Benavidez spent some time talking to boxing reporters about his upcoming showdown with David Morrell and why he expects to prove inside the ring that he’s on a different level from his opponent. Here’s some of what Benavidez had to say.
“Every fight is different, every fighter has a different style so it’s up to me and my team to go in there and dissect it, to see what I have to do,” Benavidez said about facing Morrell. “But like I said, we’ve been working on the necessary stuff that we need to work on to make sure we neutralize Morrell’s power, hos movement, and all his stuff.
“I use experience to my advantage. My last fight when I fought with two injured hands I was going up against a great fighter so I kind of had to use more touches, more speed, I had to do stuff that I don’t usually do but it actually showed me that I have a lot of heart and going up against a guy of that caliber with two messed up hands and now that I’m injury free, I feel amazing and nothing’s going to be able to get in my way, February 1st.
“I don’t really care about his (pre-fight) antics or none of that. To me, all that stuff from him is nervous energy. He knew that he bit off a big portion that he can’t chew and you can say anything you want…at the end of the day I know exactly what I could do. Every other fighter that I fought, every high caliber fighter has said the same thing but after they get in the ring with me they all say the same thing, they say ‘David Benavidez is on a different level.’”
Benavidez would then bring up his mild frustration with how the drug testing has been handled for this fight.
“When you go through other fighters that say ‘hey, I was tested by VADA’ but then David Morrell was not tested, it brings a lot of questions up,” Benavidez said. “I’m not the only fighter that says this, there’s been two other fighters that say this. They say that David Morrell — we’re talking about Agbeko — they say he was tested the whole camp, David Morrell was not tested, and then after the fight they didn’t do no drug test, which is kind of odd to me.
“But I really don’t care about that. Even if he was on steroids I would beat the sh-t out of him but if you’re a dirty fighter you will get exposed. That’s why they were making such a big f-cking deal and they didn’t want to test. But dirty fighters will be exposed in this game.
“We’re being tested because I keep putting pressure on VADA…At the end of the day these are the high caliber fights that need testing. When I fought Caleb Plant and when I fought Demetrius Andrade we were testing 14 weeks out. With this one we barely started testing nine weeks out. And it’s not like I’m asking stuff that I didn’t do myself, I’ve been tested more than anybody, by VADA, by anybody. I’ve been tested probably over 40 times so it’s not like telling them to do something I didn’t do myself.”