February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The Brockton, Mass.-based “Clones Colossus,” holder of the fringe IBC Americas heavyweight title, will square off with “Iron” Mike at a venue to be announced in the United States on July 31.
McBride, who stands 6-foot-6 inches and boasts of a 31-4-1 record with 26 KOs, is considered the perfect foe by Team Tyson as their troubled charge begins another assault on a heavyweight landscape left desolate by the retirement of Lennox Lewis.
It will be the 37-year-old Tyson’s first fight in 16 months since scoring his 50th pro victory with a 49-second blow out of Clifford Etienne.
“We still have two months before the fight and right now Mike is in better shape than he was when he walked into the ring against Etienne,” Tyson’s trainer, Freddie Roach, who also works with featherweight Bernard Dunne, told Fightnews.com from their Arizona camp last week.
McBride, who’s 31, will be coming off an eight-month layoff when he faces Tyson. His last bout was a third-round TKO of Marcus Rhode in Boston last December.
POCKET ROCKET RETURNS
Wayne McCullough makes his long awaited return to boxing against unheralded Ugandan John MacKay in London on June 19.
The 33-year-old McCullough will be fighting for the first time since his defeat by Scott Harrison in a WBO featherweight title match in Glasgow 15 months ago.
MacKay (8-5), a 22-year-old who fights out of Coulsden, England, appears tailor-made to get the “Pocket Rocket’s” engines started again as he seeks one more big payday before calling it a day.
McCullough will go into the scheduled 10-rounder at Alexandra Palace with a 26-4 (17 KOs) record that includes two successful WBC bantamweight title defenses, in 1995 and ’96.
THORNTON BOUT
Light middleweight Martin Thornton, who is planning a move to New York to boost his career, meets journeyman Bruce Corby in a scheduled six-rounder at the Memorial Hall in Plymouth, Mass., this Friday.
“He’s an opponent,” Thornton (7-1-1, 3 KOs) said of the 16-23 Corby, who at 35 is 10 years older than the Galway-born prizefighter.
The grandson and namesake of a former All-Irish heavyweight champion, Thornton, who’s 25, is coming off a four-round points decision over Peter Kaljenvic in New Hampshire last month.
Thornton is also a Gaelic footballer on the side and has signed to play half-forward with New York’s Astoria Gaels.
KASSIM TWIST
Given the well documented twists and turns in his fighter’s young life, manager Tom Moran wasn’t entirely shocked when Kassim Ouma suffered an injury last week and had to pull out of last Saturday’s IBF title fight with Verno Phillips in Joplin, Missouri.
According to Moran, the 25-year-old Irish-phile from Uganda suffered a “sprain of his thoracic spine with muscle spasm,” which caused fluid build-up in the lungs.