Former unified world boxing champion, Keith Thurman, slammed referee Thomas Taylor for stopping his fight with Sebastian Fundora early, preventing him from being able to capitalize on what he felt was a coming mistake from the defending champion atop a PBC on Prime Video PPV on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
“Whoever the f*** that referee was [Thomas Taylor], don’t hire him for main event s*** ever again, man — real talk,” Thurman told reporters at the post-fight press conference.
Thurman addressed the press following his sixth-round knockout loss to Fundora in a fight the veteran never looked competitive in, getting caught early in the first round, knees buckled in the second, and then withdrawn in the sixth.
Though Thurman protested the result, his face told a different story because of grotesque bruising around his face, as well as cuts. His face looked a bloody mess.
Boxing Social reporter Lily Ulloa took this photograph of Thurman at the post-event presser:
Regardless, Thurman bemoaned the decision as he believed he was owed the chance to continue boxing.
“Do you remember Erik Morales vs Marcos Maidana? Do you remember how many times people fought with broken orbital bones? S*** is not even broken, man,” Thurman said. “Never got dropped in the whole fight.
“I’m getting caught in the back-end of punches. The referee told me in the locker room, ‘Show me something — move your feet, duck your head, [and] I won’t stop the fight’.
“I wasn’t buckled, he just jumped in like a white rabbit.”
It came at a time in which Thurman believed “the fight was getting fun.” He said: “The people were standing on their feet. He was getting comfortable swinging big and swinging wide. He’s a volume puncher and the referee reacted to that.
“But as an OG … four more minutes, it would have been a lot of fun, I promise. I was waiting [for a mistake]. I had a long-term vision and the ref did not let me get there. I don’t need to be in the hospital.”
“[Brian] Mendoza caught him late,” Thurman said later. “I was starting to catch him a little bit. Right before Tim Tszyu retired in the eighth, he had the highlights. Fundora gets sloppy around round seven, round eight.”
Thurman said he wanted “to dog him out” by making him “go hard” early in the fight, before luring him to a mistake. “We were on the verge of that sweet spot where we were ready to go toe to toe, blow to blow, and the referee couldn’t handle the violence.”
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