Inoue, Nery, and the Six Decade Road to the Dome: Part I
Exploring the history of championship fights between Mexico and Japan ahead of the biggest fight ever between the nations
The best fights are more than just the contest between the ropes.
Next Monday in Japan (ESPN+, 4 AM EST), a good fight on paper has become more than that.
It’s an event.
When undisputed junior featherweight champion Naoya Inoue (26-0, 23 KO) defends his title against former bantamweight and junior featherweight champion Luis Nery (35-1, 27 KO), they will carry plenty of story into the ring.
For fans in Japan, Nery is clearly cast as the villain. He was once banned for life from fighting in Japan by the Japanese Boxing Commission after shenanigans related to both his wins over Shinsuke Yamanaka.
‘For life’ in boxing, of course, is often tied to the bridge between time and profit.
In the first Yamanaka bout, Nery ended one of the best bantamweight title reigns in recent times with a fourth round knockout of the then-lineal and WBC champion, only for Nery to fail the post-fight drug test for a banned substance. In some circumstances, that sort of thing can result in an outcome being reverted to a No Contest. Instead, the WBC ruled Nery could keep his title due to the likelihood of food contamination. They ordered an immediate rematch.
Nery won the rematch even more clearly, ending the career of Yamanaka with a second round stoppage. The title that night was on the line only for Yamanaka. Nery lost it on the scale, coming in officially at 121 pounds for a 118 pound fight. That final scale total came on a second attempt after initially weighing 123 pounds, a pound over the limit of the next class up from bantamweight.
Nery is 9-1 since the Yamanaka fights, suffering a lone stoppage loss in a junior featherweight title fight against Brandon Figueroa before winning four in a row to earn this title shot. This is Nery’s chance for redemption, to show the fans in Japan and around the world he can win on their shores with no dark clouds and defeat arguably the best fighter in the world.
For Inoue, a titlist in four weight classes, the first undisputed bantamweight champion in roughly fifty years, and the only undisputed junior featherweight champion since the modern division launched in the mid-70s, the opportunity is there to avenge a countryman and add another impressive victory to an already Hall of Fame career.
They’ll complete the story in front of likely more than 50,000 fans as Inoue headlines the Tokyo Dome for the first time. It’s an achievement that will stand out, win or lose, for Inoue as a boxing figure in his home nation. The Tokyo Dome and boxing have only had brief encounters in the past, most notably with Mike Tyson atop the marquee.
When the receipts are counted, it will be the biggest championship fight to date between boxers from Japan and Mexico and this event’s place as the peak of the rivalry merits examination in the broader context of their cross-Pacific clashes.
The road to the Tokyo Dome is more than just the story of Inoue and Nery. It is the story of nearly 60 years of championship boxing pitting the best of two nations at odds. While other international rivalries might be more celebrated (Mexico’s storied rivalry with Puerto Rico for instance), Mexico versus Japan has been a stalwart dating to the 1960s.
There couldn’t be a better time to explore the history of championship fights between the two countries and this will be the first of two parts before the opening bell.
To try to identify the most accurate results, non-native fighters who made their home in one nation or the other, like Cuba’s Jose Napoles, or unique stories like North Korea’s Masamori Tokuyama, were not included. Neither were bouts contested for interim or, in the case of the WBA, sub-title fights when the WBA had a primary “super” champion atop a weight class.
Ultimately, it left an identified 148 championship contests heading into Inoue-Nery. If any were missed, it wasn’t for lack of looking and readers can feel free to add a note in the comments.
Optimistically for Nery, Mexico holds the edge in the win column of the fights captured here at 78-66-3 with one “No Contest.” Nery picked up two of those wins in his bouts versus Yamanaka.
Inoue is 3-0, so far, against Mexican opponents in championship affairs.
While this review of the history of Mexico versus Japan doesn’t go into great detail on every championship contest, it will dig deeper into some of the more memorable outcomes over the years with results listed by decade along the way.
Before we all enjoy the present, let’s go back to the beginning.
The 1960s
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