Shane Mosley Jr is ready to embark on a new chapter in his boxing career as he sets his sights on Zuffa Boxing championship glory. Mosley makes his promotional debut on Sunday night at Meta Apex in Las Vegas when he faces off against hard-hitting Ukrainian Serhii Bohachuk in the main event. It’s a middleweight match-up that could catapult Mosley straight into Zuffa title contention at 160 pounds, and after scouting Bohachuk during his fight camp, he’s expecting a tough fight against a gritty opponent. “I did watch his last fight. I feel like he did good,” he said. “He was resilient and definitely took over in the last couple of rounds.”
Bohachuk has moved up a weight class to be a part of the middleweight division in Zuffa Boxing, and while the Ukrainian is much newer to the weight class than longtime middleweight Mosley, the American said he doesn’t see it being any sort of factor when the leather starts to fly. “It's just fighting,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We're fighting. He's a great fighter. I'm a great fighter. We can see who's the best.”
Mosley carries his own expectations, but has also had to negotiate his career as the son of a legendary former world champion. Shane Mosley Sr is a former three-weight world champion and one of the best fighters of his generation, and Mosley Jr said that he’s benefited from his father’s experience, as well as from being around so many boxing people on his way up. “I would say he's played a big role in my career,” he said. “I feel like, good, bad, and indifferent, I wouldn't be as close to boxing and have as much insight in boxing, if it weren't for him. So I'm very, very thankful for that, especially because it's a sport I love, and I have such appreciation for it. Just having that and having his mindset and things like that around me, and even having access to other fighters that had similar mindsets or understandings like that, and kind of having this little feeling like I'm different than everybody else, was an important thing. It was a helpful thing.”
That exposure to expertise, along with his God-given talent, has combined to power Mosley to a 22-5 career record. And now the 35-year-old hopes to make a little history by becoming the inaugural Zuffa Boxing middleweight champion. “I think it would be incredible to win the first Zuffa title. It would be my version of success,” he said. “Because my dad won multiple world titles, I get to do it with a prestigious company like Zuffa Boxing, which is a sister company (to UFC). Dana White has also put on Zuffa Boxing, and he's made that successful. When you talk about MMA, you talk about UFC. Regular people usually ask, ‘Oh, do you do UFC?’ Which means, ‘Do you do MMA?’ That is a defining thing. And if I could be a part of that – and let's just say (Zuffa Boxing) does happen to be that for boxing – I could say that I was the first world champion.”
A proud family man who loves to spend his downtime with his family, Mosley has lofty aspirations for his career, and he feels like he’s in the perfect spot to take his career to new heights as Zuffa Boxing starts to grow. “We're going in the right direction,” he grinned. “I feel like I've got GameStop!”
