Mike Tyson has thrown his name into the promotional ring and will promote the season Finale of ESPN’s Friday Night Fights on August 23rd at The Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, NY according to Dan Rafael of espn.com
Junior lightweight world titleholder Argenis Mendez (21-2, 11 KOs) will make his first title defense when he faces Arash Usmanee (20-1, 10 KOs) in the main event. In the co-feature, Claudio Marrero (14-0, 11 KOs) will face Jesus Andres Cuellar (22-1, 18 KOs) for a vacant interim featherweight title.
“We are thrilled to be finishing off the ‘Friday Night Fights’ season with Mike Tyson’s first-ever fight card as a promoter,” said ESPN senior director of programming and acquisitions Brian Kweder, who programs boxing for the network. “The quality of the card that he and his team have put together for boxing fans is fantastic.”
“I think Marrero is a stud,” Iron Mike Productions promoter Garry Jonas said. “I expect him to handle Cuellar and show his skills on national TV. And Mendez-Usmanee will be an entertaining fight. Usmanee is a go forward guy and Mendez loves guys who come forward. We knew he had an optional defense we could make before we’d have to fight Barthelemy, so we figured let’s give Usmanee the shot because we thought he beat Barthelemy.”
“We’ve been around going on two years and we have a champion [Mendez], some ranked fighters and a lot of good talent, but we weren’t getting the TV dates,” Jonas said. “There’s not enough to go around from HBO, Showtime, ESPN and the others. We had to do something to bring notoriety and attention and Mike was the perfect fit.
“We brought Mike down to see what we were doing at Acquinity Sports. We have our fighters live and train with us in Florida. We give them a really disciplined environment. We really wanted to put more organization in it, make it like a team. When Mike saw what we were doing he said it reminded him of what it was like when he was with [late trainer and adoptive father] Cus D’Amato when he was young. Hopefully, he will bring us some of the attention we need. But besides that he will help us with the young fighters, work with them, help recruit them. We hope to do some interesting things.”
Said Henry Rivalta, who heads boxing operations for the company, “Mike sees how we are a mentor for the fighters, a situation that he had with Cus. He was happy with what he saw from us and he said he is going all in.”