Teofimo Lopez Jr. looks to bounce back from disastrous loss when he faces Rolly Romero for welterweight title

Throughout his 10 years as a professional, which has included “The Ring” championship reigns as the recognized best fighter in two divisions, Teofimo Lopez Jr.’s career has been one of dramatic peaks and valleys. Lopez (22-2, 13 KOs), formerly a regular on the pound-for-pound rankings, has authored career-defining victories against Vasiliy Lomachenko (2020) and Josh Taylor (2023) that catapulted him into stardom. The 29-year-old from Brooklyn, New York, has also endured a pair of devastating losses and a few personal breakdowns in the public eye involving divorce and feuding with his own family that led to many questioning the state of his mental health. On Saturday, Lopez will attempt to pick up the pieces once more when, just seven months removed from losing his 140-pound title to Shakur Stevenson in a one-sided and comprehensive dismantling, the boxer known as “The Takeover” will move up to 147 pounds to challenge Rolando “Rolly” Romero (17-2, 13 KOs) for his WBA title in the main event of a pay-per-view card (10 p.m. ET, DAZN/Prime Video PPV) from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The 30-year-old Romero, a native of Las Vegas, will snap a 15-month layoff dating back to his 2025 upset decision win over current WBC titleholder Ryan Garcia in New York’s Times Square. Even though Lopez is nearly a 3-to-1 betting favorite to use his skills to defeat the hard-punching Romero, he knows better than anyone the concerns critics have over his current mental state and how that will affect him on fight night.

“I don’t think [the Romero fight] will be as difficult as people put it out to be, they just wonder what kind of Teofimo they will see,” Lopez told CBS Sports on Wednesday. “Is it going to be one that is happy and focused or is it going to be one that is not mentally there in the fights? I think that’s the whole case right there. I see myself really determined. I’m really focused on this mission and this goal that I have of the road to [the] undisputed [championship] at 147 [pounds]. It starts now.”

When Lopez first burst onto the scene as a 21-year-old lightweight title prospect, he was often hailed for how mature and calm he appeared despite his age amidst the constant chaos circling around him, which was often perpetrated by his brash father and trainer, Teofimo Lopez Sr., who publicly accosted future opponents like Lomachenko while screaming that his son would take them out inside the ring.

For a good stretch, Lopez was able to back up his father’s claims but not without a few cracks in the armor showing along the way, including a lifeless 2019 decision win over Masayoshi Nakatani in which Lopez was forced to play referee in a backstage scuffle between his then-fiancee and his disapproving family just moments before he walked to the ring. 

Even though Lopez fell back into form in his next fight, knocking out IBF titleholder Richard Commey in two rounds before edging Lomachenko by decision, his entire world seemed to crash in a November 2021 upset loss to George Kambosos Jr., in which Lopez endured a sustained beating and claimed after that he denied his doctor’s plea to pull out of the fight due to a torn esophagus that caused the potentially fatal condition called Pneumomediastinum.

After moving up to 140 pounds, Lopez recorded a pair of victories, including a disputed decision win over Sandor Martin in 2022, that saw him sluggish and even questioning on camera whether he “still had it.” What fans and the media didn’t know at the time was that Lopez was also navigating a messy divorce that led him to serious thoughts about suicide. 

Yet, despite the chaos surrounding him in June 2023, and the fact that Lopez played up his vulnerable mental state to the media ahead of his bout against 140-pound champion Josh Taylor in order to make it seem as if he was unfit to compete, Lopez scored a resounding upset to reinstate himself as one of boxing’s best.   

A master of dramatic reinvention, Lopez will need to do the same in a new weight class in order to defeat Romero and put the stench of such a disastrous defeat at the hands of Stevenson behind him. 

“That defeat actually took me back to when I fought [representing Honduras] in Rio de Janeiro in the Olympics in 2016,” Lopez stated. “It was like the rebuild — where do we start, where do we go from here? The mental strength that you have to have, the heart of a champion that you have to endure. To just get right back on your feet, brush it off and get right back to the gym and focus on fundamentals. That’s what I did these last few months, just technical work. The skills pay the bills. It was more of focusing on going back to when I was six years old and trying to remember things I did going back to my taekwondo and [youth boxing] days.”

The Stevenson loss was particularly damaging to Lopez’s reputation as an elite fighter in ways that went beyond his inability to adjust or deal with his opponent’s sublime skills. There was also a noticeable breakdown in communication between father and son in his corner, with the elder Lopez yelling things like, “What happened to your power, bro,” in lieu of providing tactical instructions. 

Lopez’s father came clean on Wednesday during his son’s open workout in an interview with YouTube journalist Brendan Taylor, in which he admitted that his own personal issues got in the way of his son’s success. Despite cries from the general public for Lopez to remove his father from his team and find a new trainer, both the bond between father and son and the professional relationship between them will continue into Saturday. 

“I wasn’t in a good place, I was f—ing doing drugs,” Teofimo Lopez Sr. stated. “I let the devil blind me and I didn’t protect my son. I blame myself for that. That’s never going to happen again, I’m here to stay. Hate me or love me bro, I’m here to stay.”

The reveal from Lopez’s father came one week after the two made headlines during a bizarre appearance on “The Mr. Versace” podcast with “The Ring” CEO Rick Reeno, in which the two aired out their grievances with one another in a very public way. 

Lopez stated on Wednesday that it was his choice to do the podcast and felt it was important to bring their personal issues to light in order to help others.

“[My father and I] are great, honestly. I would rather it be done like that,” Lopez stated. “There are people, I promise you, parents with their children right now, when they see the potential of their children and they know the greatness in them that they have yet to see. This also reminds all of them that we are all the same. We have these back and forth conversations. I wanted it to be right there in the ‘Mr. Versace’ podcast to let it be known and let everyone feel that authenticity of how it really is. If you show people a fairytale, they are not going to believe that it’s possible.

“But if you show them the grit, the grind, the disagreements amongst each other, just knowing that we have to get on the same page and be just right, I think it resonates better for the people going through that same process right now.”

Lopez referred to his move up to welterweight as “long overdue” and believes everything from his speed and power to his chin will be renewed against Romero in yet another redemptive victory just as it seemed as if his status as an elite fighter had met its expiration date.

“”The Takeover’ is still in effect whether people believe it or not,” Lopez stated. “I’m hyped, I’m excited. I believe that it’s a new and improved [version] of myself. I’m more mature. Did I learn everything? I just turned 29. It’s the last year of my 20s so let’s go out with a bang and leave my 20s with excellence.”