NEW YORK (AP) — Teofimo Lopez delivered some of his best performances against boxers the experts thought would beat him.
Shakur Stevenson is another one of those fighters. Undefeated and sometimes looking untouchable, the southpaw is the favorite Saturday night when he faces Lopez at Madison Square Garden in a bid to win a title in a fourth weight class.
Lopez (22-1, 13 KOs) has been watching Stevenson (24-0, 11 KOs) for years — both were 2016 Olympians who were early in their careers when they fought as pros at MSG for the first time on the same night in 2017 — and knows his opponent is skilled. But the 140-pound champion also knows what he has done when the odds are against him.
“I believe all of it is a gimmick when it comes to Shakur," Lopez said. "I believe there’s this idea what they want out of Shakur as far as the general public and the boxing community sometimes, and I’ve had many, many analysts that have been boxing or seen boxing for as long as I’ve been born, if not more, and they got it wrong every time. So that’s the part that I love as a fighter, because we get to display and the hands do the rest of the talking.”
Their bout for Lopez's WBO belt tops another quality “Ring Magazine” card that will stream on DAZN. Both fighters come off victories in previous Saudi-backed promotions, with Lopez beating Arnold Barboza last May in Times Square, a couple months before Stevenson beat William Zepeda at Louis Armstrong Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to defend his lightweight title.
This event goes back to a traditional boxing venue and organizers say MSG will be sold out for the showdown of local fighters, with Lopez from Brooklyn and Stevenson from Newark, New Jersey.
The fighters traded insults about family members at their press conference Thursday and multiple brawls broke out when they weighed in Friday, with Madison Square Garden warning that anyone fighting at one of its events may be “banned for life.”
Stevenson is listed at -325 at the BetMGM Sportsbook, making him more than a 3-to-1 favorite. But Lopez was the underdog when he beat Vasiliy Lomachenko in a 135-pound title bout in 2020, and again when he knocked off then-unbeaten Josh Taylor to win his 140-pound belt in 2023.
Stevenson, while conceding that Lopez is a good fighter, noted that Lomachenko was small for the lightweight division and Taylor, by the time he fought Lopez, had perhaps outgrown junior welterweight.
“I mean, it’s easy to perform when you’re fighting against a little guy, or the other guy is a guy that’s struggling at the weight class in Josh Taylor,” Stevenson said. “So I’m not worried about that. Those guys aren’t me.”
Stevenson is one of boxing's best defensive fighters, sometimes criticized for making boring fights by being too cautious. He seemed willing to trade more against Zepeda, saying he strayed a bit from the instructions from Terence Crawford, the recently retired great who has been with him in preparation for this fight.
Crawford was the headliner when Lopez and Stevenson fought in undercard bouts at MSG on May 20, 2017. Now they are the main event after Bruce Carrington (16-0, 9 KOs) and Carlos Castro (30-3, 14 KOs) fight for the vacant WBC featherweight championship; and unbeaten Keyshawn Davis (13-0, 9 KOs) faces Jamaine Ortiz (20-2, 10 KOs) in a 140-pound bout.
Lopez edged Ortiz two years ago and acknowledged that he's gotten up for some fighters more than others.
“It would seem that way for sure, you know what I mean? You go off the records, you go off the looks of what the media has out there, the stakes and all that, but I think it’s just me trying to find my footing in all this,” Lopez said.
He believes he took another step toward that by giving up alcohol and marijuana last year as his New Year's resolution, after realizing someone who has asthma and stayed away from smoking as an amateur shouldn't have been doing it as a pro.
So Lopez is feeling better outside the ring and now has the type of fight that has usually brought out his best inside it.
“I believe that Shakur has the skillsets to bring out that version of me for sure and I do believe that Shakur may think, at least in his mind, as far as that goes that he can hang in there with a fighter like myself,” Lopez said. “I think he bit more than he could chew for sure and I can’t wait to display that and show him that when it comes to fight night.”
AP boxing: https://apnews.com/boxing
FILE - Shakur Stevenson, left, throws a punch at Oscar Valdez during the WBC-WBO junior lightweight title boxing bout Saturday, April 30, 2022, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, file)
FILE - Teofimo Lopez, right, punches Scotland's Josh Taylor during the ninth round of a welterweight title bout, Saturday, June 10, 2023 in New York. Lopez won the fight. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, file)
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Hold on to those Thanksgiving turkeys! WKRP is coming to Cincinnati — for real this time.
“I cannot, by contract, tell you when. I cannot tell you who. But I can tell you, direct to the camera, WKRP, after 48 years, is coming to Cincinnati,” D.P. McIntire, who runs the media nonprofit that is auctioning the famous call letters, told The Associated Press. “Book it! It’s done!”
The call sign was made famous by “WKRP in Cincinnati,” a CBS television sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982. It made stars of actors like Loni Anderson and Richard Sanders, whose bumbling newsman Les Nessman reported on a Thanksgiving promotion gone bad when live but flightless turkeys were dropped from a helicopter.
McIntire remembers watching the show’s first episode — featuring disc jockeys Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) — in the living room with his parents and older sister.
“And at the end of the 30-minute episode,” he said, “I got up and I proclaimed, `I’m going to be in radio. And if I ever have the opportunity, I’m going to run a station called WKRP.’”
McIntire said he got his first on-air job at 13 as a news anchor at WNQQ “Wink FM” in Blairsville, Pennsylvania.
Fast forward to 2014, when his North Carolina-based nonprofit acquired the call sign from the Federal Communications Commission. Stations in Dallas, Georgia, and Alexandria, Tennessee, previously bore the letters.
McIntire laughs as he recalls his chat with a woman in the agency’s audio division.
He had two sets of call letters in mind. She told him he needed a third.
“Being the jokester that I am, I said, `Well, if you need three, and if it’s available, we’ll take WKRP,’” he said. “And 90 seconds later, she came back and she said, `Mr. McIntire. Congratulations. You’re the general manager of WKRP in Raleigh, North Carolina.’”
WKRP-LP — 101.9 on the FM dial — went live Nov. 30, 2015. The LP stands for “low power,” a class of station created to serve more local audiences that didn’t want mass-market content.
“Our format is what radio used to be 35 years ago in small-town America,” he said. “There is Greats of the 80s, Sounds of the 70s, 90s Rewind.”
LPFM is restricted to nonprofit organizations like his Oak City Media, and it’s definitely local.
“Your broadcast capacity is limited to 100 watts,” McIntire said. “So, your average range is between, depending on your terrain and circumstances, 4 and 12 miles (6 and 19 kilometers) in any direction. Enough to cover a small town.”
And, by necessity, it’s a low-budget affair.
The transmitter is in a corner of McIntire’s garage, between a recycling bin and the cleaning supplies. The broadcast antenna sits atop a 25-foot (7.62-meter) metal flagpole in the backyard. The studio — microphones and a mixing board hooked up to a computer — is in McIntire’s basement.
Like the WKRP of television, McIntire and his partners set out to be “irreverent.” One of their offerings is a two-hour show called “Weird Al and Friends,” focusing on the satirical works of Weird Al Yankovic.
They even had an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. But don’t call the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — they hand out gift certificates to a local grocery store.
“We don’t toss them out of helicopters,” he said with a laugh.
After 10 years on the air, the 56-year-old McIntire decided it was time to pass the reins.
“We’re in a position where the older members like me who started the station are turning the leadership over to younger members,” he said. “They’re not interested in radio.”
They put out a call for bids to use the call letters on FM and AM radio, as well as television and digital television.
They intend to use the proceeds for a new nonprofit venture called Independent Broadcast Consultants. He said IBC will be “geared specifically toward helping these new broadcasters get up and running, get the consulting that they need in order to be, hopefully, more successful than we have been.”
Oak City Media was all set to hand off the television-related suffixes — WKRPTV and WKRPDT — when another group defaulted on the agreement, McIntire said. But he said the Cincinnati deal is in the bag, he just can’t legally discuss it.
“It will be radio,” he said. “But that’s all I can tell you at this time.”
Whatever they do with the call sign, he hopes they will be true to the show that inspired it.
“It has a special place in the hearts of an awful lot of people,” he said. “And we have been very, very, very proud to have been a steward of that legacy.”
D.P. McIntire leans against a deck beneath the WKRP radio antenna in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
D.P. McIntire points to the transmitter for WKRP radio in a corner of his garage in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
The WKRP radio antenna sits atop a 25-foot flagpole behind D.P. McIntire's home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
A photo of the cast members of the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" sits in a window at the home of D.P. McIntire in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
D.P. McIntire stands beneath a WKRP banner in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
