Denzel Bentley on losing WBO title, street violence in Battersea and boxing politics
Denzel Bentley, the 31-year-old British middleweight, has been stripped of his WBO world title after the sanctioning body refused to let him make a first defence against Shane Mosley Jr this Saturday at London’s Copper Box Arena. His Friday appeal, arguing he should meet the world-ranked Mosley Jr rather than his mandatory challenger, was rejected. Bentley says he is disappointed and does not feel he has been treated like a champion, but he still plans to beat Mosley Jr in the opening bout of a six-fight deal with American promoter Zuffa.
Speaking at his gym in Essex, he placed the politics in a harsher light: friends from his old Battersea council estate have been stabbed or shot dead. Boxing, he says, kept him out of trouble; he has been chased and shot at, yet feels fortunate to be alive. He has lost three of 26 fights. Before his November 2023 defeat to Nathan Heaney, a friend was stabbed multiple times and killed on the spot by someone they knew who tried to steal a watch. He first lost someone to knife crime at 12, when a friend was stabbed outside his house. The night before he knocked out Danny Dignum in May 2024, another friend was shot; last month a bus driver he saw as a little brother was shot in the back and died. Deaths among friends from knife and gun crime, he says, run well into double figures. He still visits his mother on the estate and would like to move her so his children can see their grandmother more safely.
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