Rico Verhoeven spent some time giving his own personal reaction to his loss to Oleksandr Usyk, which ended in controversial style with a referee stoppage at the end of the 11th round. Here in this conversation with Ring Magazine, and given some time to reflect, Verhoeven shares his perspective on what took place.
Verhoeven on his feelings on his fight with Usyk
“I felt so good. I was enjoying myself, was definitely showing what I can do and I think we shocked the world like we set out to do. Yeah, just the unfortunate end was like premature.
“The
first round goes and I just started flowing. Everything we worked on in the gym just like came off, I was like ‘oh my God, this is working.’ And then the rounds kept on going and I was like ‘ok, this is nice.’ And after four rounds we get the open scoring, I believe we were tied up, I was like ‘hmmm, I’m not sure if that’s my feeling but it’s good, nobody expected that, basically.’
“And then getting past the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, I was like ‘now I’m really getting into the flow,’ and again, open scoring after eight rounds, still were tied up. Hmmm. I don’t know. That feels strange because like I really feel like I’m better and I’m touching him more than he’s touching me. But then reality sinks in, I really like have to outperform myself and my opponent to be even better and make these points even clearer or whatever we can do, work even harder, to get that win.”
On what was going through his mind when he was dropped in the 11th round
“At the moment I was like ‘dumb.’ Dumb, walking in too square, getting hit. Okay. That’s what the fight game is. You make mistakes, especially at this level, you get punished for it and he did amazing. But I was still there. Right away I stood up…my mind was still there, I knew my mouthpiece was out because if I was out I wouldn’t even like feel that or recognize that…But like I said, I heard the click already so I knew it was going to be like 10 seconds that I had to work with. Okay, perfect. We’re at the end of the round, it’s too bad that I got the eight count, keep my hands up and we’ll be fine. And then the referee jumps in right at the end of the round.
“It’s not that I was wobbly or whatever. My hands were up, I was responsive, right away when he jumped in I was like ‘what are you doing?’ The first thing I said. So it wasn’t like I was all over the place…I have no clue [why the referee stopped it at that point], it doesn’t make any sense. If I was really all over the place then yeah, if he was hitting me from rope to rope like we seen with Usyk vs Fury — he was getting hit a lot worse than I did, he was like wobbly all over the place and I was there standing straight up, hands up, defending myself.
“And then bearing in mind the end of the round is close, just let it go.”
