Naoya Inoue is boxing’s fixer. The peerless 122-pound Nippon warrior shows up after one-ring circuses soil the fight game, as last week’s hyper-moneyed breaking of Jake Paul's jaw surely did, to remind fans how pretty this most brutal of sports can sometimes be. On Saturday night in Riyadh, Inoue artfully pummeled previously unbeaten David Picasso about the head and breadbasket for 12 near-perfect rounds while retaining his undisputed super-bantamweight championship and enhancing his aura of indomitableness.
Picasso, a 25-year-old Mexican fighter who entered the ring with a 32-0-1 record, had noticeable height and reach advantages over Inoue, and attempted to put them to use throughout. But it was clear from the opening bell that Picasso was no match for the Tokyo-based Inoue, 32. The Monster’s body attack was particularly ruthless and effective; at several points in the fight Picasso clearly gasped after taking an Inoue left hook to the right kidney. The DAZN microphones in Picasso’s corner picked up his admitting to his trainer/father, Chingo Picasso, between rounds that the body shots were hurting him bad.
But this is the pain business; Chingo Picasso kissed his punching-bag of a son on the forehead and, according to the broadcast’s translator, yelled, “You have to go for him!” And the kid did just that, with overwhelmingly self-destructive results.
Compubox stats showed that on the night, Inoue landed 96 punches to Picasso’s body, including 55 power shots.
Inoue’s sweet science superiority wasn’t only blatant in the body blows, however. He fought like he wanted to leave an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better impression on his foe and fans. One of Picasso’s rare offensive moments came early in the 10th round with an uppercut that landed on Inoue’s chin. Picasso had 17 career knockouts leading up to the fight, a pretty big number for a guy with his fighting weight, so he packs a punch. But Picasso’s uppercut only perturbed the champ. In response, Inoue, who has 27 career KOs and is perhaps the heaviest hitting little guy boxing has ever seen, immediately fired off two uppercuts of his own, both of which landed flush and more obviously damaged their target than Picasso’s solo shot.
For all the leather he ate on the evening, Picasso went the distance. According to the boxing database Boxrec, for the first time in his career Inoue failed to knock out consecutive opponents. Perhaps Picasso was aware he'd achieved this sort of footnote: When the last bell rang, Picasso raised his arms as if in victory. Alas, he and everybody who watched knew he hadn’t come anywhere close to actually winning. The judges’ final cards read 119-109, 120-108 and 117-111, unanimously for Inoue.
The Monster is now 27-0 in title bouts. The Picasso fight was Inoue’s fourth defense of his super bantamweight belt in 2025 alone. He was recognized afterward as the first undisputed champ to win that many title fights in a single calendar year since heavyweight champ Larry Holmes in 1983.
In a post-fight interview shown during the pay-per-view telecast, Inoue was asked if his decisive win, combined with Terence Crawford's recent retirement, meant he should now be hailed as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Inoue humbly pointed to a much bigger man sitting ringside, heavyweight champ Oleksandr Usyk, and said he was far more deserving of the title. The Ukrainian icon then entered the ring and thanked Inoue up close and in person for his kindness.
Inoue’s victory means all talk now turns to a megafight with fellow Japanese little giant Junto Nakatani, holder of an identical 32-0 record. Nakatani, the former bantamweight champ, just moved up to super bantam to make that dreamy Inoue matchup happen. But on Saturday’s undercard, in his first outing at the new weight, Nakatani underwhelmed while getting a unanimous decision win over Mexican Sebastian Hernandez Reyes. In a fight that was supposed to be a walkover for Nakatani, he was up comfortably on the scorecard of only one of the three judges, Nawaf Almohaimeed, who scored it 118-110; ubiquitous and verbose British promoter Eddie Hearn derided Almohaimeed's margin as "sickening." Nakatani was up by just two points on each of the other cards, meaning he only won the fight because arbiters Gary Kitanoski and Mike Hayel both gave him the last round.
Heading into the weekend, Inoue-Nakatani was being forecast as potentially the biggest bout in the history of Japanese boxing. There's really nobody his size in or out of his home country left for Inoue to fight should Nakatani's lackluster outing derail their encounter.
But please don't tell Jake Paul.
