Intentional or not, it looks like a slight.
Top Rank, who will promote the upcoming unification clash between junior featherweight champions Marlon Tapales and Naoya Inoue, has released a video to introduce the fight’s first-ever poster. And it is fire, as per the course for Top Rank.
Only, it seems to conveniently forget one thing: Tapales is a champion, too, and he is also “ascending the mountain of greatness” as teased by Top Rank on X (formerly Twitter). As a result, the video is noticeably one-sided, full of Inoue’s greatest hits and none of Tapales’—not even the highlights of his massive upset of Uzbek fighter Murodjon Akhmadaliev to win the WBA and IBF straps.
Take a look:
Curiously, Tapales appears in the video only at the 49-second mark, with a clip of him entering the ring after Inoue’s beat down of Stephen Fulton to win the WBC and WBO titles.
It was a cameo for a lack of a better term, and it shows beyond any doubt who Top Rank thinks is the A-side in this December 26 clash.
To be fair, though, Tapales is really the heavy underdog in this unification match given The Monster’s unblemished 25-0 slate with 22 devastating KOs.
Not that it matters to Tapales who has previously claimed that he knows exactly what to do to pull off the massive upset.
And slights like this should only add fuel to Tapales’ already raging fire.