Shawn Porter has been discussing the best of boxing in the last 12 months and has picked his fighter of the year.
2023 has been a year that has seen big names knocked off their perch, young talents rise to the top, prospects impress and plenty in between.
Speaking on his own The Porter Way Podcast, former welterweight champion ‘Showtime’ has now highlighted his own standout pugilist and went with a Japanese star.
“I went overseas with mine, I went [Naoya] Inoue.”
Inoue became undisputed in a second weight class, super bantamweight, on Boxing Day when he stopped Marlon Tapales in the 10th round having knocked him down in the fourth.
The win meant the Japanese unified his WBC and WBO super-bantamweight belts with Tapales’s WBA and IBF titles and now, age just 30, he is only the second man in history to become undisputed in two divisions in the four-belt era, after Terence Crawford did the same back in July.
This latest win came less than a year after he first unified the super-bantamweight division when he knocked out Stephen Fulton in January, and it was only in 2022 that he became undisputed bantamweight champion by stopping Paul Butler, having previously beaten Nonito Donaire, Aran Dipaen and Michael Dasmariñas.
It is that business and the fact that Inoue has had 21 consecutive title fights that meant Porter picked Inoue over other contenders – particularly a former opponent in Terence Crawford, who has a good shout for the award but only fought once in his stellar win over Errol Spence Jr.
“I went to Inoue because of the activity.”