One Second Left: Fundora Floors Hadribeaj at the Final Bell to Keep His WBC Title in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS

Sebastian Fundora needed all but one second of his Saturday night in Las Vegas. One second from the final bell, with a decision win already in his pocket, the WBC super welterweight champion uncorked the left hand that finally broke Ermal Hadribeaj, dropping the challenger in the middle of the ring at The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan. Hadribeaj dragged himself up before referee Thomas Taylor finished the count, but his legs were gone, and Taylor waved the fight off at 2:59 of the 12th and final round — a technical knockout about as late as a stoppage can possibly be.

The win was Fundora's fourth straight defense of the WBC title at 154 pounds and moved the 28-year-old southpaw from Coachella, California, to 25-1-1 with 17 knockouts. Hadribeaj, the WBC's No. 1 contender, lost for the first time in his career, falling to 23-1-1 — and for long stretches of a bruising, mauling fight, he made the champion look very beatable doing it.

A challenger who refused to stay outside

Hadribeaj's plan was clear from the opening bell: get underneath the 6-foot-5 champion's long arms and stay there. As Boxing247's live report described it, the challenger crowded Fundora from the first round, landing hard punches inside and never giving the champion room to turn the fight into the long-range shooting gallery he prefers. Boxing News 24's round-by-round card gave Hadribeaj the first and fourth rounds outright, and even the rounds Fundora won were contested in a phone booth — the champion following his man around the ring, unable to cut it off, trading short shots at close range.

That plan came with a price. The clinching that made Hadribeaj so hard to hit clean also kept drawing the attention of Taylor, who deducted a point from the challenger for holding in the third round — Boxing News 24 noted the deduction appeared to come without a prior warning — and then took another point from him in the 11th as the holding grew more desperate. Two penalty points in a title fight is a mountain, and it meant Hadribeaj spent the second half of the night needing rounds he was steadily running out of.

Still, the fight was genuinely competitive deep into the evening. Hadribeaj's harder individual shots kept answering Fundora's volume, and FIGHTMAG's live account had the challenger still pressing forward and landing even as the body punches accumulated underneath him. What he could not do was stop the tide. Fundora, one of the few tall champions in boxing who genuinely likes fighting inside, began finding his uppercut in the clinches and digging downstairs with both hands — work that does not always win rounds on the spot but collects its debt late.

The second-half takeover

The numbers chart the turn precisely. According to CompuBox figures reported by FightsATW, Fundora outlanded Hadribeaj 124-70 over the final six rounds, more than doubling his output — 17 of 65 punches a round against 12 of 37 for a challenger who, in CompuBox's phrase, held and clinched all fight. On Boxing News 24's unofficial card, Fundora had built a 107-98 lead after 11 rounds, and the official cards were never needed. The challenger who had made the early rounds so uncomfortable was, by the championship rounds, mostly surviving — holding on, quite literally, and hoping to hear the final bell.

He nearly made it. Fundora, knowing the fight was his on the cards, still pressed the action in the 12th instead of coasting, and with the clock bleeding its final seconds he found the shot he had been building toward all night: a left hand, thrown after a night of lefts to the rib cage, that put Hadribeaj on the canvas with one second remaining. The challenger beat the count. He simply had nothing left to stand on, and Taylor's stoppage at 2:59 ended the first loss of Hadribeaj's career one second before the judges would have ended it for him.

Afterward, Fundora explained the patience behind the finish. "I told the ref in the fourth round that I was hurting him," he said, in remarks carried by theScore. "I was hitting him in the rib cage the whole time with the left hand, and when I went up the middle, I heard the noise that he made. So I just kept touching that and knew it would break him." He called the night's work exactly what it looked like: "It was an interesting fight. I had to go back and fight on the inside and show everyone again that I can still do that. It was dramatic to knock him out at the last second."

Undisputed is the only call left

Fundora did not waste his moment on the microphone. He told DAZN's Chris Mannix, as FightsATW reported, that he wants the winner of Jaron "Boots" Ennis vs. Josh Kelly — the last obstacle between him and the undisputed super welterweight championship, a fight Bad Left Hook noted is already shaping up as the division's defining bout for the first half of 2027. It is the natural end point of the run Fundora has built since his lone career loss, a 2023 knockout defeat to Brian Mendoza: five straight wins, the WBC and WBO titles taken from Tim Tszyu in March 2024, and successive defenses against Chordale Booker, Tszyu again and, last March, former champion Keith Thurman.

The title fight topped a strange night at The Chelsea, the intimate theater inside The Cosmopolitan that has become one of the Strip's most reliable boxing rooms. The scheduled co-feature never happened: Brandon Figueroa missed the 126-pound limit at Friday's weigh-in, lost his WBA featherweight title on the scales and then fell ill, canceling his bout with Tomoki Kameda outright — our weigh-in coverage has the full story of Figueroa's lost weekend. On the undercard that remained, Armando Reséndiz outworked Koen Mazoudier over 10 toe-to-toe super middleweight rounds, winning a unanimous decision (98-92, 97-93, 97-93) that Boxing247 noted flattered him given the trouble Mazoudier caused, and Marco Romero stopped Matias Ferreira at 1:54 of the first round.

None of it will be remembered longer than the last second of the main event. Champions are supposed to close shows, and Fundora closed this one with the clock at 2:59 — one tick from a decision that would have read like a hard night's work, transformed instead into the kind of finish that follows a fighter around for the rest of his career. The Towering Inferno keeps his belt, keeps his unbeaten run going, and now waits on Ennis and Kelly to settle who stands between him and everything at 154 pounds.