Jamel Herring evidently has put a difficult bout with Jonathan Oquendo behind him.
The junior lightweight champ, who won by disqualification in a foul-filled fight on Sept. 5, will move on to a showdown with former two-division titleholder Carl Frampton sometime in January, he told ESPN.
Herring and Frampton were expected to do battle in November but the date was pushed back because of damage above Herring’s right eye.
“The timeline apparently now is that they’re looking at January,” Herring told ESPN. “I actually wanted to come back in December.”
Herring’s fight with Oquendo was brutal, as the Puerto Rican repeatedly butted the champion. A clash of heads in the fifth round, which was deemed an intentional butt, caused a cut above his right eye.
Finally, after Round 8, Herring had had enough. He told referee Tony Weeks that he couldn’t see out of the eye and the fight was stopped. It was declared a DQ because the cut resulted from a foul.
Herring was accused by some of quitting immediately after the fight.
He later said he had a scratched cornea and a damaged orbital socket, which he believes originated in a fight against Denis Shafikov in 2016, which Herring lost.
“I apparently had an old fracture in my face that didn’t properly heal right. That fracture probably came from the Denis Shafikov fight,” Herring told ESPN. “So I’ve been through worse. It’s not a matter of quitting.
“The doctor thought I had an old fracture that didn’t heal properly, so when [Oquendo] kept head-butting, it was basically shifting into my right eye socket, and that was also causing an issue. That’s what they put on the medical records, as well, on the notes.
“So it was basically the lens on my eye being scratched up and an old injury that was irritated again. … It wasn’t the blood like I thought it was, because my eye was so bloody. I thought it was the blood filling into my eye.”
Bob Arum, Herring’s promoter, told ESPN that pushing the Frampton fight back a few months was no issue.
“The guy has to heal, first, there’s no reason to rush it,” said Arum, CEO of Top Rank. “We’re going to be busy, we have a lot of shows, including the [Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury fight on Dec. 19]. So we’ll punt it to January. What’s the hurry?”
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