Fuji, Takeshi

Takeshi Fuji was born on July 6, 1940 in the city of Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands , in a family of immigrants from Japan of the third generation. He spent his childhood in the United States, where from an early age he was actively involved in boxing. He won national Golden Gloves tournaments in California and Nevada, he had 132 fights in amateurs, of which he won 116 times, lost 16 times. As a teenager, he moved to his historic homeland, where he began to attend the boxing gym, owned by the famous wrestler Rikidozan .

At the professional level, Fuji made his debut in April 1964 in Japan, his first opponent Minoru Goto won by knockout in the second round. During the following months he spent many successful matches, in June 1965, he won the vacant title of champion of Japan in welterweight - another contender for this title, a representative of Tokyo Nakao Sasadzaki, was knocked out 45 seconds after the start of the fight. In the same year, Fuji suffered a first loss in his career, by unanimous decision from American Johnny Santos, and a year later there was a second loss by knockout in the sixth round from Filipino Fel Pedranza.

Despite two defeats, most of his fights Fuji still won, and his rivals were not the weakest fighters. He retained the title of champion of Japan, in 1966 he defended him and won the championship belt of the Asia-Pacific Boxing Federation (this belt also defended once). Having risen high in the world rankings, in 1967 he got a chance to compete for the world title in the light welterweight class according to the versions of the World Boxing Council (EBU) and the World Boxing Association (BWA). The current Italian champion Sandro Lopopolo only stayed on one leg, and in the second he went for a heavy knockout.

The first time Fuji successfully defended the championship title, but during the second defense, held in Tokyo in 1968, Argentine Nicolino Locke had a clear advantage - after the tenth round, the champion's corner refused to continue the match. Subsequently, Takeshi Fuji went into the ring for another two years, in the summer of 1970 he had to fight with former world champion Eddie Perkins , but just a few days before the start of the match, he was seriously injured, and the Japanese boxing commission forbade him to participate in this fight. Thus, Fuji ended his career as an athlete. In total, he had 38 fights in professional boxing, 34 of which ended in victory (including 29 ahead of schedule), lost three times, in one case a draw was fixed. After completing his sports career, he worked as a coach in one of the boxing gyms in the city of Mito , Ibaraki Prefecture ^[1] .

• Takeshi Fuji (Eng.) - statistics of professional fights on the site BoxRec