By Brain Campbell

If there has been a recurring theme in unified junior middleweight champion Jarrett Hurd’s meteoric rise toward consideration among the best pound-for-pound fighters in the sport, it’s that nothing has come easy.

Following a brief and rather nondescript amateur career, Hurd (23-0, 16 KOs) wasn’t provided the luxury of the hand-picked matchmaking and hype that surrounds a typical future star. Yet for each difficult test placed in front of him — from then-unbeaten prospect Frank Galarza in 2015 to current WBC champion Tony Harrison in his first title bout two years later — Hurd came through with performances that just about leaped through the television screen.

An impressive knockout of former champion Austin Trout followed to close 2017. Six months later, Hurd dropped long-reigning champion Erislandy Lara in Round 12 to cement a split-decision win that was voted the fight of the Year.

After surgery and a get-well fight to test his left shoulder out, Hurd returns on Saturday in a homecoming bout that is anything but a gimme fight.

A native of nearby Accokeek, Maryland — who, by the way, still proudly lives at home with his parents — the 28-year-old Hurd will defend his IBF and WBA titles on Saturday against former title challenger Julian Williams (26-1-1, 16 KOs) in a Premier Boxing Champions card (8 p.m. ET, Fox, stream live on fuboTV) at EagleBank Arena in Fairfax, Virginia.

The 29-year-old Williams, a gritty native of Philadelphia, brings the pedigree of a technical boxer and the backbone of a brawler, which has Hurd ready for anything that comes his way.

“It’s hard to tell what type of fight this is going to be,” Hurd said. “I want to say that he’s going to try to box, but I said that about Erislandy Lara and we saw that he stood toe-to-toe with me. Because of my size, I don’t really think Julian Williams is going to try to do that. He’s going to try to get his shots off and score points and make it through 12 rounds.”

There’s a legitimate argument to make that Williams is the most underrated fighter in the division. Too many critics have focused on what happened during his lone title bout to date in 2016 when an uppercut from then-IBF champion Jermall Charlo knocked him down and led to a knockout loss shortly after in Round 5.

The reality is that Williams was winning the fight (in his opinion, handily) before the time of the stoppage and happened to get caught with the wrong punch at the wrong time.

“I don’t know if I’m forgotten like some of these sports writers or experts might say,” Williams said. “I wasn’t going to let that happen. I know how boxing works. Losses happen. Knockouts happen. Just because you take a loss that doesn’t mean you can’t come back and be a great fighter.

“You just get back up on the horse.  You just can’t stay down too long.  So I just got back in there and got a couple of wins. I knew this time would be coming. Boxing’s got a way of pushing people out that takes a loss. And it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re done.’ The loser’s always done.”

Williams has bounced back with four straight wins since the loss to Charlo, including two by knockout, and firmly has the attention of Hurd as far as what type of challenge to expect.

“The most dangerous I would say is his inside game. He has a great inside game,” Hurd said. “People maybe underestimate it a little bit but he does great things inside with his hands and how he places his shots. He sneaks them in there. He does a lot of good work in the inside. He also works good on the outside but his inside work is the most dangerous.”

Fight card, odds

The danger awaiting Williams, of course, surrounds the almost absurd combination of Hurd’s size and stamina for the division.

Hurd is the first one to admit that he’s not the most technical junior middleweight in the world and often absorbs clean punches from opponents while losing the early rounds. But his uncanny ability to keep coming over the full 12 rounds has routinely worn down both the gas tank and will of his opponents to the tune of eight knockouts over his past nine wins.

“My defense is getting better but what people have to understand is that I kept stepping up the competition I was facing,” Hurd said. “So of course I got hit more, but if you look at the stats, my opponent got hit even more than me. Because of my style it looks like I take a lot of punches. I expect to get hit in this fight but, I’m ready to hit him more.”

While Hurd certainly has goals of unifying all four titles at 154 pounds and will be watching closely at the result of the June 23 rematch between WBC titleholder Tony Harrison and former champion Jermell Charlo, he also knows his body may not allow him to wait that long.

“I definitely want to be undisputed [but] It all depends because I’m such a big junior middleweight,” Hurd said. “Every fight is getting more and more difficult to make the weight. Even though I come in under weight and was 152 when I fought against [Jason] Wellborn [in December], it’s just that I’m putting on more weight in between fights and even though I’m making it, to me I don’t think it’s healthy to be dropping that amount of weight for a fight.

“Even though I’m light, I still feel strong. And I think there’s more opportunity for me at 160. There’s a lot of people who want to see a bigger fights there for me.”

Prediction

Williams is a gritty fighter who can box or bang at a fairly even level. Given Hurd’s technical flaws, it wouldn’t be out of the question for the champion to have trouble in the early going as Williams sets the pace behind his jab and works in well-timed hooks.

The problem for Williams, of course, is the same problem every fighter in the division has faced before him up to this point — having success against Hurd is fine, but can you do it for 12 full rounds as fatigue and damage take their toll?

Williams is a good puncher who throws smart combinations but he’s far from a knockout threat on the elite level. Because of that, there’s a certain inevitability that Hurd will eventually adjust and pressure him into submission.

Whether or not Williams’ knockout loss to Charlo was the result of a questionable chin or the perfect punch he never saw coming, the real battle in this fight will come down to whether Williams’ punch resistance is stronger than Hurd’s unyielding ability to corner and suffocate him.

Hurd often tells a story about the roots of his world-class stamina that began with an amateur loss in which he had dominated early before unsuccessfully going for the finish. Fatigue soon engulfed him before ultimately he saw defeat on the scorecards. From that day forward, Hurd vowed to never gas out in a fight again.

Since that moment, the only thing more impressive than Hurd’s stamina and his ability to make 154 pounds with a body so large is the chin and barbaric style of stalking forward that he has packaged along with it. Until someone can outlast him at a higher pace while scoring legitimate damage, it’s going to be hard to bet against Hurd at junior middleweight.