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Carlos Cuadras-McWilliams Arroyo bout added to Forum’s ‘SuperFly 2’ card

Carlos Cuadras celebrates after retaining his WBC super-flyweight title in Japan in 2015. He lost the belt the next year.
(Jiji Press / AFP/Getty Images)
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The “SuperFly 2” boxing card on Feb. 24 at the Forum added a bout that HBO will air on its broadcast, with former super-flyweight champion Carlos Cuadras of Mexico meeting Puerto Rico’s McWilliams Arroyo.

Cuadras (36-2-1, 27 knockouts) has narrowly lost his last two fights in the Southland, a 2016 title defeat to Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez and a September loss (114-113 on all three scorecards) to countryman Juan Francisco Estrada.

Estrada parlayed that triumph to the Feb. 24 main-event against World Boxing Council champion Srisaket Sor Rungvisai, who knocked out Gonzalez in the fourth round in the first SuperFly card at StubHub Center in September. Because of the viciousness of Gonzalez’s knockout loss, he’s not ready to fight on this card.

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Arroyo (16-3, 14 KOs) went the distance against then-flyweight champion Gonzalez at the Forum in April 2016.

“It’s a great matchup any time you match a world-class Mexican fighter against a world-class Puerto Rican,” promoter Tom Loeffler said of Cuadras-Arroyo. “Cuadras has been in two very close [HBO] fights — if he didn’t have the knockdown against Estrada [in the 10th round], it would’ve been a draw — and I lobbied [HBO executive vice president] Peter Nelson hard to get him back on this show,” Loeffler said.

The card will be a tripleheader, said Loeffler, that will add either Japan’s Naoya Inoue, the World Boxing Organization super-flyweight champion who fights Dec. 30 in Japan, or World Boxing Assn. champion Khalid Yafai of England.

“They won’t fight each other,” Loeffler said. “So many fans have expressed interest in Inoue after his U.S. debut on HBO in September— he made such a splash — but he’s fighting at the end of December so we have to see how he comes out of it.”

Yafai last fought on heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua’s show in Cardiff, Wales, in late October.

Tickets for SuperFly 2, priced from $30 to $250, went on sale Tuesday through Ticketmaster and the Forum box office.

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