Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz will put his interim WBC super lightweight championship on the line against Néstor Bravo on Saturday, September 19, at Pechanga Arena in San Diego. It is Cruz’s first fight of the year, and the main event anchors a card that was reshaped when the planned Jesús “Mono” Ramos vs Meiirim Nursultanov bout was canceled after health complications for the Mexican boxer.
That is why the search is happening now: a title defense, a new opponent with a strong record, and a card built around a rivalry tied to Mexico’s Independence Day celebrations. Cruz enters with 28 wins, three losses and two draws, including 18 knockouts, after his 2025 majority draw with Lamont Roach. Bravo brings 24 wins, one loss and 17 knockouts, and he arrives with momentum after stopping Pedro Campa in the second round in January of this year.
The title at stake also gives the fight more than normal weight. An interim WBC belt is not the full championship, but it still places the winner in a stronger position inside the division and keeps the title picture moving while the sanctioning body sorts the rest out. For Cruz, it is also a chance to make a clean first impression under Eddy Reynoso, which makes this more than a simple return bout.
The revised lineup still gives the show depth. Daniel Blancas meets Sergio Jiménez, Marco Verde faces Guillermo Hernández, and Eumir Marcial takes on Omar Huerta. Verde, a silver medalist at the Paris 2024 Olympics, remains unbeaten as a professional, adding another point of interest to a card that lost one of its planned attractions but kept enough names to stay relevant.
The missing Ramos-Nursultanov fight is the one crack in an otherwise orderly build. Health issues removed the co-feature, and the card had to be adjusted around it, leaving Cruz-Bravo to carry even more of the load. That is a different kind of pressure for a main event: not just defending a title, but making sure the reshaped evening still feels like a major occasion when the first bell rings.
Broadcast coverage begins at 18:00 hours in central Mexico on DAZN and, with the main event scheduled for around 21:00 hours. Azteca 7 is set to begin airing the main fights at 23:00 hours. By the end of the night, the key question will not be whether the card survived the change, but whether Cruz can turn his first fight of the year and first bout under Reynoso into the kind of win that makes the new era look real.
