The pair are on a collision course that could culminate in one of the best fights that can be made in boxing taking on Cinco de Mayo next year. However, with Benavidez set to face Michal Cieslak in a cruiserweight title unification on December 12, Ring champ Opetaia doesn’t want to wait until eight months to return to the ring.

“I don’t want to wait until May for my next fight,” Opetaia said on the Mr. Verzace Podcast. “That’s ages away. I’d love to get one more fight in this year, and then one more early next year, and then we can fight in May. I’d definitely like to get a fight in. I’m not going to wait until May sitting around. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Opetaia (31-0, 24 KOs) also said he’d be ready to face Benavidez (32-0, 26 KOs) in December.

Benavidez, The Ring’s No. 1-ranked light heavyweight and cruiserweight, and No. 5-ranked fighter pound-for-pound, is the WBA and WBO cruiserweight champion. The Phoenix, Arizona, native also holds the WBC light heavyweight title.

The WBC announced on September 14 that it elevated Cieslak (28-2, 22 KOs), The Ring’s No. 4-ranked cruiserweight, from interim to full cruiserweight champion. Noel Mikaelian, The Ring’s No. 5-ranked cruiserweight, previously held the belt, but the sanctioning body stripped him of the title after he fought Opetaia rather than Benavidez, who was his mandatory challenger.

A sanctioning body declaring a champion from another sanctioning body as a mandatory challenger is rare, but it happened in part because Benavidez’s representatives petitioned the WBC for the designation.

Opetaia, 31, beat Mikaelian (28-4, 12 KOs) by ninth-round stoppage in the co-main event of Ryan Garcia-Conor Benn on September 12 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. In the same ruling where it declared Cieslak, of Kozienice, Poland, as its cruiserweight champion, the WBC ruled the winner of Opetaia-Mikaelian to be the mandatory challenger for the winner of Benavidez-Cieslak.

Cieslak, 37, won the interim WBC cruiserweight title with a fourth-round stoppage of Jean Pascal in June 2025.

During his post-fight interview after stopping Mikaelian, Opetaia called Benavidez, 29, into the ring. Benavidez and the Australian southpaw showed respect for each other, and verbally agreed to face each other on next May at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Any hopes of that coming to fruition would depend on Benavidez beating Cieslak and Opetaia winning his next fight if he opts not to wait.

Benavidez proclaimed Opetaia as the “boogeyman of the division,” but anointed himself as the man to take the boogeyman out. For Opetaia, the exchange was exactly what he was hoping for, and he billed a potential clash between them as the kind of moment fighters live for.

“They told me he was in the crowd, so I tried to find him and call him in,” Opetaia said. “I wanted him to say that. I just want to concrete the fight. It was good to have him in there [and] good to hear his words. I’m just hoping we get that fight over the line.”