Mary Spencer, left, lands a blow to Ogleidis Suarez during their WBA World Super Welterweight Championship fight in Montreal last April.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Canadian boxer Mary Spencer will face Australian world middleweight champion Desley (Destroyer) Robinson over 10 rounds on May 30 in El Paso, Tex.
Spencer (10-3-0 with six knockouts) is coming off an Oct. 30 unanimous decision loss in Montreal to American Mikaela Mayer at 154 pounds. The defeat cost the 41-year-old Spencer her World Boxing Association super welterweight crown, while Mayer also collected the World Boxing Council and World Boxing Organization titles left vacant by the retirement of Norway’s Cecilia (First Lady) Braekhus.
Robinson (11-3-0 with four knockouts) won the vacant International Boxing Federation middleweight title with a unanimous decision over Australian Kaye Scott in December, 2024. Robinson unified the 160-pound division last April, defending her IBF belt and winning the vacant WBO title by downing Australian Chloe Chaos.
“Belts don’t intimidate me. They motivate me,” Spencer said in a statement. “But on fight night, it’s not about rankings, records or titles. It’s about who’s willing to go to a darker place. And I promise you … I live there.”
The 38-year-old Robinson, a single mother of three children who fights out of Logan City in Queensland, Australia, most recently stopped American Logan Holler in the second round in October.
The Most Valuable Promotions card at the El Paso County Coliseum features two main events.
Unified featherweight champion Amanda (The Real Deal) Serrano of Puerto Rico will face Germany’s Cheyenne (Pepper) Hanson, ranked fourth by the WBO and sixth by the WBA contender.
Amanda Serrano (right) tags Heather Hardy with a right during their bout in Dallas in 2023.Sam Hodde/Getty Images
The other marquee bout is a rematch of the WBA world lightweight title fight between Americans Stephanie Han and Holly Holm.
Han, an El Paso police officer, defended her crown in the first fight in January by technical decision after seven rounds, when an accidental cut forced the fight to go to the scorecards.
The 44-year-old Holm has held boxing and mixed martial arts titles.
Spencer became interim WBA super welterweight champion in September, 2024, by a unanimous decision win over Germany’s Naomi Mannes. She was elevated to full champion after Britain’s Terri Harper vacated the title to fight at lightweight.
She defended the title in April, 2025, with a unanimous decision win over former world champion Ogleidis Suárez of Venezuela. It was Spencer’s third straight victory since a pair of losses to Belgium’s Femke Hermans in December, 2022, for the International Boxing Organization super welterweight title and in October, 2023, for IBO and IBF super welterweight crowns.
What I learned boxing with the blind
The Montreal-based Spencer returned to her roots while training for the Mayer fight, holding the bulk of her camp in Detroit and her hometown of Windsor, Ont.
Spencer, who took up boxing at 17, won world amateur titles at 66 kilograms in 2005 and 2008, and at 75 kilograms in 2010.
She was Canadian champion at 64 kilograms when women’s boxing was approved to join the Olympic program in 2012, and she finished fifth at 75 kilograms at those London Olympics with only three women’s weight classes contested.
The MVPW-03 card is part of Most Valuable Promotions Women, a year-round global platform for women’s boxing from MVP, founded in August, 2021, by Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian.