Heavyweight title fights, Thurman-Porter headline Showtime's upcoming schedule

Showtime announced its boxing schedule through the end of June, and it is heavy on heavyweight title fights.

Showtime will broadcast the IBF heavyweight title bout between new champion Charles Martin and 2012 Olympic gold medalist Anthony Joshua on April 9 in London. Then, on a date still to be determined but likely to be in May from Russia, Deontay Wilder will put his WBC belt on the line against top challenger Alexander Povetkin.

Stephen Espinoza, Showtime Sports' executive vice president and general manager, also announced that the highly anticipated welterweight bout between Keith Thurman and Shawn Porter will be held June 25 on CBS.

In a surprise, Espinoza announced that Leo Santa Cruz is expected defend his WBA featherweight title against unbeaten Carl Frampton, the IBF/WBA super bantamweight champion who is coming off a big win over Scott Quigg.

Espinoza said that fight has been agreed upon by the fighters, but has yet to be formally completed.

But the other bouts Showtime/CBS announced Friday are completed, and it will focus on the heavyweights.

"In the last six months, we've seen the heavyweight division go from something that was relatively dormant to a division which seems to change every week," Espinoza said. "This past week, we saw Lucas Browne emerge as someone who is a contender. Anthony Joshua is someone who has been generating a lot of attention for a long time and he's proven to be a huge draw in the U.K. He's very skilled, which you'd expect from an Olympic gold medalist, and his career has progressed quickly."

Wilder, a 2008 bronze medalist in the Beijing Olympics, has moved slowly and hasn't taken on a great challenge since winning the WBC belt in 2015. But that will change when he meets Povetkin (30-1, 22 KOs), who was the 2004 Olympic gold medalist in Athens.

Wilder, who is 36-0 with 35 KOs, hasn't faced anyone with Povetkin's boxing skills. On top of that, he'll be fighting out of the U.S. for the first time.

"He's going out of his comfort zone to take this fight," Espinoza said of Wilder. "He's fighting in a vastly different time zone with different food and different settings and perhaps very different weather. It creates an element of unpredictability."

The Thurman-Porter bout is probably the most anticipated on the scheduled. It was set for March 12 after having been discussed for months, but was postponed when Thurman was injured in an auto accident when his airbags deployed.

They'll fight June 25 on CBS, though the venue hasn't been chosen. Thurman has fought on NBC and ESPN in his last two bouts, while Porter defeated Adriren Broner on NBC last year.

Still, while it's a great fight for hard core fight fans, they're still not all that well known to the casual audience.

"There is no magic formula to say if you appear on network TV this many of times and you do this, this and this that you're guaranteed to become a star," said Espinoza, who said there will be shoulder programming created to help boost the bout's visibility. "What this fight represents to us is perhaps determining the leader of the next wave of welterweights. Floyd Mayweather has retired and Manny Pacquiao is saying he's going to retire after his next fight [on April 9 against Timothy Bradley] and so this fight is kind of the one to determine who's the leader of the group that follows."

Showtime's other events include:

* Gary Russell Jr. versus Patrick Hyland for the WBC featherweight title on April 16 at Foxwoods.

* Badou Jack versus Lucian Bute for the WBC super middleweight title and James DeGale versus Rogelio Medina for the IBF super middleweight title on April 30 at a venue to be determined.

* Ruslan Provodnikov versus John Molina Jr. on June 11 in Verona, N.Y.