HITS and MISSES from Another Weekend of Boxing: Harrison-Charlo 2 and More

HITS and MISSES from Another Weekend of Boxing: Harrison-Charlo 2 and More

Boxing was all over the place last weekend, with some of the best fighters in the sport notching important victories to help move their careers forward.

Main event winners include Jermell Charlo recapturing the WBC title he lost to Tony Harrison last year on a PBC on Fox card, Danny Jacobs making the successful jump up to 168 pounds to defeat Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on DAZN, and UK heavyweight Daniel Dubois stopping Japan’s Kyotaro Fujimoto on ESPN+.

Without further ado, here are the biggest HITS and MISSES from the latest busy weekend of topnotch boxing action.

HIT: Jermell Charlo’s Career-Defining KO in Biggest Fight of Career

Charlo was the first of Houston’s twin brother world champions to win a title back in 2016, but he was also the first Charlo to lose as a professional when Tony Harrison scored a controversial decision win against him in December 2018.

Favored in the rematch, Charlo scored an impressive eleventh-round knockout in what I would call a career-defining performance to re-solidify his standing among the very best junior middleweights in the world today.

Becoming the two-time WBC junior middleweight champion was an impressive accomplishment for the 29-year-old, but it looks even better when you consider how well Harrison was fighting right up until Charlo scored the knockout.

It was a terrific back and forth battle between two highly skilled competitors. Now, let’s hope Charlo gets the chance to face unified junior middleweight champion Julian Williams in 2020. Williams is currently scheduled to face Jeison Rosario on Jan. 18 but is heavily favored to retain his titles. Assuming he wins as expected, there’s no better time for a unification battle than his very next fight.

MISS: The Predictable, Avoidable and Wholy Entertaining Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Debacle 

Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.’s appearance on DAZN Friday night in Arizona against Danny Jacobs was such a wild spectacle of outlandish entertainment that it almost deserves to be labeled as one of the biggest hits of the weekend.

But since Chavez Jr. probably never should have been in the main event in the first place, and because the 33-year-old son of Mexico’s most admired fighter ever ended the night by quitting on his stool with a bloody nose after experiencing the first slightest hint of adversity, it’s probably best to just label this particular showing a big swing and a miss.

Let’s go over all these crazy things just one more time for posterity’s sake. Back in October, Chavez Jr. refused to take a random drug test required by the Nevada Athletic Commission after promoters requested the Jacobs-Chavez Jr. bout be sanctioned in Las Vegas. Chavez Jr. was temporarily suspended until he was to appear before the NSAC, which made sense because he had already failed prefight drug tests in Nevada twice before.

The fight was then moved to Arizona which sanctioned the match after Chavez Jr’s attorneys won a lawsuit against the NSAC to have the suspension vacated. With that settled, Chavez Jr. proceeded to weigh in at 172.7 pounds–well over the 168-pound super middleweight limit. But instead of Jacobs moving on to the pre-identified backup plan of fighting Gabriel Rosado, Jacobs and his team decided to allow Chavez Jr. to pay the million-dollar penalty for the fight to go as planned.

To be fair, the fight was pretty solid right up until the moment Jacobs hit Chavez Jr. in the nose and the Mexican decided to quit. At that point, though, fans began throwing bottles, shoes and other kinds of trash at Chavez Jr., and the fighter had to be shielded from the onslaught by celebrity actor Micky Rourke who had come to the fight in support of Chavez Jr.

HIT: New WBC Flyweight Champ Julio Cesar Martinez’s Title Winning Redo

Flyweights don’t always move the needle for everyone, but Julio Cesar Martinez has sure seemed to consistently earn the respect and admiration of boxing fans all over the world as of late.

Martinez captured the vacant WBC flyweight belt with a ninth-round knockout of Cristofer Rosales on Friday on the undercard of the Jacobs-Chavez Jr. card in Arizona. It was a tremendous performance, one that proved his dominance of Charlie Edwards last time out was no fluke.

Martinez had defeated Edwards via a one-sided stoppage for the same title back in August, but the win was quickly overturned by the WBC after it was apparent that one of the punches Martinez landed to stop Edwards landed late.

The WBC ordered an immediate rematch, but Edwards decided he’d rather avoid getting rolled by Martinez again so he vacated his title. That left Martinez the chance to fight Rosales for the belt, and the 24-year-old from Mexico City made good on the opportunity by stopping Rosales in what was probably the best fight of the weekend.

MISS: The Coronation of “Top Prospect’ Karlos Balderas 

So, who tabbed Karlos Balderas as one of the top prospects in boxing?

I know that’s what we in the media were trained to think by promoters through various press releases and promotional assets over the course of the last few years, but all that hyperbole seems pretty silly right about now

In fact, the last press release sent out by the PBC before Balderas got wrecked by Rene Tellez-Giron on Saturday night in the opening bout of the Harrison-Charlo 2 card hailed him as a “sensational 2016 U.S. Olympian” who was one of the “top prospects” in the entire sport.

PBC on Fox’s Brian Kenny even went so far as to tell the audience that Balderas was on his way to carving out his own place alongside the likes of other top young lightweight stars such as Teofimo Lopez and Ryan Garcia.

But Tellez-Giron, coming straight off a loss, by the way, in his last fight, decidedly dominated Balderas with some pretty tremendous power punching on the way to scoring two knockdowns in the six-round stoppage win.

Moreover, Tellez-Giron was arguably forced to win the fight twice after referee Ray Corona allowed the contest to continue for some reason at the end of the third when it was fairly clear Tellez-Girron had done enough to warrant the stoppage.

So maybe promotional crews in boxing use way too much hyperbole when talking up young fighters like Balderas. But absolutely we in the boxing media accept way too much of it without too many questions.

HIT: Heavyweight Hopefuls Daniel Dubois and Efe Ajagba’s Stunning 2019 Cappers

Two of the best heavyweight prospects in the sport were in action on Saturday, and both ended up capping their 2019 campaigns in fine form.

Daniel Dubois knocked Kyotaro Fujimoto down with a jab in the second round on Saturday night in the main event at Copper Box Arena in London, then out for good a few moments later to prove why he’s considered the best young heavyweight plying the trade across the pond.

There are tons of things to love about Dubois. He’s a six-foot-five-inch terror with tremendous power and fluid movement. Just 22-years-old, Dubois went 5-0 with 5 KOs in 2019 including capturing the Britsh and Commonwealth heavyweight titles in successive fights.

Meanwhile, Efe Ajagba scored a vitally important knockout win against Iago Kiladze on the undercard of Harrison-Charlo 2. Ajagba stands six-feet-six-inches tall and enjoys the longest reach ever recorded in the history of the heavyweight division at 85 inches.

But it wasn’t quite as easy for Ajagba as it was for Dubois.

The 25-year-old was dominating Kiladze right up until the third round when Ajagba seems to have believed the referee was about to wave off the fight. Kiladze suddenly stormed back to knock Ajagba down in the third round which forced the Nigerian-born heavyweight to learn the most valuable lesson of all for fighters in the heavyweight ranks: finish people when they are hurt.

Still, Ajagba did finish Kiladze in the fifth round to end the year 4-0 with 3 KOs. Now, his trainer, Ronnie Shields, has more important data to work with in regards to getting Ajagba ready for the next level of competition, and it didn’t have to come at the expense of suffering much more than the hurt pride of having been put down to the canvas.

And it’s much better it happened now against the limited Kiladze than had it come later against more dangerous opposition.

Photo credit: Stephanie Trapp

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