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‘How To Box’ by Joe Louis: Part 4 – Bodywork and the Uppercut

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There is a certain type of Joe Louis opponent. He is not defined by the style with which he boxes, his size or his temperament. What binds these men together is that they gained the attention of Joe Louis as adversaries. Think of men like Jersey Joe Walcott (more of whom in Part Five), Max Schmeling and Billy Conn. At a given moment it dawned upon each of these men for the first time that Joe Louis had really noticed him. So many fighters who had the bravery to take to the ring with him were interchangeable. Paycheck, Dorazio, McCoy, Roper, Lewis, these men did not stir in Louis even the merest suggestion that he was doing anything other than what came naturally; he was a shark that had come to feed.

For each of those that troubled him long enough for him to notice them in a more fundamental way, a way that called for studied consideration, the moment of realization came at different times. Walcott learned last, as he took to his heels and ran from Joe in the final round of their first fight. Schmeling likely realized in the moment his back was broken by a Louis punch in their rematch. Conn recognized his predicament as he came to from an inexplicable reverie in his dressing room before his own second fight with Louis long enough to mutter, “this will be the worst fight ever” and trudging to the ring with the same expectation of a positive outcome as a man heading to the gallows.

And what of Arturo Godoy, the Chilean jack-in-the-box bruiser who extended Joe Louis fifteen rounds in February of 1940, when did he realise he had drawn the special attention of a champion who always wrought terrible havoc on the fighters that caught his eye? History doesn’t record the exact moment but if I were guessing I would speculate that it was whenever he learned that Louis was working in training specifically to nullify the Godoy style. According to The San Jose Evening News, Louis had been working with sparring partners who were told to recreate the “croquet-wicket stance” of the Chilean contender whilst Louis worked upon tactics to nullify the awkwardness of an opponent who had split the decision in that first fight.

It seemed Godoy had caught the attention of Jack Blackburn, too.

After the debacle that was the first Schmeling fight, Blackburn tended to satisfy himself with a solid training camp that saw Louis turn up and do what he was told. Blackburn was hired in part because he was tough enough to handle a man with Joe’s astonishing gifts but by the time the German had been set up for them, a problem that even canny manager John Roxborough could not have foreseen emerged—Blackburn had gone soft. This embittered, giant-killing, murdering alcoholic had fallen so completely for Joe Louis that he couldn’t bring him to heel. Blackburn complained bitterly to the Norfolk Journal and Guide about Joe’s new relaxed attitude to training.

“You newspaper men have made him think he can just walk out and punch anyone over and that Schmeling’s the easiest pushover of the lot. Well Joe’s likely to get hit on the chin by one of them Schmeling rights…”

The trainer’s total prescience in predicting not just Joe’s downfall but the specific mode of that downfall is arguably the best thing that ever happened to Louis. Little Chappie had no more problems getting Big Chappie to listen to what he was told thereafter. Louis worked in training, only pausing long enough to let Blackburn taste the sweat on his shoulder when, after weighing the salt content, he would indicate whether Joe should continue or hit the shower.

Whilst they talked about the specific strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, Blackburn did not have a modern-day trainer’s access to film or internet and Godoy had not boxed in the United States since 1937. In early 1940, Blackburn and Louis had been caught by surprise and had been run close. They would not repeat that mistake four months later.

“I don’t like other fella to make me look bad,” said Joe. “They usually find out I don’t like it.”

Another Joe Louis punch was about to come of age.

The Uppercut

“Perhaps the shortest of all blows is the uppercut.”

This is the first word on the uppercut in the Joe Louis boxing manual. I hope readers are by now familiar with How to Box. Joe did indeed throw uppercuts shorter even than the narrowest of his hooks, but it was not a punch that he used to bombard and overwhelm opponents until the second fight with Godoy. The uppercut in volume solved both problems Godoy had set for him in the first fight, discouraging the headbutts Joe felt the Chilean had reigned down upon him and punishing every reckless step in his swarming attack. The punches themselves are dizzying. Louis begins with a right uppercut inside, “bending to the right and slightly forwards” as How to Box advises on throwing the right uppercut, before stepping back as Godoy (pi

Burman

Burman

ctured) tries to crowd him and landing a left uppercut/overhand right twice in quick succession, “dropping your right arm a few inches and making sure the fingers of your fist are facing your own body, bring your right arm up in an underhand arc to your opponent’s chin.”

A missed or even a landed uppercut can be an invitation to the wildest of counters because, as per the above description, it commits the bodyweight to the same side as the punch that is being thrown. You transfer the weight to your left side as you throw your left. Joe’s problem with the commitment he shows to this punch is that it makes him vulnerable to exactly the type of rushes that Godoy excels in. This, then, is why Louis is so careful to throw another punch behind it, generally his wildest, least technically fussy punch. His balance allows him to commit to this sort of plan. Imagine for a moment the practical difficulties in maintaining balance, never mind punching position, whilst being leaned upon and butted by a 200 lb. man and steering your weight right and throwing the uppercut—now add the technical detail of the second punch (see Part 3—The Right Hand). My guess is that there has been no fighter around his weight capable of making this fight plan work with the possible exception of Evander Holyfield or Ezzard Charles, who were never able to generate anything like the speed and power Louis had on these punches.

Godoy would say afterwards that these were the blows that dissuaded him from his highly publicized pre-fight strategy of slugging it out with Louis. He had lasted perhaps thirty seconds.

Going now to the fight-plan that had caused Louis so much frustration in the first fight, Godoy tried to swarm his way in from the crouch, Louis greeted him with the right uppercut to the body. The punches that come right after this blow are the ones that had made so little impression on the challenger in the first fight, but Louis has his single welcomer down pat already—the uppercut is working.

Just how much he needs that uppercut becomes apparent as the rest of the round plays itself out. Louis spoke after the first fight of his concern for his hands. Beating a tattoo upon Godoy’s bowed head, he claims to have never risked the wrath of his full-blooded straight punches in that fight—there is indeed a noted difference in the Louis jab, which Blackburn has convinced him he needs to throw with impunity in the second meeting—but the straight right stays in the holster. The other punches skit and whistle off Godoy as he burrows in, the angles are all wrong as he gets inside the arc of the left hook and even that messier cross. Whenever a near-to-flush punch finds him, he dips even lower to ditch whatever comes behind it. Through the second, third, fourth and fifth Louis peppered uppercuts into what may have seemed at the time a repeat of the first fight, but that punch was telling. Sometimes he just lifted them into the face or body of the oncoming Chilean as he mauled forwards, low-risk, low-reward punches that did a cumulative damage to his opponent. But every now and again he would turn the style on and throw the punch as it’s described in How to Box, giving it “the slight twist of the hip” that will often “send your opponent tumbling to the canvas.”

At the end of the fifth, Louis told Blackburn that his stubborn opponent was “getting soft” and was “ready to go.” Blackburn hesitated, then told Louis to keep boxing for one more round. The frustration in Joe’s work in those three minutes is there to see; it is, I believe, his worst round of the fight. He’s a shark that came to fight but is now ready to feed. Blackburn saw the redundancy of holding him back any longer, and in the seventh, Louis came to kill. The weapon of choice, of course, was the uppercut.

By the beginning of that seventh, Joe had already inflicted upon Godoy the wounds, predominantly to his left eye and his lips, that would lead The Afro American to describe him as “the worst battered piece of meat ever to walk from the Yankee Stadium,” easy to write off as hyperbole were it not for The Calgary Herald describing him one week later as “still looking like he had been hit with a meat-clever.”

Louis landed more than a dozen flush uppercuts of the perfected variety in that seventh round and to appreciate their power is to watch Godoy lose touch with his own boxing as the round ticks down. No longer fighting to contain his man he now makes half steps, turning Godoy as he goes, opening doors for one or other of those cleaving punches that cost him so little in terms of balance. The knockdown, which comes right at the end of the round, is a sight to see, as Godoy bobs twice below waist height, a bemused Louis looking on, missing with his first punch, but then straightening Godoy to almost his full height against his will on the end of first a left-handed, and then a right-handed uppercut. This is the Louis solution to the Godoy crouch in a nutshell: punch him underneath his chin until he stands up straight.

The eighth is a master class in the uppercut. Louis recognizes immediately that Godoy no longer has the balance or strength to swarm and that he is now only following. He immediately transfers his offense to the backfoot, fighting laterally and backwards making room by turns for each hand. Godoy is a rampart crumbling.

The straight right hand is finally uncorked to dispatch the gutsy Chilean, but the uppercut is the punch that solved the puzzle, won the fight, and opened Godoy’s face like a can of blood-frothed beer. The “dozens” of stitches he needed in his eyebrows post-fight likely contributed to the end of his prime—Louis had broken another one and Godoy won only four of his next twelve fights.

But he was spared the expected body punching, outside of the occasional uppercut. The press had been almost unanimous pre-fight in predicting that Louis would go to the body in an effort to “straighten Godoy up.”

Bodywork

When Joe Louis stopped Red Burman with a body punch in January of 1941, the most telling reaction was surprise. Louis just didn’t knock guys out with body shots.

“For the first time in his three year reign as king of the fistic world,” wrote the Lewiston Morning Tribune, “[Louis] knocked out a rival with a punch to the body.”

The punch itself was a straight right hand, the most precise and deadly of the Louis finishers as outlined in Part Three, this time driven to the heart.

“So unexpected was it,” the newspaper continued, “that the crowd in Madison Square Garden let out an audible gasp as the Brown Bomber revealed this new way of arriving at the old result. Up to tonight he flattened 10 of the 12 battlers who had challenged the reign he began when he finished old Jim Braddock…the head punches were the crushers.”

Burman had also surprised up until that point, doing well and arguably winning the third on a hard left hand that “half turned” the champion, but in the fifth he was brought to heel, cut and bloodied before being trapped upon the ropes and very nearly broken in two.

Burman

Louis vs. Burman

“A funny look spread over [Burman’s] face,” said the Tribune of the challenger’s reaction to the final punch. “Then he toppled. He fell with his head and neck across the bottom strand of the ropes and stayed that way, moving only slightly.”

“That was just about the hardest punch I ever threw,” Louis offered post-fight.

The above remark is worthy of your consideration. Louis still had some incredible punches ahead of him including, amongst others, the destruction of Buddy Baer (more of which in Part Six) but his more famous single punches— the left hook against Galento that brought blood from the face of “the little man” in rivers, the cannonball right that left Braddock in repost on the canvas, the shot that brought the famous scream from Schmeling—were behind him. But Joe’s pick—or “just about”—was the body shot he threw at Burman, twelve defences into his extraordinary title run. What this tells us is that Louis is as capable of hurting a man to the body as he is to the head. The reason that he doesn’t have more stoppages via body punches is that he was every bit as much a headhunter as his single peer, Muhammad Ali. But Louis was far too drilled, far too much the perfect technician to neglect body punching in the same way. He used it as a tool to facilitate his headhunting, and so great a fighter was he that he sharpened this tool not upon journeymen as is customary, but upon two former heavyweight champions of the world.

A little under a year after turning professional with a record standing at just 19-0, Joe Louis matched not just a former world champion but a man who outweighed him by more than sixty pounds in the shape of Italian giant Primo Carnera. In the first, Louis ripped punches into Carnera’s head and Carnera did his best to grab his tormentor, closing down avenues for Joe’s more exact punches upstairs but opening up the body. In the second Louis attacked that body two-handed as Carnera’s eyes were filled by what the Lewiston Daily Sun ringside reporter described as “a look of horror.” By adding bodywork, Louis had transformed himself into a lit stick of dynamite, still possible to smother, but only to one’s detriment. He continued to mix his punches in this fashion until the fourth, during which he rested a little only to open up in earnest in the fifth.

As always, Louis is looking to land his jab, but here he goes to the body. Carnera has a serious size advantage and whilst Louis hasn’t struggled to reach him the jab is his way in. When he throws this punch to the body it is not quite as perfect or snapping as is the respective punch to the head. Louis “pumps” his left when he throws it downstairs, often taking a step to his left or straight back as he does so, a nod to his temporary vulnerability as, for just a second, his bodyweight goes over that front foot. Adding a stout jab to the chest, his offense is in motion without his having to overreach himself in any meaningful way. Carnera is understandably but ineffectually trying to maintain distance with his own jab but Louis has a dramatic advantage in handspeed which allows him to close that gap. When the Italian manages to move off the ropes having suffered a handful of Joe’s Sunday punches, Louis again returns to the jab to the body, lowering Carnera’s guard and setting him up beautifully for the feint Louis launches at around 1:50 of the round, a step inside as though he were about to jab the body followed by a shift and a clattering hook upstairs. Carnera’s bewilderment is now complete. He is guarding against a jab to the body, a jab to the chest, flashing punches upstairs and a feint off the low jab. With just two different jabs downstairs, Louis has bought himself total tactical superiority over a much larger former champion of the world.

In the sixth, a scything left hook is added to the wheelhouse right Louis dropped at the end of the fifth. This punch causes Carnera notable discomfort as it is delivered in the same fashion as the left hook to the head, short, fast and powered through the right leg (see Part Two—The Jab & Left Hook). As a rule Louis displays no equivalent to the straight right hand to the body (though he seems to have made an exception for the unfortunate Burman) but he throws his other power punches in near identical fashion to the ones he throws upstairs. For all that, they are rarer and generally abandoned when it is time for Louis to finish, although he does feint a left to the body as he prepares the giant’s coup-de-grace.

Only weeks later, bodywork played a less crucial role against another former heavyweight champion, Jack Sharkey.

Sharkey was there for Joe’s punches more than Carnera had been by virtue of his lesser size but Louis utilized a great uppercut to the body in that fight, straight through the middle as Sharkey went into his crouch, foreshadowing his eventual solution to the Godoy problem. Sharkey’s lack of dynamism and abandonment of his offense also left him vulnerable to a newfound fluidity in Louis as he went round the houses on Jack, landing a left to the head then a right to the body then a left to the body and a right to the head. But these body blows are not the eye-catching punches, and nor should they be. How to Box offers little, a single paragraph which notes dryly how body punches are liable to “weaken the opponent,” but as we’ve seen they were much more. The body punch that laid Red Burman low led him to label Louis “the killer-driller,” a nickname that may have stuck were it not for the fact that Louis had been “The Brown Bomber” for many defences by that stage. The real function of Joe’s bodywork was not to “kill” however, rather it was designed as a second front, a secondary wave of attack to confuse and stretch the opponent’s defence. Louis, like all great destroyers, understood to take the opponent’s defences to pieces. Furthermore, like all great fighters he has a defence of his very own. It is not the deeply flawed defence of legend, either. It is layered, for the most part technically sound, designed to facilitate the punches that made Joe Louis famous and the subject of Part Five.

I hope you can join me.

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Australia’s Liam Paro Aims to Steal the Show on the Haney-Prograis Card

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These are heady days for the sport of professional boxing in Australia. Cruiserweight Jai Opetaia is the best fighter in his weight class. Tim Tszyu is a major star in the Land Down Under and his younger brother Nikita is lapping at his heels. Then there’s undefeated super lightweight Liam Paro, 27, whose profile will grow immensely if he can get past Cleveland’s Montana Love when they meet on Dec. 9 in San Francisco at the home of the Golden State Warriors. It’s a 12-rounder that will serve as the chief supporting bout to the showdown between Devin Haney and Regis Prograis.

Forget the fact that Matchroom honcho Eddie Hearn has seen fit to dress up this fight with some frivolous title; this is a good match-up. An undefeated southpaw, Liam Paro (23-0, 14 KOs) is coming off the best win of his career. Montana Love (18-1-1, 9 KOs) would likely be undefeated too if not for a bizarre disqualification in his most recent bout. He too is a southpaw.

Paro turned heads in is his last outing when he scored a brutal, one-punch, opening-round knockout of countryman Brock Jarvis. Paro was favored, bur Jarvis, a disciple of Jeff Fenech, Australia’ most famous living boxer, was accorded the better chance of ending the bout with one punch.

Paro vs. Jarvis, staged in October of last year in South Brisbane, marked Matchroom’s first foray into Australia. Paro has had two fights fall out in the interim. The British Boxing Board of Control pulled Paro out of a March 11, 2003 match in Liverpool, England with Robbie Davies Jr. when a routine but mandatory scan showed evidence of a facial fracture. Three months later, Paro was forced to withdraw from a title fight with WBA 140-pound belt-holder Regis Prograis because both of his Achilles tendons were inflamed, compromising his mobility.

The facial fracture, insists Paro, was a false positive; the test was defective. As for the Achilles issue, that’s cleared up. “It’s in my rear-view mirror,” he says.

Paro was raised in the city of Mackay which is near the Coral Sea coast of Queensland. His ancestors migrated here from Italy to work in the sugarcane fields. Unlike so many other dads, his father Errol, a welder in the steel industry, has no boxing background and isn’t directly involved in preparing his son for a fight. Errol is with his son in Las Vegas at the moment (Errol’s first visit to Sin City) and will be there with several other family members to cheer on Liam when he resumes his career in San Francisco on Dec. 9.

When healthy, Liam Paro can usually be found training at the Top Rank Gym in Las Vegas. The boxing infrastructure of the Southern Nevada city draws prizefighters from around the world. He has sparred extensively with Jamel Herring and has boxed with the likes of Shakur Stevenson and Devin Haney. Practicing his craft with fighters of that caliber may give him an edge when he touches gloves with Montana Love.

Montana Love

Montana Love came to the fore in August of 2021 when he stepped up in class and upset Russian tough guy Ivan Baranchyk on a Jake Paul promotion in Cleveland. Baranchyk’s handlers stopped the one-sided affair after seven rounds. Five weeks later, Love signed with Matchroom.

Montana Love

Montana Love

What followed was a third-round blast-out of 29-1 Carlos Diaz followed by a hard-earned 12-round decision over Gabriel Gollaz Valenzuela and then a match with Australia’s Steve Spark which marked Love’s debut as a top-of-the-marquee attraction in his hometown.

The fight between Love and Spark was even on two scorecards after five rounds. In the sixth, shortly after a clash of heads left Love with a bad cut over his left eye, Love pushed Spark out of the ring and was immediately disqualified by referee David Fields. It was a controversial call; a “terrible call” in the words of Eddie Hearn. For the record, after flipping over the top strand of rope, Spark landed on his feet and was fit to continue.

A 28-year-old father of three, Love has always had the vibe of a hungry fighter, a residue of the adversity he has had to overcome. His father died when he was three years old and his mother was only 38 when she passed away from colon cancer. In 2015, as his career was just getting started, he was remanded to prison on theft- and drug-related charges and served 16 months.

It’s rather ironic that Love will be facing an Australian opponent on American soil in back-to-back fights. Needless to say, he hopes that the second installment will go better than the first.

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The Murder of Samuel Teah Calls to Mind Other Boxers Who Were Homicide Victims

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There will be a boxing show this Friday at Philadelphia’s 2300 Arena, a low-budget card featuring the return of former IBF 130-pound world title-holder Tevin Farmer. During the event, there will assuredly be a somber moment when those in attendance stand and silently pay homage to Samuel Teah as the timekeeper tolls the traditional 10-bell farewell. Teah passed away last week on Black Friday, Nov. 24, another victim of America’s epidemic of gun violence. He was 36 years old.

Teah was shot in the mid-afternoon during an altercation that spilled onto the sidewalk of a street in Wilmington, Delaware, and died at a Wilmington hospital. As of this writing, there’s been no arrest, but the shooting was apparently not random. A bus driver for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, Teah was purportedly in Wilmington (roughly 35 miles from his home in Philadelphia) to visit the mother of his child.

Samuel Teah fought as recently as this past May when he suffered a shocking defeat at the hands of journeyman Andrew Rodgers at a show in Pennsylvania’s Newton Township, reducing his record to 19-5-1. Two months earlier he had spoiled the undefeated record of Enriko Gogokhia, an Egis Klimas fighter (think Oleksandr Usyk and Vasily Lomachenko) on a card in Ontario, California. This embellished his reputation as a spoiler. Earlier in his career, he had spoiled the undefeated record of O’Shaquie Foster, winning an 8-round unanimous decision over the man that currently reigns as the WBC world super featherweight champion.

What made Teah’s death more tragic, if that were possible, were all the tragedies that he had overcome. He was born in Liberia when that country was embroiled in a civil war. The family escaped to a refugee camp in Ghana and eventually reached the United States, settling first in New York and then Philadelphia. On the day after Christmas in 2008, when Teah was 21 and working at a Home Depot, he lost six members of his family in a fire that swept his mother’s West Philadelphia duplex after a kerosene heater exploded.

For some, Teah’s violent death may call to mind the murder of another Philadelphia boxer, Tyrone Everett.

That’s an awkward comparison.

Tyrone Everett was a world-class fighter. Six months before he was shot dead by his girlfriend in May of 1977, Everett, then 34-0, lost a 15-round split decision to Puerto Rico’s Alfredo Escalera in a failed bid to win Escalera’s WBC junior lightweight title, a decision so rancid that it stands among the worst decisions of all time. Moreover, the circumstances of Everett’s murder were sordid. His girlfriend, no stranger to the police, fatally shot him after finding him with a transvestite and there was heroin in the apartment they shared. (Editor’s note: For more on this incident, check out the new book by TSS contributor Sean Nam: “Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, Fixed Fights, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing” available on Amazon).

Samuel Teah was no Tyrone Everett. A man of deep faith, Sam’s positive attitude, despite all his tribulations, was infectious. “Everyone liked Teah,” said prominent Philadelphia sports journalist Joe Santoliquito who, upon hearing of Teah’s death, tweeted, “he will always have a special place in my heart.”

While the circumstances are different in every case, Teah joins a long list of boxers who met a violent death. If we limit the list to fighters who were still active at the time of their passing, here are four that jump immediately to mind.

Stanley Ketchel

The fabled Michigan Assassin, Ketchel met his maker on Oct. 15, 1910, at a ranch in Conway, Missouri. In the immortal words of John Lardner, “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

Battling Siki

Famed for knocking out Georges Carpentier when the “Orchid Man” held the world light heavyweight title, Siki was only 28 years old when he was gunned down in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan on Dec. 15, 1925, but by then the Senegal-born Frenchman had already degenerated into a trial horse. Siki’s body was found in the middle of the street with two bullets in his back fired at close range by an assailant, never identified, who was thought to be avenging a beating he suffered at one of the speakeasies that Siki was known to frequent.

Oscar Bonavena

At age 33, Oscar Bonavena was still an active boxer when he was gunned down on May 22, 1976, on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, at the front gate of the infamous Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel. Bonavena had come up short in his biggest fights, losing a 15-round decision to Joe Frazier and losing by TKO in the 15th round to Muhammad Ali, but the rugged Argentine was still a major player in the heavyweight division.

The shooter was a bodyguard for the brothel’s owner Joe Conforte, and rumor has that Conforte was the de facto triggerman, having Bonavena assassinated because the boxer was having an affair with Conforte’s 59-year-old wife Sally who was also Bonavena’s manager of record at this point in the boxer’s career. The story about it spawned “Love Shack,” a 2010 movie that despite a seemingly can’t-miss storyline and a formidable cast (Joe Pesci played Joe and Helen Mirren played Sally) proved to be a box-office dud.

Vernon Forrest

While all homicides are tragic, some are more distressing than others and the death of Vernon Forrest on July 25, 2009, was particularly gut-wrenching. Forrest was shot twice in the back by would-be robbers with whom he exchanged gunfire on July 25, 2009 at a gas station in Atlanta.

Forget the fact that Forrest was a two-division title-holder who had regained the WBC world super welterweight title in his most recent fight with a lopsided decision over Sergio Mora. Few in the sport were as widely admired. His philanthropic work included establishing group homes in Atlanta for the mentally disabled. His death came just two weeks after the death of Arturo Gatti who left the sport following a loss by TKO to Alfonso Gomez in July of 2007 and died under suspicious circumstances at age 37 at a hotel in Brazil.

We here at The Sweet Science send our condolences to Samuel Teah’s family and loved ones. May he rest in peace.

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Benavidez Dismantles Andrade: Will Canelo Be Next?

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SHOWTIME aired its final pay-per-view event tonight with a show that aired from Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The four-fight PPV card included world title fights in the 140 and 130-pound divisions, plus an interim title fight at 168 and the return of former two-division title-holder Jarmall Charlo. The interim title fight was a battle of unbeatens between David Benavidez and Demetrius “Boo Boo” Andrade and that was the featured attraction.

Benavidez, 26, is big for the weight class and lived up to his new nickname, “El Monstro.” He had too much firepower for the 35-year-old Andrade, a 2008 Beijing Olympian who began his pro career at 154 and had won world titles in two lower weight classes. His big moment came in the waning seconds of round four when he knocked Andrade to his knees with a sweeping right hand. The fight turned brutally one-sided at that point although one of the judges had Benavidez ahead by only one point when the sixth round ended. But there would be no seventh round. Andrade’s corner wisely stopped the fight.

A consensus 7/2 favorite in man-to-man betting, Benavidez (28-0, 24 KOs) began his pro career in Mexico at age 16. In his post-fight interview, he called out Canelo Alvarez while brashly predicting that he would be a legend before he left the sport (and you’ll get no argument from this corner). It was the first pro loss for Andrade (32-1).

Co-Feature

Jermall Charlo returned to the ring after a 29-month absence and scored a lopsided 10-round decision over Jose Benavidez Jr. The judges had it 100-90, 99-91, and 98-92.

This bout was slated for the catch-weight of 163 pounds. Charlo came in overweight (166.4) but the match went ahead. Benavides Jr, a world title challenger during his days as a welterweight, had his moments, but was outclassed by Charlo who advanced his record to 33-0 (22). Benavidez falls to 28-3-1.

Matias-Ergashev

In what shaped up as the most action-packed fight of the night, 31-year-old Puerto Rican Subriel Matias retained his IBF 140-pound title, battering Shohjahon Ergashev into submission in a match that was halted by Ergashev’s corner two seconds into the sixth round. The heavy-handed Ergashev, who was undefeated heading in, dominated the first round-and-a-half, but Matias (20-1, 20 KOs) gradually wore him down.

Matias, who avenged his lone defeat to Petros Ananyan with a dominant showing in the rematch, had become something of a forgotten man in the talent-rich 140-pound weight class, but tonight he showed that he belongs among the elite in the division. It was the first pro loss for Egrashev (23-1, 20 KOs), a southpaw from Uzbekistan who fights out of Detroit and had SugarHill Steward (formally Javan “Sugar” Hill) in his corner.

Garcia-Roach

In the pay-per-view opener, Lamont Roach (24-1-1, 9 KOs) wrested the WBA 130-pound title from Hector Garcia (16-2) with a well-earned split decision. The judges had it 116-111 and 144-113 for Roach with the dissenter favoring Garcia 114-113.

A 32-year-old Dominican southpaw, Garcia was making the first defense of the title he won from Roger Gutierrez, a belt he was allowed to keep after moving up to lightweight to challenge Gervonta Davis, a bout he lost on a ninth-round stoppage. Roach, an underdog in the betting making his first start in 16 months, had come up short in a previous world title fight, losing a decision to Jamel Herring in 2019.

Roach was trailing on two of the scorecards through 10 rounds in what had been a ho-hum fight. But he cranked up the juice in the homestretch, rocking Garcia in the 11th and flooring him with a right hook in the final stanza. Take away that knockdown (an illegal punch as it landed behind Roach’s head), and Garcia would have retained his belt with a draw.

Non-PPV

In his first start at 140 pounds, Puerto Rico’s Michel Rivera rebounded from his first pro loss (a wide decision at the hands of Frank Martin) with a unanimous 10-round decision over Sergey Lipinets. The judges had it 96-94 and 97-93 twice. Rivera, who improved to 25-1 (14) patterns his style and his persona after Muhammad Ali with whom he bears a strong facial resemblance.

It was the first fight in 16 months for the 34-year-old Lipinets (17-3-1), from SoCal via Kazakhstan. He rarely took a backward step but it wasn’t effective aggression.

In the opener on Showtime’s YouTube channel. 21-year-old super welterweight Vito Mielnicki Jr, now trained by Ronnie Shields, scored the best win of his career, advancing to 16-1 (11 KOs). The pride of Vineland, NJ, Mielnicki had Alexis Salazar on the canvas three times before the match was halted at the 2:27 mark of the opening stanza. Guadalajara’s Salazar (25-6) had been stopped only once previously.

Photo credit: Amanda Westcott / SHOWTIME

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