Before ‘Bud’ Crawford, there was Ace Hudkins: A Look Back at the ‘Nebraska Wildcat’

Published

2 years ago

August 4, 2023

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Before ‘Bud’ Crawford, there was Ace Hudkins: A Look Back at the ‘Nebraska Wildcat’

During his career, Ace Hudkins was recognized as the California state champion in two weight classes – lightweight and heavyweight. He fought before crowds of 30,000-plus at baseball parks in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago and he came within a shade of wresting the world middleweight title from the great Mickey Walker, losing a decision widely assailed as a heist.

In light of Terence “Bud” Crawford’s brilliant performance last Saturday against Errol Spence, now would seem to be a good time to dust off the Ace Hudkins omnibus. Before Crawford, there was little argument that Hudkins was the best fighter ever born and raised in Nebraska.

Asa “Ace” Hudkins was born in 1905 in Valparaiso, a little farming town where his father owned a livery stable. His father died young and the family moved to Lincoln where Ace took up boxing at age 16 after first attracting notice as a wrestler with the Lincoln, Nebraska YMCA. He fought exclusively in and around the Cornhusker State before turning up in Los Angeles in December of 1924.

Los Angeles in 1924 was a boomtown. The population of LA County soared from 936,000 to 2.2 million during the decade of the 1920s. In December of 1924, boxing in the Golden State was on the cusp of a renaissance, the result of the new state law that took effect that month that overturned the law in effect since 1914 that had restricted matches to four rounds. A new arena for boxing was rising from the dirt on South Grand Avenue, the Olympic Auditorium, offering an alternative to Hollywood Legion Stadium, which itself was fairly new.

Having two venues for boxing in close proximity in a large and rapidly growing city was bound to drive up purses and Ace Hudkins was one of many leather-pushers who followed the scent of fresh money to Southern California in the mid-1920s.

In Hudkins’ second fight in California, on Jan. 9, 1925, he was thrust against California lightweight champion Tommy Carter. A capacity crowd was on hand for an event that was somewhat historic, marking the first “long fight” (i.e., 10-rounder) at Hollywood Legion Stadium.

The fight, by all accounts, was a doozy. Carter had the Nebraskan almost out on his feet in the third round, but Hudkins roared back and almost finished Carter in the sixth. The bout went the full distance and there was scarcely a dull moment. The referee awarded the match to Hudkins, a foregone conclusion as “the gawky, freckled kid from Nebraska,” as reporter Ed Frayne phrased it, “won conclusively.”

By then, Ace Hudkins had 45 pro fights under his belt although he was yet only 19 years old. Reporters took to referencing him as the Nebraska Wildcat and predicted that he would go far if he tightened up his defense.

Hudkins had 11 more fights before the year was out, all but one in Los Angeles. The exception was a 10-round contest in East Chicago, Indiana, against Sid Terris. The lightweight title was then in dispute – the great Benny Leonard had retired – and the winner would claim the title, notwithstanding the fact that the New York Commission recognized Buffalo’s Jimmy Goodrich.

The bout was a thriller climaxed by a breathtaking final round that had the crowd on its feet the whole while. Ace never took a backward step, but the consensus of ringside reporters was that he was out-boxed. This was no disgrace. Terris, a clever New Yorker with a magnificent record (66-4-2 heading in, per boxrec) would be inducted posthumously into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

During the bout, Ace was warned several times by referee Dave Barry (he of “long count” fame) for low blows and general roughhousing and this became part of his persona. Retrospectives of Ace Hudkins invariably touch upon his penchant for flouting the Queensberry code. “Whatever it takes (to win),” was his mantra.

Coney Island

Ace had better success against Terris’s landsman Ruby Goldstein. A baby-faced knockout artist from New York’s Lower East Side who would go on to become a prominent referee, Goldstein, nicknamed the Jewel of the Ghetto, was 23-0 when he was pitted against Hudkins on June 25, 1926, in the outdoor arena at Coney Island.

New York then had a rule that mandated that a fighter had to be at least 21 years old to compete in a 10-rounder. Both Hudkins and Goldstein were under the limit and their match was slated for six frames. Despite this encumbrance, a crowd estimated as high as 18,000 swarmed into Coney Island Stadium to see the Jewish phenom perform against the mysterious “wildcat” from out west who was making his Big Apple debut.

Things started swimmingly for Goldstein. Midway through the first round, he put Hudkins on the deck with a straight right hand. “At this stage,” wrote the ringside reporter for the Brooklyn Standard Union, “the buttonhole makers who wagered their shekels on Ruby were counting the profits.” But Hudkins was up at the count of six and bobbed and weaved and clinched to last out the round.

Goldstein won the second round also, but Ace landed a big right hand just before the bell and from that point it was all Hudkins who ended the match in the fourth with a paralyzing left hook that put Goldstein down for the count. A physician clambered into the ring and stayed with him until he regained his senses and young Ruby would leave the ring in tears.

Hudkins had three more fights in New York before returning to Los Angeles where he racked up five straight wins, outpointing such notables as Mexican-American trailblazer Bert Colima and future Hall of Famer Lew Tendler.

Welterweight

When Ace returned to New York in the summer of 1927, he was a full-fledged welterweight. He carried 146 pounds for his June 15 date with Sergeant Sammy Baker at the Polo Grounds on a card studded with leading lightweight contenders.

The guest of honor was Col. Charles Lindbergh who had flown solo from New York to Paris the preceding month, a feat that made him a national hero. Lindbergh came there at the behest of Ace Hudkins. It turned out that they were old friends who met when Lindbergh, three years older than Ace, was in Lincoln attending flight school.

The motorcade that transported Lindbergh and his host Mayor Jimmy Walker to the fight ran into traffic and Lindbergh missed the first two rounds. When he finally took his seat, Hudkins’ right eye was already purplish and swollen. The cut over the eye burst wide open in round seven and the referee waived the fight off.

Hudkins got his revenge the following month in a fight for the ages at LA’s Wrigley Field, home to the city’s Triple-A baseball teams.

Hudkins-Baker II was a gory spectacle. At the finish, said a ringside scribe, “both fighters were covered with blood and many ringside spectators wished they had come equipped with umbrellas.” Harry Grayson, soon to be one of America’s highest-paid newspaper writers as the sports editor of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, could not contain his enthusiasm. “Veterans declared it to be the most savage contest their tired old eyes ever gazed upon,” said Grayson. “This writer never saw a more bitterly contested duel between great fighters.”

The fourth round ended with Sergeant Baker flat on his back, unconscious. But the bell sounded when the referee reached the count of nine and Baker recovered during the one-minute respite and fought his way back into the fight. The turnout, at least 30,000, was said to be the largest in LA boxing history and the gate receipts exceeded the previous high by a good margin.

A fighter of Sicilian extraction from Baltimore, Joe Dundee, then had the strongest claim to the welterweight title. Hudkins signed to meet him at Wrigley Field on Nov. 4. 1927. What ensued was one of the nastiest riots in California boxing history.

Dundee refused to come out of his dressing room when the promoter failed to make good on his guaranteed $60,000 fee. When that became obvious, fistfights erupted like wildfires in every section of the enclosure. Some of the belligerents managed to make their way into the ring. The battle royal collapsed the ropes on one side of the ring and a score of men landed on press row, crushing typewriters and telegraph equipment. Every available policeman in the city was dispatched to the ballpark where they “wielded their nightsticks with vigor” to quell the conflagration.

Middleweight

Hudkins then set his sights on middleweight champion Mickey Walker, the Toy Bulldog, a former welterweight title-holder who would go on to defeat some of the leading heavyweight contenders before his career had wended its course. While he was waiting, he engaged in several more fights, notably a rubber match with Sergeant Sammy Baker at Madison Square Garden. This bout wasn’t as gory as their second fight, but was every bit as robust. The decision went to the “wildcat” who struck the reporter from the New York Daily News as a throwback to the Stone Age.

Ace Hudkins and Mickey Walker collided on June 21, 1928, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. It was 10-rounder, the limit then in effect in Chicago for any prizefight, whether for a world title or otherwise. The turnout, purportedly 30,000, was impressive considering the ominous skies, a portent of the torrential downpour that larruped the crowd in the final two rounds.

It was a bloody, tightly-contested affair and, at the conclusion, most of the reporters were in accord with the referee who deemed Ace Hudkins the winner. But both judges dissented (their scorecards were not made public) and Walker retained his crown.

Despite the drenching from the cloudburst, many in the crowd lingered long after the fight to vent their displeasure, holding up the walk-out fight. “It was one of the wildest demonstrations of disapproval any championship fight has witnessed in recent years, lasting fifteen minutes in full volume and a half-hour in more sporadic form,” said the correspondent for the Associated Press.

The damage was starting to take its toll on the Nebraska Wildcat, a glutton for punishment. He lured Mickey Walker to LA for a rematch, but their contest, on Oct. 6, 1929, was a pale imitation of their first encounter. The reporter for the Los Angeles Record scored the bout 6-1-3 for the Toy Bulldog while conceding that his tally may have been a bit generous to Hudkins. This may, however, have been Hudkins’ best payday. The turnout, 21,370, including many Hollywood stars, shattered the California record for gate receipts.

Light Heavyweight

Undeterred by his second failed bid at Walker’s middleweight title, Hudkins set his sights on the light heavyweight diadem. To this end, he challenged the leading contender and future title-holder Maxie Rosebloom.

Their match at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 14, 1930, although a predictably foul-filled tussle, was an entertaining affair. Ace won the first three rounds, but then faded. In reaching for a stab at the light heavyweight title, he had reached too far.

Hudkins, clearly past his prime although only 25 years old, would have only seven more fights before calling it quits. In the fifth of those seven fights, however, he turned back the clock, winning the California heavyweight title from Dynamite Jackson. Hudkins upended Jackson before a packed house at the Olympic Auditorium on Sept. 15, 1931, in a match pushed back three weeks after Ace suffered a bad case of poison ivy.

Heavyweight

In his customary slashing and mauling style, Hudkins wore down his 205-pound adversary and coasted home after building an insurmountable lead. “The spectacle of the 173-pounder moving his heavier foe around the ring, much as husky gentlemen shove pianos, gave the crowd many a chuckle,” said the reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Express.

Ace had previously defeated Chicago heavyweight hopeful King Levinsky and his triumph over Jackson sparked talk of a match between him and rising heavyweight star Max Baer. That would have been an interesting match-up, if only because it would have paired two native Nebraskans. Baer was born in Omaha but spent his formative years in Colorado and Northern California.

That match never materialized and Ace’s win over Dynamite Jackson proved to be his last hurrah. He surrendered the title to Lee Ramage in his first defense and his performance in his swan song fight with Utah journeyman Wesley Ketchell was desultory. The best that could be said is that he lasted the distance in both matches. The only man that ever stopped him was Sergeant Sammy Baker and Ace avenged that setback twice.

After the Fall

In retirement, Hudkins became an alcoholic which led to numerous brushes with the law resulting from bar brawls, drunk driving, and such, and a near-fatal incident in 1933 when he was shot in the chest by the proprietor of a nightclub. But he kicked the habit and became a successful businessman. With his three brothers – Clyde, Art, and Ode – he opened a ranch that rented horses and related equipment to Hollywood filmmakers and TV studios in an era when Westerns were the backbone of the industry. Roy Rogers’ famous “Trigger” and the original “Silver” of Lone Ranger fame were boarded and trained at the Hudkins Brothers North Hollywood facility. Ace appeared with some of his horses in a few movies where he was an uncredited stunt rider. He was battling Parkinson’s disease when he passed away at age 67 in 1973.

You won’t find a plaque for Ace Hudkins at the International Boxing Hall of Fame, but that may yet happen. In this reporter’s opinion, he is no less qualified than Tiger Jack Fox, the most recent inductee in the Old Timer category, and Hudkins created much more of a stir during his brief but tumultuous career.

As to whether Ace could hold his own with Bud Crawford, that’s a rhetorical question. Crawford is a special talent. There are many dimensions to his game, whereas Hudkins, although tough as nails, had only one gear. A reporter seeking the right adjective to describe his technique, came up with the word longshoreman. But despite his limitations, it would be hard to argue with former LA Times scribe Paul Lowry who called Hudkins the best near-champion of his era.

Paul Gallico referenced Ace Hudkins in his classic memoir, “Farewell to Sport.” We’ll give Gallico the last word, er, words: “[He] was tough, hard, mean, cantankerous, combative, foul, nasty, courageous, acrimonious, and filled at all times with bitter and flaming lust for battle.”

—

Editor’s Note: Kristine Sader, a distant relative who had access to Ace Hudkins’ scrapbooks, wrote a biography of the boxer that was published in 2018. “Ace Hudkins: Boxing with the Nebraska Wildcat,” a $25 paperback, can be found at Amazon.

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Arne K. Lang

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“Breadman” Edwards: An Unlikely Boxing Coach with a Panoramic View of the Sport

Published

14 hours ago

May 8, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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Stephen “Breadman” Edwards’ first fighter won a world title. That may be some sort of record.

It’s true. Edwards had never trained a fighter, amateur or pro, before taking on professional novice Julian “J Rock” Williams. On May 11, 2019, Williams wrested the IBF 154-pound world title from Jarrett Hurd. The bout, a lusty skirmish, was in Fairfax, Virginia, near Hurd’s hometown in Maryland, and the previously undefeated Hurd had the crowd in his corner.

In boxing, Stephen Edwards wears two hats. He has a growing reputation as a boxing coach, a hat he will wear on Saturday, May 31, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when the two fighters that he currently trains, super middleweight Caleb Plant and middleweight Kyrone Davis, display their wares on a show that will air on Amazon Prime Video. Plant, who needs no introduction, figures to have little trouble with his foe in a match conceived as an appetizer to a showdown with Jermall Charlo. Davis, coming off his career-best win, an upset of previously undefeated Elijah Garcia, is in tough against fast-rising Cuban prospect Yoenli Hernandez, a former world amateur champion.

Edwards’ other hat is that of a journalist. His byline appears at “Boxing Scene” in a column where he answers questions from readers.

It’s an eclectic bag of questions that Breadman addresses, ranging from his thoughts on an upcoming fight to his thoughts on one of the legendary prizefighters of olden days. Boxing fans, more so than fans of any other sport, enjoy hashing over fantasy fights between great fighters of different eras. Breadman is very good at this, which isn’t to suggest that his opinions are gospel, merely that he always has something provocative to add to the discourse. Like all good historians, he recognizes that the best history is revisionist history.

“Fighters are constantly mislabled,” he says. “Everyone talks about Joe Louis’s right hand. But if you study him you see that his left hook is every bit as good as his right hand and it’s more sneaky in terms of shock value when it lands.”

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father died when he was three. His maternal grandfather, a Korean War veteran, filled the void. The man was a big boxing fan and the two would watch the fights together on the family television.

Edwards’ nickname dates to his early teen years when he was one of the best basketball players in his neighborhood. The derivation is the 1975 movie “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” starring Laurence Fishburne in his big screen debut. Future NBA All-Star Jamaal Wilkes, fresh out of UCLA, plays Cornbread, a standout high school basketball player who is mistakenly murdered by the police.

Coming out of high school, Breadman had to choose between an academic scholarship at Temple or an athletic scholarship at nearby Lincoln University. He chose the former, intending to major in criminal justice, but didn’t stay in college long. What followed were a succession of jobs including a stint as a city bus driver. To stay fit, he took to working out at the James Shuler Memorial Gym where he sparred with some of the regulars, but he never boxed competitively.

Over the years, Philadelphia has harbored some great boxing coaches. Among those of recent vintage, the names George Benton, Bouie Fisher, Nazeem Richardson, and Bozy Ennis come quickly to mind. Breadman names Richardson and West Coast trainer Virgil Hunter as the men that have influenced him the most.

We are all a product of our times, so it’s no surprise that the best decade of boxing, in Breadman’s estimation, was the 1980s. This was the era of the “Four Kings” with Sugar Ray Leonard arguably standing tallest.

Breadman was a big fan of Leonard and of Leonard’s three-time rival Roberto Duran. “I once purchased a DVD that had all of Roberto Duran’s title defenses on it,” says Edwards. “This was a back before the days of YouTube.”

But Edwards’ interest in the sport goes back much deeper than the 1980s. He recently weighed in on the “Pittsburgh Windmill” Harry Greb whose legend has grown in recent years to the point that some have come to place him above Sugar Ray Robinson on the list of the greatest of all time.

“Greb was a great fighter with a terrific resume, of that there is no doubt,” says Breadman, “but there is no video of him and no one alive ever saw him fight, so where does this train of thought come from?”

Edwards notes that in Harry Greb’s heyday, he wasn’t talked about in the papers as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. The boxing writers were partial to Benny Leonard who drew comparisons to the venerated Joe Gans.

Among active fighters, Breadman reserves his highest praise for Terence Crawford. “Body punching is a lost art,” he once wrote. “[Crawford] is a great body puncher who starts his knockouts with body punches, but those punches are so subtle they are not fully appreciated.”

If the opening line holds up, Crawford will enter the ring as the underdog when he opposes Canelo Alvarez in September. Crawford, who will enter the ring a few weeks shy of his 38^th birthday, is actually the older fighter, older than Canelo by almost three full years (it doesn’t seem that way since the Mexican redhead has been in the public eye so much longer), and will theoretically be rusty as 13 months will have elapsed since his most recent fight.

Breadman discounts those variables. “Terence is older,” he says, “but has less wear and tear and never looks rusty after a long layoff.” That Crawford will win he has no doubt, an opinion he tweaked after Canelo’s performance against William Scull: “Canelo’s legs are not the same. Bud may even stop him now.”

Edwards has been with Caleb Plant for Plant’s last three fights. Their first collaboration produced a Knockout of the Year candidate. With one ferocious left hook, Plant sent Anthony Dirrell to dreamland. What followed were a 12-round setback to David Benavidez and a ninth-round stoppage of Trevor McCumby.

Breadman keeps a hectic schedule. From Monday through Friday, he’s at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas coaching Caleb Plant and Kyrone Davis. On weekends, he’s back in Philadelphia, checking in on his investment properties and, of greater importance, watching his kids play sports. His 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are standout all-around athletes.

On those long flights, he has plenty of time to turn on his laptop and stream old fights or perhaps work on his next article. That’s assuming he can stay awake.

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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Published

3 days ago

May 6, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.

In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.

Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.

CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.

****

Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.

Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”

And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.

Joey Archer

Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer

Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.

Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)

Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.

Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.

In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.

When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.

Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.

May he rest in peace.

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Bombs Away in Las Vegas where Inoue and Espinoza Scored Smashing Triumphs

Published

4 days ago

May 4, 2025

David A. Avila

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Japan’s Naoya “Monster” Inoue banged it out with Mexico’s Ramon Cardenas, survived an early knockdown and pounded out a stoppage win to retain the undisputed super bantamweight world championship on Sunday.

Japan and Mexico delivered for boxing fans again after American stars failed in back-to-back days.

“By watching tonight’s fight, everyone is well aware that I like to brawl,” Inoue said.

Inoue (30-0, 27 KOs), and Cardenas (26-2, 14 KOs) and his wicked left hook, showed the world and 8,474 fans at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas that prizefighting is about punching, not running.

After massive exposure for three days of fights that began in New York City, then moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and then to Nevada, it was the casino capital of the world that delivered what most boxing fans appreciate- pure unadulterated action fights.

Monster Inoue immediately went to work as soon as the opening bell rang with a consistent attack on Cardenas, who very few people knew anything about.

One thing promised by Cardenas’ trainer Joel Diaz was that his fighter “can crack.”

Cardenas proved his trainer’s words truthful when he caught Inoue after a short violent exchange with a short left hook and down went the Japanese champion on his back. The crowd was shocked to its toes.

“I was very surprised,” said Inoue about getting dropped. ““In the first round, I felt I had good distance. It got loose in the second round. From then on, I made sure to not take that punch again.”

Inoue had no trouble getting up, but he did have trouble avoiding some of Cardenas massive blows delivered with evil intentions. Though Inoue did not go down again, a look of total astonishment blanketed his face.

A real fight was happening.

Cardenas, who resembles actor Andy Garcia, was never overly aggressive but kept that left hook of his cocked and ready to launch whenever he saw the moment. There were many moments against the hyper-aggressive Inoue.

Both fighters pack power and both looked to find the right moment. But after Inoue was knocked down by the left hook counter, he discovered a way to eliminate that weapon from Cardenas. Still, the Texas-based fighter had a strong right too.

In the sixth round Inoue opened up with one of his lightning combinations responsible for 10 consecutive knockout wins. Cardenas backed against the ropes and Inoue blasted away with blow after blow. Then suddenly, Cardenas turned Inoue around and had him on the ropes as the Mexican fighter unloaded nasty combinations to the body and head. Fans roared their approval.

“I dreamed about fighting in front of thousands of people in Las Vegas,” said Cardenas. “So, I came to give everything.”

Inoue looked a little surprised and had a slight Mona Lisa grin across his face. In the seventh round, the Japanese four-division world champion seemed ready to attack again full force and launched into the round guns blazing. Cardenas tried to catch Inoue again with counter left hooks but Inoue’s combos rained like deadly hail. Four consecutive rights by Inoue blasted Cardenas almost through the ropes. The referee Tom Taylor ruled it a knockdown. Cardenas beat the count and survived the round.

In the eighth round Inoue looked eager to attack and at the bell launched across the ring and unloaded more blows on Cardenas. A barrage of 14 unanswered blows forced the referee to stop the fight at 45 seconds of round eight for a technical knockout win.

“I knew he was tough,” said Inoue. “Boxing is not that easy.”

Espinoza Wins

WBO featherweight titlist Rafael Espinosa (27-0, 23 KOs) uppercut his way to a knockout win over Edward Vazquez (17-3, 4 KOs) in the seventh round.

“I wanted to fight a game fighter to show what I am capable,” said Espinoza.

Espinosa used the leverage of his six-foot, one-inch height to slice uppercuts under the guard of Vazquez. And when the tall Mexican from Guadalajara targeted the body, it was then that the Texas fighter began to wilt. But he never surrendered.

Though he connected against Espinoza in every round, he was not able to slow down the taller fighter and that allowed the Mexican fighter to unleash a 10-punch barrage including four consecutive uppercuts. The referee stopped the fight at 1:47 of the seventh round.

It was Espinoza’s third title defense.

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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