Rodriguez vs. Estrada: A Closer Look at Saturday’s Dream Match-up in Phoenix 

The meeting of Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez (19-0) and Juan Francisco Estrada (44-3) in the Footprint Center, Phoenix this Saturday night is a generational clash so satisfying as to feel improbable. When Estrada, the 115lb lineal champion, turned professional Jesse Rodriguez was eight years old. By the time Rodriguez turned professional, Estrada had already been matched for alphabet belts on seven different occasions, winning six. By the time Rodriguez picked up a strap of his own in early 2022, Estrada had been the legitimate lineal champion of the world for three years. This is the king Rodriguez seeks to topple this weekend, one of boxing’s royal bloodlines, and until recently, one of her greatest champions. 

But King Estrada has been inactive, the poison of post-COVID 19 boxing, and generally inadvisable for a thirty-four-year-old super-flyweight. Estrada has been waiting for the perfect money fight, the right contest to bring him out of hibernation and into the arena, but that arrangement is the cousin of retirement. If a fighter is refusing to budge for less than a given amount, he’s really saying he might not fight again, an important psychological step. Estrada has spent all of 2023 and some of 2024 with his feet up and he hasn’t made weight since December 11, 2022. He hit 115lbs dead on the nose and the following day boxed his in his most recent contest, against fellow sub 118lb legend Roman Gonzalez. 

Everything Jesse Rodriguez needs to know about Estrada is contained within these twelve rounds of boxing, the good and the bad, the reason to be cautious. Leaping straight to the twelfth round and the reason Rodriguez should be cautious: beaten and having lost every one of the last five rounds on my card, Estrada rallied to win the twelfth on pure heart. His three-time opponent, the man with whom he shared the best trilogy of the twenty-first century, Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez was naturally more robust than Estrada. Being hit bothers him less than all but a tiny handful of fighters and that more than anything drew him close to victory over his old foe. Estrada resolved to contest the line he had been breaking before Gonzalez in that twelfth round and he did so while dealing some of the highest-class left-handed work that can be seen in boxing today. In the twelfth, as in the first, he jabbed, led with left hooks to the body, pierced with a lead left-uppercut and tied on a final punch, the riskiest punch, to all his combos where he had been stepping out earlier before. It won him the round and the fight; if he’d balked in that twelfth round the fight would have been a draw and the fourth between Gonzalez and Estrada would now have been boxed, to what result is anyone’s guess.   

What Rodriguez sees in that twelfth round is the part of Estrada that has been unbreakable. It might be easier to change his mind with punches than it is to change Roman’s, but it is Estrada who is in possession of the truly unbreakable chin. Nobody has even been close to stopping him and when it seemed that Gonzalez had strategically broken him, he found it in him to win the fight’s most important round against the run of action in ninety seconds that may have done more to define his career than any other thirty-six minutes. Estrada must be completely broken to be broken at all. 

More, if Rodriguez watches the first half of that fight, he will see style that does not please him. Estrada spent the first six rounds against Gonzalez controlling perhaps the finest ring-general of his generation bar Floyd Mayweather. Estrada’s left-hand is a delight, a paradigm of variety. He will lead with the left hand to the body, probably the second riskiest punch from the orthodox stance, and he will throw it all the way across himself to the far hip of his opponent if the front quarter is properly guarded. Behind this, all punches are possible, hooks and uppercuts abound, and the division’s best power jab is a punch that he must not be allowed to settle behind if he is to be beaten. 

Fortunately for Rodriguez, it is a punch that can be disrupted, not least because Estrada wants to throw more hurtful punches in many moments. If he settles behind his left jab he will win, but he has many more routes to victory and he is no slave to that punch. Certainly though, Rodriguez has the tools to disrupt Estrada’s offence generally and his jab especially. I am ready to dismiss Estrada’s jab as a factor in this fight – that is how good Rodriguez is. 

The Footprint Center is a venue that has been kind to Rodriguez. He was brilliant there in February of 2022 for his arrival in earnest at the top of the sport, out-pointing veteran Carlos Cuadras over twelve rounds to lift an alphabet strap at 115lbs. It was not a close fight; I gave Cuadras three rounds, one of them arguable, and two of the judges saw it the same way. What most impressed about Rodriguez was the very thing that Roman Gonzalez used to his advantage in his third war with Estrada, his indifference to the punishment the supposedly bigger man and puncher, Cuadras, inflicted. Indeed, Rodriguez made a strategic error in spending too much time in the pocket fighting it out with Cuadras, when his greater successes were either at range or moving in to close range and then moving straight back out. He was indifferent to Cuadras and his hitting for the most part, punching all the while. 

Rodriguez worked this charm with excellent footwork, taking advantage of his natural excellence in balance to pivot right and open up new vistas for his punches.  After losing the first round to Cuadras, Rodriguez won a close second and then in the third stamped his authority on the fight. Cuadras cannot say he wasn’t warned; after landing a good southpaw uppercut in the first thirty seconds of the round, he landed a second only moments later, and Cuadras was deposited neatly on his backside.  

This will not work against Estrada – he’d read the runes on the first punch and change the distance or the angles. Estrada doesn’t have quite the talent for balance that Rodriguez does, but he understands where he is in the ring as well as anyone. That is why even Gonzalez couldn’t trap him along the ropes early in the third fight, Estrada was always ready to retaliate or move. That said, Estrada, the slower man, might find himself vulnerable to these pivots and changes of fortune, especially as he’s trying to develop his jab early in the fight. Estrada has an interesting strategic choice to make early in this contest: will he give ground or try to hustle up? Rodriguez has shown a certain vulnerability to infighting ostensibly larger men at the 115lb limit but Estrada has shown brilliance in drawing aggressive fighters into space and punishing them savagely. He could mix these strategies but history has shown that Estrada prefers to box with a real clarity of plan. It may not be wise to compromise that clarity at this late stage. 

Assuming Estrada goes with his preferred method of dealing with quick pressure, giving ground and countering the man and the space, he may find himself being out-sped and out-hit; a slow start would be disastrous for him so if he finds Rodriguez is able to make his way in to range and land while Estrada is waiting to counter, he will need to stand his ground and we will have a war on our hands. Either way this feels like a fight that cannot fail to deliver.  

I feel quite strongly that Estrada’s time has come. That he has the wrong amount of wear on him, over too many years and now with eighteen months of inactivity making matters more uncertain, he’ll get found out in the second half of the fight and find himself dropping a clear decision in the region of 116-112.   

I will be very happy to be proven wrong though. Estrada is a modern wonder and I’ve loved every moment of his hard-charging ambitious career, and I do think that the 2020 version would have been too much for even this summitting Rodriguez. 

For the winner, a top five pound-for-pound slot. 

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