By Aaron Klein: Exciting but deeply flawed welterweight prospect Antwone Smith (12-1-1, 8 KOs) was too much for his 26 year-old Colombian counterpart Juan Camilo Novoa (13-2, 11 KOs), taking him out with a flurry of punches in the 4th round of a scheduled 8-round bout on Friday night at the War Memorial Auditorium, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Smith, 21, had problems in the first two rounds with the immense power of Novoa, who shelled Smith incessantly with powerful right hands to the head.
It looked as if the young 21 year-old Smith was well on his way to being an early knockout victim of the hard-hitting Novoa. However, in the 4th round, Smith got lucky and hurt Novoa with a left-right combination, staggering him badly in the process. Not to let the opportunity go to waste, Smith unloaded on Novoa with a series of right hand shots sending him backwards down on the canvas. The referee Telis Assimenios quickly called a stop to the fight at 2:59 of the round, even though I thought that Novoa appeared alert enough to possibly continue fighting. The way that Smith was punching, however, I doubt that he would have lasted for long, though, before taking a few more big right hands and possibly going down again.
Novoa, 26, looked superb in rounds one and two, feeding Smith with right hands that looked as if they were launched by a howitzer. I was frankly surprised, and impressed, that Smith could take the shots because each one of them had knockout intentions on them. Novoa is one of those rare fighters that have incredible power and can knockout an opponent even when he’s not really trying to. In this case, he was clearly giving it his all in an effort to get the younger Smith out of there as quick as possible. Smith, however, as I mentioned already, had a rock iron chin, which allowed him to take some tremendous shots that would have knocked out a lesser fighter.
It would have been good though if Smith had tried blocking a few of them, because he was doing an outright poor job of getting out of the way of any of Novoa’s big shots. In effect, Smith was leaving it up to his chin to keep him in the fight long enough for him to get his own offense started. In this case it worked, but unless he learns how to protect himself in the future, I personally don’t like his chances against any of the fighters in the top 20, most of which would obliterate him in an execution style beating.
Novoa, though, had little in the way of boxing skills or technique, and was fighting solely on back of his knockout power. In the 2nd round, Novoa was really hammering Smith with big shots, the type of shots where you take a good look if you’re the trainer of Smith and start to consider throwing in the towel to protect him from sustaining permanent damage. It wasn’t happening, and Smith got out of the round after taking some terrible head shots, quite a lot of them in fact.
In the 3rd round, Smith began to get into the fight for the first time as Novoa looked as if he had punched himself out in the first two rounds while going for a knockout. Smith used this opportunity to land well with his right hand and jab, keeping Novoa under a blanket of punches during the round.
In the 4th round, Novoa began to once again tag Smith with big power shots, hammering him with some brutal right hands to the head. Just when it looked as if Novoa had a knockout in his sights, Smith landed a perfect left hook to the head of Novoa, staggering him badly, then tagged him with three consecutive right hands that dropped Novoa to the canvas. The referee zoomed in and halted the fight then and there, not giving Novoa a chance to see if he could perhaps fight on from the knockdown.
Like I said, I don’t know if he could have but I would have liked to have seen him at least try. He would have most certainly been throwing huge home run punches and perhaps if he had landed one, we may have seen an altogether different outcome.
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