By Scott Gilfoid: Hard-hitting middleweight contender Marco Antonio Rubio (42-4-1, 37 KOs) stopped 38 year-old Alfredo Cuevas (26-10-1, 17 KOs) in the 5th round of a scheduled 10-round bout on Friday night at the Sovereign Performing Arts Center, in Reading, Pennsylvania. Rubio, ranked #3 in the WBC middleweight division and a potential opponent for WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik’s next bout, dispatch Cuevas when his corner stopped the bout at the end of the 5th round. Despite Rubio’s high ranking and high percentage of knockouts on his record, he was far from impressive and looked little better than the 38 year-old Cuevas. Rubio’s high punch output was the telling factor in the fight, especially when he suddenly turned up the volume in the 5th round and landed a lot of hard combinations to the head of Cuevas in the round. It came to no surprise to me that the fight was stopped in the corner after the round.
Rubio, however, showed to have little defense for the right hand of Cuevas, who found it relatively easy to nail Rubio with punches anytime he felt like, which as it turns out, was quite often. Heck, Cuevas couldn’t miss Rubio even if he tried because he never seemed to be able to block anything thrown his way. Most of the rounds were close, hard fought and difficult to extract the winner of the round. Most of the punches Rubio throws are the weak variety, jabs and right hands. Every once in awhile he would load up with something and you could see that he had good power, though not nearly as good as his record would indicate.
Rubio, 27, controlled the 1st and 2nd rounds using his jab and a lot of movement. He’s tall, 6’1″, thin and has long arms, which enabled him to keep Cuevas on the outside somewhat. However, Cuevas often waded though Rubio’s jabs and landed hard shots to the head. This is when it became apparent that Rubio has very little defense against anything thrown at him. I mean, he’s good if he can stay on the outside and jab, but whenever Cuevas got close to him and threw punches, he landed with ease. That’s not a good sign for Rubio if he plans on having any success with a fighter like Pavlik.
In rounds three and four, Cuevas began landing much more often as he backed up Rubio frequently to the ropes where he’d tag him with big shots. Rubio, clearly a class above Cuevas, fought well in most circumstances but not nearly as good as he should be given his high #3 ranking in the WBC. Cuevas, who looked closer to 45 than 40, landed some especially hard right hands in both the 3rd and 4th rounds. I felt then that if Cuevas was a little younger, perhaps 5 years younger, he would have possibly beaten Rubio. He seemed to impress me more than what I was seeing from Rubio during the fight. At least Cuevas could actually block a punch, which he did on many occasions, picking off many of Rubio’s jabs and right hands.
In the 5th round, Rubio began throwing nonstop punches as he seemed to be trying to get Cuevas out of there. Not to be outdone, Cuevas answered back with almost equally hard shots until the end of the round. During the last 30 seconds of the round, however, Rubio landed some especially hard right hands which connected well to the head of Cuevas. Still, it was a close round like most of the others.
Hopefully, Pavlik doesn’t decide on using Rubio as his next opponent. I can see Pavlik taking this guy out even quicker than Gary Lockett last Saturday night. Rubio looks bad whenever a right hand is thrown at him and takes most of the flush, with his head snapping back. Most of Rubio’s wins have come against lower level fighters, with a only a small handful of them coming against good (not great) opponents, such as Jose Luis Zertuche, Grady Brewer, Fitz Vanderpool and Frankie Randall. Against good fighters, like Kassim Ouma, Kofi Jantuah and Zaurbek Baysangurov, Rubio has been pretty much soundly beaten.