By Manuel Perez: In the second consecutive fight in which Juan Manuel Lopez (23-0, 21 KOs) has scored a first round TKO victory, he destroyed Cesar Figueroa (30-7-2, 22 KOs) seconds into the fight on Saturday night, hitting him with a single left hand and dropping him to the canvas where the referee Roberto Ramirez stopped the fight at 0:47 of the 1st round as Figueroa was in no kind of condition to get up from the knockdown. Figueroa, 30, got to his knees and looked ready to get up and possibly beat the count, but after looking to be getting up, he stopped and looked down and let the referee count him out of the fight.

The punch that Lopez, 25, nailed him - a straight left hand - didn’t seem like all that big of a punch from the looks of it. In fact, if you dig a little deeper in Figueroa’s record, you’ll notice that he has been stopped early on in five of his last eleven bouts, so let’s not get things twisted around and start crowning Lopez as the next knockout king because he it looked more like a good jab than a real power punch. I doubt that any top 15 fighter would have had any problems taking the shot that Figueroa got hit with, and while we’re at it, probably most B and C class fighters would have taken the shot without any problems.

However, when you have a fighter that has been stopped as many times as Figueroa has in his last 11 bouts, anything can happen at any time because a fighter’s punch resistance tends to decrease with the more knockouts that they receive over time. Honestly, that punch shouldn’t have hurt Figueroa, and probably wouldn’t have back in 2003 when he ran into a tough Mexican fighter by the name of Humberto Soto, who stopped him for the first time in his career in the 7th round. Since that time, it’s been downhill for Figueroa and he’s suffered four knockouts in the subsequent years.

Lopez said he’s like to fight Vazquez, a fighter I’d also like to see him mix it up with, but I think he needs to fight Daniel Ponce De Leon again, whom he beat in quick 1st round stoppage in June. De Leon was in control of the fight when he got hit with a couple of shots that he didn’t see. If not for the shots that he didn’t see, who knows? We’d probably be talking about de Leon’s fast knockout of Figueroa rather than Lopez.

I’m sorry, but I don’t consider Lopez in the same class as de Leon, and unless he can prove that he’s a better fighter by fighting him again, I see the fight as a lucky fluke for Lopez. As for Vazquez, I seriously doubt that he’ll step in the ring with Lopez. He just seems like he’s interested in taking on some other opponents right now, maybe looking for an easy fight for a change. I do think Vazquez would beat Lopez if the two were to meet, but I doubt that it’ll be as early as December 6th.

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