The “New” John Duddy Outclasses Vanda

By Boxing News - 02/23/2009 - Comments

duddy66By Sean McDaniel: Showing a completely different look that used more boxing and jabs, undefeated middleweight John Duddy (26-0, 17 KOs) outclassed a slower more limited Matt Vanda (39-9, 22 KOs) by a 10-round unanimous decision on Saturday night on the undercard of Miguel Cotto vs. Michael Jennings at Madison Square Garden in New York. Duddy, 29, known for being a face first slugger who typically gets hit a lot while beating mostly limited competition, used mainly jabs to defeat Vanda on Saturday night.

Although like most of Duddy’s competition thus far, Vanda was another C-level fighter, but you can’t blame Duddy for fighting another easy opponent because he’s in the middle of changing his fighting style and probably needed the practice. The final judges’ scores were 99-91, 99-91 and 97-93.

Duddy showed little power in the fight, but he seemed not to even try to sit down on his power shots. A few times he would in each round, loading up for several hard shots but mainly he stayed committed throwing jabs. The benefit for Duddy was that he got through the fight without having his face sliced and diced, which in his recent fight against Smichet, had been badly cut up.

That fight more than anything seemed to send out a warning sign that Duddy needed to change his style of fighting if he wanted to last long in boxing. With a new trainer Pat Burns, Duddy has sought to overhaul his previous style of fighting, taking away his usual brawling style and replacing it with a more classic boxing style. On Saturday night, Duddy looked like a wind up Felix Sturm, jabbing, jabbing and jabbing, and throwing only a token power shot from time to time.

Vanda, not powerful or particularly fast, was held at bay by the jab and could do little to make a fight of it. Duddy probably could have taken Vanda out in three or four rounds if he had chosen to go after him and try and take him out with power shots. However, in doing so Duddy would have taken some shots, and would have no doubt been cut like he often is.

The crowd would have loved it but the fight wouldn’t have served any purpose to prepare Duddy for better fighters in the middleweight and light middleweight division. Fighting better fighters is clearly something that Duddy needs to do because after six years, he’s in danger of building a Joe Calzaghe type record based on victories over mainly power puffs.

Inflated records are fine of course, especially when they get you potentially lined up for a big payday against middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik, but Duddy wants more than just a shot at the title. He wants to win.

Vanda did little to try and get past Duddy’s jabs in rounds one through nine. He appeared content to load up with an occasional shot, but not much more than that. He looked like he was going through the motions and not interested in getting hurt by pressuring Duddy hard. Needing a knockout to win, Vanda came alive in the 10th and final round, giving Duddy some problems by hitting him with big punches through much of the round.

Duddy took the shots like always, firing back as best as he could. Vanda might have had a better shot if he had attacked Duddy like this in the earlier rounds, but I honestly don’t think that Vanda has the stamina to fight like this, because he probably would have if he thought he could do it.