By Jim Dower: Fighting for the first time in over a year, three-time world champion, 36-year-old Marco Antonio Barrera (66-7, 43 KO’s) got back on the winning track, defeating a very passive Adailton De Jesus (26-5, 21 KO’s) by a one-sided 10 round unanimous decision in lightweight action on the undercard of the Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. vs. John Duddy bout at the Alamodome, in San Antonio, Texas. The final judges’ scores were 100-90, 98-92 and 99-91, all for Barrera. I scored the fight 100-90 for Barrera.

Barrera, who lost his last fight to Amir Khan in March 2009, had the perfect opponent for him tonight in Texas. De Jesus gave new meaning to the word cautious, as he looked as if he were in the ring with a live grenade instead of a mere man and seemed afraid to mix it up with Barrera much of the time.

With no pressure being put on him and allowed to keep the pace nice and slow, the 36-year-old Barrera looked suddenly years younger in dominating the unwilling and incredibly tentative De Jesus. It was brilliant match-making on Barrera’s promoter Bob Arum’s part, because De Jesus actually made Barrera look good, which he hadn’t been looking in ages.

With nothing coming back at him, Barrera won the first four rounds by default, because De Jesus just wasn’t throwing anything. In rounds five and six, De Jesus started throwing an occasional punch and looking like he wanted to make a fight of it finally. However, Barrera calmly picked him apart with left hooks and straight right hands, taking advantage of De Jesus’s many mistakes in the ring.

Even though Barrera is clearly lost several steps and appears small at lightweight, he just had way too much skills for a fighter like De Jesus, a B level fighter. Again, it was great match making on Arum’s part by finding De Jesus, because if this had been a better opponent than De Jesus, I suspect that Barrera would have been dominated and beaten.

In the 10th round, Barrera went all out trying to score a knockout, as he unloaded on De Jesus with every tool in his offensive toolkit. However, De Jesus was able to get through the action without going down or getting hurt. Barrera still looks to be a world class fighter, but he looked badly faded and nothing like his prime years in the late 90s and early 2000s.