By Jim Dower: Undefeated supper middleweight contender Edwin Rodriguez (20-0, 14 KO’s) demonstrated his class with a lopsided 10 round unanimous decision win over Don George (22-2-1, 19 KO’s) on Saturday night on the undercard of Matthew Macklin vs Sergio Martinez at the Madison Square Garden, in New York, New York, United States.

The final judges’ scores were 96-94, 99-91 and 97-93. Rodriguez, 26, did an excellent job of neutralizing the 27-year-old George’s power advantage by jabbing him, throwing combinations and using movement. The differences in skills between the two fighters looked huge. George looked like a pure slugger facing a boxer/puncher out of his class.

George just never seemed to get un-tracked. Instead of throwing shots, George mostly just followed Rodriguez around the ring taking shots but letting his punches go. It was frustrating to watch because there so many opportunist for for George to land his power shots if he had sense enough to let his punches go instead of just standing and staring at Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was putting on a jabbing clinic in the first couple of rounds as he constantly circled the ring to stay out of range of George’s Kelly Pavlik-like power shots. It really wasn’t all that hard for Rodriguez to elude the painfully slow George, as he proved to be terrible at trying to cut off the ring. You’d like to have thought that his trainer would have taught George a quick move to cut off runners like Rodriguez, but no. George’s feet were slow that he really needed to pursue Rodriguez at a job similar to Antonio Margarito and Lamont Peterson used in pursuing movers like Miguel Cotto and Amir Khan in their fights.

George was able to catch up to Rodriguez from time to time in the 3rd and 4th rounds to land some big shots. However, George failed to follow up his shots with anything else. Perhaps he was expecting Rodriguez to topple over with every shot because he was admiring his work far too much instead of throwing additional punches and ideally combinations.

Rounds six through ten saw Rodriguez continuing to move and control the action with his jab and fast combinations. George looked frustrated and never did throw many shots and spent most of the time slowly plodding after Rodriguez but then failing to throw anything when he was standing in front of him.