Daniel Ponce De Leon vs. Jayson Velez on 3/2: De Leon with tough opponent

By Boxing News - 01/31/2013 - Comments

velez5By Dan Ambrose: It took WBC featherweight champion Daniel Ponce De Leon (44-4, 35 KO’s) four years to finally capture another world title after having lost his WBO super bantamweight title to a young Juan Manuel Lopez in June 2008 in a 1st round knockout loss.

Last September, De Leon defeated WBC featherweight champ Jhonny Gonzalez by an 8th round technical decision to capture the WBC title. Instead of being able to enjoy the title, De Leon’s brief time as the champion may end in his very first title defense against unbeaten #5 WBC Jayson Velez (20-0, 15 KO’s) on March 2nd in New York.

This is going to be a really tough fight for De Leon because the 24-year-old Velez can probably punch harder than Lopez, and he’s got an older fighter in front of him in 32-year-old De Leon. Velez, 5’9”, will have a huge four inch height advantage over the 5’5” De Leon to go along with his youth, speed and power advantage.

Those qualities are going to make it awfully tough for him to be beat in this fight, even though De Leon will have a big advantage in experience compared to him. There’s no question that experience is valuable, but a lot of De Leon’s experience is the negative kind in the form of him losing to Juan Manuel Lopez, Adrien Broner, Celestino Caballero and Yuriorkis Gamboa.

Those are easily the best fighters that De Leon has faced during his career, and he lost those fights. De Leon’s best wins have come against Jhonny Gonzalez, Antonio Escalante, Eduardo Lazcano, Cornelius Lock, Rey Bautista, Gerry Penalosa, Emmanuel Lucero and Sod Kokietgym. Those are good fighters no doubt, but most of those wins came earlier in De Leon’s career rather than recently.

Velez’s opposition has been much less an impressive with his best victories coming against Salvador Sanchez Jr., Levi Breau and Jose Angel Beranza. It doesn’t matter that Velez doesn’t have the experience because he’s simply a better fighter all around compared to De Leon.



Comments are closed.