(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Jim Dower: In an exciting fight, WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (26-0, 16 KO’s) defeated former two division world champion Zab Judah (42-8, 29 KO’s) by a 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The final judges’ scores were 115-112, 114-112, 116-111.
Garcia knocked Judah down with a big right hand in the 8th round. Just when it looked like Garcia was going to score a stoppage, Judah came back in the last three rounds, hurting Garcia with big left hands in the 10th and 11th rounds. Garcia appeared to gas out in the last part of the fight, and he looked uncomfortable in taking Judah’s big left hand power shots.
Luckily for Garcia, Judah was mainly throwing pot shots because if he were able to throw combinations, he would have likely stopped him. Judah suffered a big cut under his left eye in the 8th after getting knocked down. Garcia was later cut on the forehead in the 11th and then suffered an additional cut on his forehead in the 12th, both caused by head-butts.
You can make a pretty good argument that Judah created a great blue print in how to beat Garcia by staying out of range of his left hook, using a lot of feints to keep from loading up on his left hook, throwing single shots, and ducking the obligatory left hook from Garcia. The problem for Judah is that he had problems with Garcia’s right hands, and he didn’t throw enough punches on his own.
Other boxing results:
WBO middleweight champion Peter Quillin (29-0, 21 KO’s) had a nice little sparring session in defeating fringe contender Fernando Guerrero (25-2, 19 KO’s) by a 7th round knockout. Guerrero was knocked down twice in the 2nd from two booming right hands, and then twice more in the 7th before the referee pulled the plug on the mismatch. The fight had mismatch written all over it the moment the fight was signed because Guerrero had recently been knocked out by 40-year-old Grady Brewer, and that’s not a good sign for a contender going into a title shot. A better question would be why the World Boxing Organization sanctioned this fight given that Guerrero had recently been knocked out. Whatever the case, Quillin was able to stop a fighter that Grady Brewer had stopped in fewer rounds in a 4th round TKO. What does that say about Quillin?
The fight should have been stopped in the 2nd round because the referee missed a knockdown and Guerrero was just holding onto Quillin’s waste to try and keep from falling down. I’m talking waist, not shoulders. After the 2nd round, Guerrero was out-boxing Quillin during stretches of the fight, just as former WBO middleweight champion Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam had done in the fight before this. When Quillin isn’t knocking his opponents down, he’s getting out-boxed and that seems to suggest that he won’t be holding onto the WBO title for too much longer unless Golden Boy keeps finding more fringe contenders like Guerrero for him to fight.
***
Middleweight Daniel Jacobs (25-1, 22 KO’s) defeated replacement opponent Keenan Collins (15-8-3, 10 KO’s) by a 4th round knockout. Jacobs cornered Collins along the ropes in the 4th and then opened up with a salvo of huge shots that dropped him. Collins got back to his feet but was knocked down again by some huge punches from Jacobs. After he got back up, Collins was nailed by a flurry of punches ending with the fight being stopped.
***
Other boxing action:
Marcus Browne KO 2 Taneal Goyco
Zachary Ochoa pts 4 Calvin Smith
Miguel Cartagen pts 4 Angel Carvajal
D’Mitrius Ballard TKO 2 Marcus Clay
Comments are closed.