By Dan Ambrose: I thought I was watching a replay of the long count between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney tonight with referee Tony Weeks letting WBO light welterweight champion Mike Alvarado (34-2, 23 KO’s) get up past the 9 count in his fight against Ruslan Provodnikov (23-3, 16 KO’s) in Denver, Colorado.
Provodnikov got the victory by a 10 round stoppage, but I’m just glad that the fight didn’t go to the score cards, because I had a feeling watching the fight that Provodnikov would have found himself on the losing end of a controversial decision if it went to the judges.
Alvarado took a terrible beating tonight, and I’m wondering if he’ll ever be the same again. He was hit with some sledgehammer left hooks from Provodnikov despite using movement much of the fight. The problem for Alvarado was he couldn’t run the entire time. He had to stop in every once in while to throw punches, and Provodnikov was always there waiting for him. I’ve got to give a ton of credit to Provodnikov by having the conditioning to chase Alvarado for 10 rounds and beat him with power shots.
Alvarado said after the fight via RingTV “He shook me up with a lot of shots and I wasn’t able to recover like I usually do. I was winning the fight. I was boxing him good, but I have him a little too much. I was keeping him out as much as I could.”
There was no way that Alvarado could pitch a perfect shutout to keep from getting hit by Provodnikov, because it wasn’t easy for Alvarado to land his own shots. He had to stay in the pocket a lot longer than he wanted to just to land a clean shot each time he’d stop running to set up his offense. Provodnikov’s head movement and his ability lean backwards away from Alvarado’s shots made it difficult for Alvarado to get off his shots quickly and then get away. He had to stay in there with Provodnikov whether he wanted to or not.
You could see the tide turning in the fight starting in the 6th round. Provodnikov hit Alvarado with a really hard left hook in that round, and it kind of took a little bit of the energy out of Alvarado. He looked stunned for the remainder of the round. Provodnikov then was able to make Alvarado miss with his shots while hitting him hard with his own. This pattern continued into the 7th,
In the 8th, Provodnikov hurt Alvarado with a hard right hand high on the head followed by a left hook. He then drove him across the ring and then dropped him with a storm of punches. At first I thought that Alvarado had been shoved to the canvas because Provodnikov was all over him while nailing him with a flurry of punches. But in replay you could see that Alvarado was hit hard by two big shots, one of which hit him while he was falling down. Where it got strange was how Alvarado got up at just past the count of 9, and the referee let the fight continue. I thought he should have stopped it because it looked like Alvarado didn’t beat the count.
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