Mike Perez’s stock drops badly after gift draw against Takam

By Boxing News - 01/19/2014 - Comments

perez66By Scott Gilfoid: The WBC might want to make an adjustment on their heavyweight rankings to move Mike Perez (20-0-1, 12 KO’s) from #5 WBC to something closer to #15 after his horrible performance last night in getting what many boxing fans saw as a gift 10 round draw against little known Carlos Takam (29-1-1, 23 KO’s) at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.

There’s no way on Earth that Perez deserved a draw in that fight, because he clearly lost the last 7 rounds of the fight. It was all Takam from the 4th round on with him beating up Perez on the inside and exposing him as being little more than a pumped up cruiserweight with too much blubber on his frame. The judges scored it 96-94 for Perez, 95-95, 95. I don’t agree with those silly scores at all. You might as well have put blindfolds on the three judges and had them guess the rounds, because those scores would give you the same results. Anyone with two eyes saw that Takam beat up Perez on the inside and fought well enough to deserve the win.

I had a feeling that it was going to go badly for Takam when I heard HBO analyst Roy Jones Jr. trying to convince Max Kellerman that Mike Perez is a knockout artist with huge power. I kind of lost respect for Jones Jr. with him trying to inflate Perez’s power when you could see that he wasn’t a puncher. By the end of the fight, Jones Jr’s earlier comments about how Perez is a huge puncher had him looking bad. If Perez had any power whatsoever, he would have knocked Takam out. The fact is Perez isn’t a puncher. He’s just a little heavyweight who at times throws a lot of punches. It was disappointing to say the least that Jones Jr. couldn’t see with his own two eyes that Perez was the weaker fighter of the two in the ring last night.

Perez’s promoter Tom Loeffler of K2 said this about his disastrous performance: “Mike fought well early in the fight but the head-butt left him with blurred vision for a couple of rounds and seemed to keep him from being able to mount a consistent attack in the 2nd half of the fight.”

I’m sorry, Tom, I don’t buy the excuse. It wasn’t Perez’s blurred vision that was causing him to get nailed with body shots in his blubbery midsection. Perez didn’t have the power, speed or the inside game to compete with Takam, and so he ended up getting dominated in the last 7 rounds.

What’s telling is that Loeffler didn’t say anything about about wanting to put Perez in a rematch with Takam. That kind of tells you that there’s no confidence that Perez can beat this guy, and if he can’t beat Takam, then there’s honestly no point in having Perez as a top 15 contender. I guess Perez can get what would be an undeserving title shot against one of the champions, but what’s the point? This would be like throwing another Manuel Charr in the ring with one of the Klitschko brothers and expecting as different outcome.

Loeffler said “There are many more great match-ups for Mike in the heavyweight division and we look forward to seeing him compete at the highest level.”

Did you notice how Loeffler chose not to saying anything about wanting to put Perez back in with Takam? That’s kind of telling, isn’t it? If he’s not mentioning a rematch with Takam, that gives me the impression that he doesn’t believe Perez can beat him.

If HBO is going to be televising Mike Perez’s fights moving forward, then they at least need to put their foot down and insist that he fight Takam in a rematch, because fans don’t need a fighter to be crammed down their throat on HBO if he can’t even beat the lower ranked heavyweights. This is like someone flunking a class in algebra and expecting to move into calculus in their next class. As far as I’m concerned, Perez flunked the Takam class, and he either needs to repeat or it or drop out. It’s just wrong if Perez is able to move forward and get bigger fights after this and have HBO actually televise them.



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