By Jim Dower: Unbeaten cruiserweight prospect Oleksandr Usyk (5-0, 5 KOs) defeated South African Daniel Bruwer (24-6-1, 21 KOs) in the 7th round of a scheduled 12 round fight on Saturday night to win the interim WBO Inter-Continental cruiserweight title at the Arena Lviv Stadium, in Lviv, Ukraine.
In the 7th, Usyk knocked Bruwer down with a right hand. Bruwer stayed down flat on his face and the fight was halted at that point. Moments before the stoppage, Bruwer had dropped his hands and was challenging Usyk to engage with him.
The referee had to warn Bruwer to put his guard back up because he was just taking shots to the head without even attempting to block them. The punch that knocked Bruwer down wasn’t a hard one. It was a punch that didn’t land with a lot of force. It just looked like Bruwer wasn’t interested in fighting any longer.
Usyk, a 2012 Olympic gold medalist from Ukraine, used a lot of constant movement to keep out of the way of Bruwer’s shots. Usyk mostly jabbed and occasionally threw straight left hands and quick combinations. He wasn’t standing still for very long, and he seemed to be treating Bruwer with too much respect for his limited talent.
The fight likely would have been over in the 1st or 2nd round if a solid cruiserweight like Marco Huck had been facing Bruwer because he would have let his hands go with power shots until Bruwer fell. But Usyk wasted a lot of time with his amateur point-scoring style of fighting, and he made the fight a lot harder than it should have been.
In other action on the card, former WBA light welterweight title holder Andriy Kotelnik (32-4-1, 13 KO) defeated Alexander Benidze (13-15-2, 6 KOs) by an 8 round unanimous decision. Kotelnik knocked Benidze down in the 2nd round.
This was the first fight for the 36-year-old Kotelnik in four years since his controversial 12 round decision loss to Devon Alexander in 2010. It’s a shame that Kotelnik stepped away from the game at the time instead of continuing to fight. He would have had a good chance of picking up another world title in the last 4 years had he continued to fight.
Other boxing results on the card:
Viktor Plotnykov TKO 2 Vladimer Janezashvili
Oleg Malinovskiy KO 3 Giorgi Gochishvili
Bekman Soylybayev TKO 2 Pavel Petrov
Serhiy Radchenko UD 4 Igor Pylypenko
Petro Ivanov KO1 Andriy Danichkin
Eldos Sarkulov UD 4 Oleksiy Kozlov
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