By Allan Fox: Tim Bradley (31-1-1, 12 KOs) expects his greater experience to be too much for world champion Jessie Vargas (26-0, 9 KOs) when the two fighters go at it tonight on HBO Championship Boxing.
Bradley has been fighting against major competition since 2006, and he’s got a huge start of the 26-year-old Vargas, who is fighting his first tough foe of his career. Bradley has put on a lot of muscle for this fight, and he’s hoping to use his new power to score a stoppage tonight.
After the bad experience he had in his last bout against Diego Chaves, Bradley wants to make sure the judges have no part of this fight. He just wants them to sit and watch without being able to do anything. In other words, Bradley doesn’t want to wind up getting robbed of a win like in his bout against Chaves. Bradley fought well enough to deserve the victory against Chaves, but instead he wound up with a disappointing 12 round draw.
“Vargas is puppy chow to me,” Bradley said to Yahoo Sports. “He’s dog food. I can’t let this go to the judges.”
Bradley hasn’t knocked anyone out in the past five years, so it’s hard to expect him to get a KO in this fight. Unless his trainer Joel Diaz helped Bradley find some untapped power in his body, it’s not probable that he’s going to be able to hurt Vargas with any of his punches.
Vargas has a good chin and he’s not been hurt by any of his opponents yet. He stood up to Josesito Lopez’s best shots in their fight several years ago. It stands to reason that if Vargas was able to take Lopez’s hard punches, then he’ll have no problems dealing with Bradley’s shots.
Bradley needs to be careful that he doesn’t get hurt while trying to get a knockout. He tried to score a knockout in his fight against Ruslan Provodnikov in 2013, and in his second fight against Manny Pacquiao, and in both fights, he took a lot of punishment in return. Bradley didn’t come close to knocking either of those guys out. If anything, it was Bradley who was on the verge of being knocked out in the Provodnikov bout.
“They say fighters can’t generate more power, that you have what you’re born with and that’s it. But I didn’t believe it,” Bradley said. “Baseball players adding power later in their careers, and there were golfers who started hitting it farther. And of course, tennis players, too. So I kind of figured, ‘If these guys can add power, why can’t I?”
It’s true that baseball players are adding more power, but it’s also true that many of them have done it with the assistance of performance enhancing drugs. Bradley shouldn’t assume that he’ll be able to generate the kind of power that some dirty baseball players have done in the recent past.
Bradley needs to focus on trying to win a decision against Vargas because that’s his best chance of winning the fight. Bradley is never going to be a puncher, and he’s probably not helping himself by focusing so much on trying to develop his power. He’s about to turn 32, and if he doesn’t have the power by now then it’s safe to say that he’ll never get it.
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