rios100 By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA lightweight champion Brandon Rios (33-3-1, 24 KOs) says he’s retiring from boxing after his 9th round knockout loss to WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs).

At 29, Rios says his body isn’t say anymore due to him being out of the ring for the past eight months, and he feels he’s had too many wars in the ring during his 11-year pro career.

HBO analyst Roy Jones Jr. theorized that Rios was done “yesterday” before he even stepped inside the ring for the Bradley fight at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. This makes you wonder whether Rios came back merely for the payday rather than due to him thinking he had a real chance of winning the fight. That would be sad if that’s the only reason why Rios took the fight with Bradley.

Rios certainly didn’t fight with any of the old fire we’ve seen from him in the past. He fought like someone whose heart really wasn’t into the job. We didn’t see Rios attacking Bradley the way he did Mike Alvarado in their three fights. Rios just looked like someone who wasn’t mentally into the fight.

“My body is not the same no more,” Rios said after the fight tonight. “I’ve been in a lot of wars. I think it’s time to hang it up. I’m done. It’s been a great run. I’m sorry I didn’t put on a great show, but [expletive] it. I didn’t want to hurt my body, and I didn’t want to hurt my family, I didn’t want to hurt my friends. I think I’m going to hang up my gloves and call it a night.”

Would things have been different if the Bradley vs. Rios fight taken place earlier this year when Rios was still in good shape from his easy 3rd round knockout win over Alvarado last January. We’ll never know for sure, but you’d have to imagine that an in shape Rios would have given Bradley a lot more problems than the 170lb version that we saw tonight.

It’s still hard to believe that Rios gained so much weight. He weighed the same amount of weight that IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin routinely weighs in at for his fights in the middleweight division. That’s pretty incredible for a welterweight to rehydrate 23 pounds and come into the fight at 170 like we saw from Rios.

I would like to know what Rios’ trainer Robert Garcia was thinking in the final weeks of his training camp. He had to know that he coming into the fight too heavy. I guess he was just going to hope for the best from Rios.

You have to wonder whether Rios would have this same desire to quit all of a sudden if he hadn’t made a lot of money in his fights against Manny Pacquiao, Mike Alvarado and Diego Chaves. Having a bank account with a lot of money makes it easy to quit and sail off into the sunset compared to the many fighters who don’t have a ton of money to retire on.

According to CompuBox, Rios had a terrible fight in landing only 81 of 454 punches for a connect percentage of 18 percent. Bradley landed 254 of 570 punches for a 45 percent connect percentage.