(Photo Credit: Ed Mulholland/HBO) By Tim Fletcher: Ring rusty former featherweight champion Yuriorkis Gamboa (24-1, 17 KOs) will be making one of his increasingly rare appearances to ring this Saturday night in a 10 round fight against Hylon Williams Jr. (16-1, 3 KOs) on the undercard of the Bryant Jennings vs. Luis Ortiz fight at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, New York.
The 34-year-old Gamboa has had promotional issues that have kept him out action. The Gamboa-Williams fight will be televised on HBO Latino this Saturday. The start time is 12:15 a.m. ET/PT.
Gamboa fought only once in 2013, twice in 2014, and thus far not at all in 2015. It’s been exactly 13 months since Gamboa last fought in defeating Joel Montes de Oca by a 6th round knockout last year in November 2014. When you think of how short fighters’ careers are in boxing, it’s just so sad to see a guy as talented as Gamboa wasting away.
It’s similar to how fellow Cuban gold medalist and former super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux hasn’t been active with his career as of late despite being blessed with incredible talent.
Fighting in the lightweight division, the 5’5 ½” Gamboa is going to have a hard time competing against some of the bigger fighters in the division due to his limited height. However, Gamboa is still probably good enough to win a win world title at lightweight if he hurries and is given a chance at a title in the near year or two.
After that, it’s unlikely that he’ll have enough of his skills left to win another title. But even now, it’s hard to know what Gamboa has left after sitting out of the ring for the past 13 months.
It’s quite possible that Gamboa has faded in the last year and isn’t even the same fighter that Terence Crawford had to struggle to defeat in their fight last year in June 2014. Gamboa was giving the bigger Crawford a run for his money until getting sloppy in the 5th and brawling with him instead of continuing to fight smart and box the way he had in the first four rounds.
“My primary focus for every fight is to get in the ring, get the job done in a way that I perform my best as a fighter, and the people paying for tickets go home happy with what they went to see,” Gamboa said via ESPN.com. “However, for this fight I added another layer to that. I focus on proving to everyone that I still have what it takes to make it to the top.”
This is a showcase fight for Gamboa to impress the boxing fans, as Williams doesn’t have much punching power to keep him honest. Williams has fought only once in the past three years in fighting to an eight round draw against Jason Litzau last August. Before that, Williams had not fought since beating John Willoughby in October 2012.
Williams’ only career defeat was against Rances Barthelemy in February 2012 in losing by an eight round unanimous decision.
“I learned that boxing is a lot tougher outside of the ring than inside,” Gamboa said. “I learned that we are not meant to be boxing forever and have to take advantage of every opportunity in front of us as if it were the last one. I am about to put that to use.”
Comments are closed.