By Jim Dower: Former middleweight title challenger Curtis Stevens (29-5, 21 KOs) overcame a left hand injury to defeat James De La Rosa (23-5, 13 KOs) by a 10 round unanimous decision on Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Stevens, 31, knocked De La Rosa down with a left hook to the head late in the 1st round. The final judges scores were 98-90, 96-92 and 96-92. Boxing News 24 scored the fight 96-92. It wasn’t impressive stuff from Stevens, but he did enough to get the win.
Stevens had a point deducted for a low blow in the 8th round.
The fight looked like it was going to have an early ending after Stevens dropped De La Rosa in the 1st round. However, Stevens stopped using his left hand in the 2nd round, and the action slowed way down at that point. Stevens was stuck using just his right hand, and he didn’t have enough power with that hand to do much other than get the better of De La Rosa by narrow margins. De La Rosa was still shell-shocked in the 2nd round from his knockdown in the 1st, so he didn’t do much in round 2.
In round three, De La Rosa began to come on in the second half of the round. He was connecting with slapping shots to the head and body of Stevens. As the round progressed, De La Rosa began to look more and more confident.
De La Rosa backed Stevens up to the ropes in the first half of round 4, and landed a lot of shots. In the last minute of the round, Stevens came back with hand shots to the head of De La Rosa to make it a close round.
The boxing crowd booed the lack of action in round 5, as Stevens wasn’t throwing punches and he was just letting De La Rosa slap at him with weak shots. It was a clear De La Rosa round, but it was hardly impressive.
Stevens picked up the pace in the 6th round, and was able to nail De La Rosa with some big right hands. However, the crowd still booed the lack of action. Stevens was waiting too long to let his hands go. Never the less, he clearly did a better job in this round than he had in the previous one.
In rounds 7 though 10, Stevens attacked De La Rosa with mostly right hands. In the 8th, Stevens trapped De La Rosa against the ropes and hammered him with rights to the body. A couple of his shots strayed low, causing referee Russell Mora to warn him. Moments later, Stevens hit De La Rosa with another low blow. Mora then stopped the action and took a poiint away from Stevens for the low blow.
In the 10th, De La Rosa taunted Stevens by talking with him, and raising his hands in the air in victory solute. De La Rosa looked like he was trying hard to upset Stevens as much as possible.
Stevens is going to need to do better than this in his future fights if he wants to have a chance of winning a world title. The way Stevens looked against De La Rosa, it’s doubtful he would be able to beat even WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders, who some boxing fans feel is the weak link amount the champions at 160.