By Jeff Aranow: The much taller 5’7 ½” WBC super flyweight champion Rey Vargas (31-0, 22 KOs) used his height and reach advantage to defeat voluntary challenger Oscar Negrete (17-1, 7 KOs) by a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Vargas vs. Negrete is the co-feature bout on the HBO World Championship Boxing card headlined by Miguel Cotto vs. Sadam Ali.
This was a disappointing fight for the undercard of Cotto vs. Ali. The card deserved better than this mismatch.
The judges scored the Vargas-Negrete fight 119-108, 119-108, and 120-108. Boxing News 24 scored it 120-108. Negrete, 5’5”, was walking into shots all night long from the 27-year-old Vargas, and not able to land his shorter punches at a high enough rate to be competitive in the fight.
It took Negrete 6 rounds to realize that he would be more effective fighting on the inside rather than the outside. Negrete should have known going into the fight that he wouldn’t stand a chance by competing with the taller Vargas by fighting on the outside. Negrete had tried to use an in and out style of fighting against Vargas, but it didn’t work well. Vargas was adept at catching Negrete with shots when he was coming forward.
Vargas suffered cuts over both eyes, starting in round 5. The first cut over his right eye of Vargas seemed to slow him down a little in the 5th and 6th, and this enabled Negrete to be more effective than he’d been in the previous rounds. Vargas still appeared to dominate the action, however. It just wasn’t quite as one-sided as it had been in the first half of the fight before the first cut.
Negrete showed a lot of heart in the fight in continuing to press the attack on the younger Vargas. Negrete walked through withering fire at all times to land his body shots.
Vargas looked like he was wearing down starting in the 7th round, as Negrete began to unload on him from up close.
In round 8, Vargas was cut over his left eye from a shot. Negrete did a good job of targeting the cut to do more damage to the eye. By this point in the fight, Vargas had both eyes bleeding, making it difficult for him to see. Vargas stayed calm, and continued to throw a lot of weak shots to keep Negrete off balance and unable to unload the way he wanted to.
In rounds 9 through 12, Vargas used his jab and reach advantage to control the fight from the outside. Vargas made sure he hit Negrete frequently when he was coming forward trying to attack.