Welterweight contender Jesus Soto-Karrass (19-3-3, 14 KOs) won a hard-fought 10-round unanimous decision on Friday night over veteran Germaine Sanders (27-5, 17 KOs) at the Jacob Brown Auditorium, in Brownsville, Texas. Karrass, 25, cruised through the first four rounds of the fight, out-punching the 37 year-old Sanders with hooks to the body and head. Karass, ranked #10 in the World Boxing Organization welterweight division, had little problems, as Sanders seemed only interested in throwing jabs during most of the action.
Though his jab was an effective tool against Karass, it wasn’t enough to win the rounds, for Karass would generally wait until the last minute of each round to open up with his body attacks. The final judges’ scores were 95-93, 97-92 and 96-93, all for Karass.
In rounds one through four, Karass constantly came forward, shooting hooks, and right hands to the head of Sanders, backing him up. During most of the rounds, Sanders rarely threw a punch other than a jab, as if he were afraid to commit himself to a punch for fear of getting countered by Karass. When Sanders did start opening up a little, he showed a nice short right hand that he’d throw as a counter punch as Karass was coming in. However, the power was mostly negligle and not enough to deter Karass from unloading his punches whenever he pleased, which as turned out, was quite frequent.
In rounds five and six, Sanders dominated the action with his numerous jabs and right hands, keeping Karass at the receiving end of his punches. It seemed as if Karass had opted to take these rounds off because he did next to nothing for most of the rounds, except in the last minute when he would open up with some combinations. It was either laziness on his part or a bad strategy, as he gave up the rounds without much of a struggle.
In rounds seven through ten, Karass resumed controlling the fight, hitting Sanders with 1-2 combinations and out-working him. Karass hit Sanders with a low blow in the 7th round, which caused a time out for a couple of minutes while Sanders recovered from the blow. When action resumed, Karass continued with his excellent body work, landing big hooks to Sander’s midsection and head.
Karass landed a ton of combinations in the eighth round, as he appeared to be trying to take out Sanders. However, his punches, though numerous, had little effect on Sanders. Part of the problem is that Karass doesn’t have a lot of power, and needs to throw a lot of punches to score his knockouts. Against Sanders, however, he was unable to land enough due to Sanders trying to keep Karass on the outside with his constant jab.
In the 10th round, Sanders showed little urgency to score a knockout, even though he was far behind in the fight on the scorecards. Sanders continued throwing jabs, as if he were still in the opening rounds of the fight. Either he had no idea of how far behind he was in the fight, or he believed that didn’t have the power to knock Karass out even if he had wanted to.
In a lot of ways, Karass’ style looked similar to Mexican fighter Antonio Margarito, albeit without Margarito’s awesome power and workrate. He’s going to need to work on improving his power if he wants to move up from his #10 ranking in the WBO and perhaps contend for a title in the future.