By Jim Slattengren: World Boxing Council super bantamweight champion Israel Vazquez (42-4, 31 KOs) puts his title on the line when he meets up with former WBC super bantamweight champion Rafael Marquez (37-4, 33 KOs) on March 1st, at the Home Depot Center, in Carson, California. This will be the 3rd bout for both fighters, with each one splitting a fight. In the first bout, Marquez, 32, hurt Vazquez early one with a series of hard jabs, left hooks and right hands to the head that dropped Vazquez, breaking his nose.
It seemed as if Vazquez never recovered from the early damage that Marquez inflicted on him, as he was never able to get into the fight after the first couple of rounds. As the fight progressed, Marquez continued to home in on Vazquez’s badly broken nose, hitting it often with big shots and making it hard for Vazquez to concentrate due to the terrible pain.
Ultimately, the fight was stopped in the 7th, with Vazquez unable to breath out of his broken nose. For Marquez, he fought the perfect fight, staying on the outside, using his jab and right hand down the middle to punish the hard-hitting Vazquez. Marquez didn’t make the mistake of trying to fight inside with Vazquez, who is most dangerous when he has an opponent directly in front of him, in close.
However, in their rematch, fought on September 4th, 2007, Vazquez’s huge power made the difference, for he landed often with left-right combinations, stunning Marquez early and often. Marquez seemed to have totally forgotten who had made him effective in the first bout, for he rarely used his excellent jab, and his right hand was hardly a factor as well. Marquez came inside, trying to beat Vazquez at what he does best – inside fighting. It was a strategy almost doomed for failure, in that Marquez took punishment every time he got in close to Vazquez, who was able to land his power uppercuts to the head and hooks to the body without having to make any effort to chase his opponent.
In the 3rd round, both of Vazquez’s eyes had cuts over them, though Marquez had problems of his own with a cut over his right eye. Marquez continued trying to trade shots with the more powerful Vazquez in rounds four and five, but was getting the worst of it, with Vazquez’s shots landing harder and lightly more frequent in volume. It wasn’t as if Marquez wasn’t landing, because he was hitting Vazquez about as often as the first fight, but his punches seemed to have less of an effect than before, perhaps because Marquez was failing to use his jab as often as the first fight.
Eventually, in the 6th round Vazquez hurt Marquez with a right-left combination, dropping him to the canvas. He made it up, but was badly hurt, prompting for the referee to move in and rightly stop the fight. For some, they felt that the referee stopped the bout too quickly, but from my vantage point, it seemed like the logical thing to do. Marquez was still badly hurt, and would have surely gone down in the next 20-30 seconds with Vazquez landing tremendous bombs.
This time around, if Marquez has any hopes of winning the fight, he’s going to need to stay on the outside, and try not to mix it up with Vazquez as often. The smart thing to do would be for Marquez to use his jab almost exclusively, and once he has Vazquez focusing completely on the jab, then come on behind it with a straight right hand, like in the first fight. Marquez needs to stay away from throwing hooks or standing too close to Vazquez, for that would be a recipe for another knockout.