By Manuel Perez: In a fight that was hardly close, super middleweight Antwun Echols (31-7-4, 27 KOs) fought to a 10-round majority draw with undefeated prospect Michael Walker (18-0-2, 12 KOs) on Friday night at the Paragon Casino & Resort, in Marksville, Louisiana. Walker, 29, was a last second replacement for Allan Green, who pulled out of the fight at the last minute leaving the opening for Walker to step in. Two judges had the fight scored even at 95-95, while the third had it 98-92. I scored it for Echols myself, seeing that he appeared to clearly win eight of the ten rounds.
Walker, a hard puncher, but with horrible handspeed a poor workrate, looked good in rounds two and three. However, after that, Walker pretty much went into the shutdown mode for the rest of the bout. Mostly, Walker would follow Echols around with his hands held up, looking somewhat like heavyweight Ross Puritty. He punched about the same rate as Puritty, only rarely letting his hands go, and even then it was near the end of the round. In between, Echols was hitting him 50-60 per round with head shots and hard body shots.
For the life of me, I couldn’t see anything close about any of the rounds after the 3rd round. It was all dominated by Echols, who landed a hard chopping shots to the head of Walker, and bruising body shots as well. I tracked most of the punches in ever round, and after going through each page of notes, it was filled with punches thrown and landed by Echols. Every twenty to thirty punches landed by Echols, Walker would throw one punch, and then it would be followed by another thirty shots landed by Echols.
Overall, terrible decision by two of the judges. Echols easily won rounds four though ten, although Walker made it somewhat close in the final round when he finally let his hands go for the final 10 seconds of the round. However, that doesn’t take away the entire round in which Walker was getting tagged with hard combinations from Echols. It’s too bad these two fighters can’t do this one over so that they get the decision right next time.