By Aaron Klein: WBC flyweight champion Daisuke Naiton (32-2-3, 20 KOs) fought to a 12-round draw with #1 WBC flyweight challenger Pongsaklek Wonjongkam (67-3-1, 35 KOs) on Saturday night at the Kokugikan, in Tokyo, Japan. The final judges’ scores were 114-114, 115-113, for Naito, and 114-115, for Wonjongkam. However, I didn’t give Wonjongkam one round in the fight because he was getting outlanded 10-1 in every round. It wasn’t a case of Wonjongkam punching that much harder than Naito, because Wonjongkam’s punches were just a little harder than Naito’s punches, which made it seem shocking that the fight was scored so closely by the three judges.
Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t find any rounds where Wonjongkam made it even slightly close because of his minimalist punching style and his plodding manner of fighting. Wonjongkam, 30, had held the WBC flyweight title from 2001 until July 2007, losing it by a 12-round unanimous decision to Naito. That’ admirable to have held the title for that period of time, but however good Wonjongkam was in the past, he looked like a shot fighter against Naito on Saturday night.
Naito easily won the first round, as he moved well around the fight, landing jabs to the head and hooks to the body of Wonjongkam, In the second round, Wonjongkam thew Naito to the canvas, in a move that looked to have been the result of his frustration with his inability to match Naito’s offensive attacks. It didn’t change anything, though, as Naito continued to pour in shots from the outside. When he would come inside, Naito would land one or two punches, and then move away before Wonjongkam could respond with his own shots. Long stretches of time would elapse in every round between Wonjongkam attempting to throw a punch.
In between that time, Naito was nailing him with shots to the head. By the sixth round, Wonjongkam’s left cheek was beginning to swell up badly from the numerous right hands that Naito was hitting him with. Still, nothing changed in the bout as Naito continued dominating Wonjongkam with ease. In the 8th round, Wonjongkam began to fight disparately, hitting on the break, ramming heads with Naito and applying more pressure. However, he was missing the most important part – throwing punches. As such, Naito easily won the 8th round.
In the 9th round, Wonjongkam came out stalking Naito, as if he’d finally made up his mind to make a fight of it. Overall, he landed all of a couple of punches, while taking a huge amount of head shots in the round from Naito. I still couldn’t find a reason to give Wonjongkam a round.
In rounds 10-12, Naito continued outlanding Wonjongkam by an incredible margin, hitting him over and over again without anything coming back at him. It was a one-sided beating in each of these rounds, as Wonjongkam had nothing to fire back with other than mean looks. In the end, I figured that the referee would announce Naito as the winner by a wide margin, seeing that Wonjongkam had received such a thorough beating. However, as I previously mentioned, the judges’ scored the fight a draw. That was really bad scoring of a fight, and it would definitely rank as one of the poorest I’ve ever seen in all the years I’ve been watching boxing.