By Jim Dower: In perhaps one of the best heavyweight fights in recent memory, the 6’5” Chris Burton (11-0, 6 KOs) defeated journeyman fighter Lee Swaby (22-20-2, 11 KOs) by an eight-round unanimous decision on Friday night at the Eston Sports Academy, in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire. Burton, 27, one of the top heavyweight prospects in the UK, traded bombs with the 31 year-old Swaby for the entire eight round fight, dropping Swaby once, in the 5th round. Burton, however, struggled much of the time with Swaby, who landed big shots frequently in the fight and hurt Burton on a couple of occasions.
However, Burton never backed off at one time in the fight, instead continuing to fire back with beautiful combinations and a big right hand that gave Swaby a lot of problems in the fight. When he was on offense, Burton looked remarkably well, showing more power and skill than most of the current top heavyweight contenders in the division, including Ruslan Chagaev, the WBA heavyweight champion.
Though he’s still at the start of his career and unknown too many people, Burton is clearly a heavyweight to keep an eye due to his excellent skills. Defensively, however, he still has a lot of work ahead of him if he wants to compete against the top fighters in the heavyweight division. Swaby, 31, was able to hit him repeatedly with uppercuts, a lot of them thrown from a distance and badly telegraphed.
Burton finally made adjustments by the fifth round, when he caught Swaby with a big right hand as he was coming in to throw a right hand. Burton would continue to nail Swaby with right hands for the final three rounds, especially whenever Swaby would attempt to throw uppercuts. Burton, however, was hit with way too many chopping right and left hands from Swaby, who would mostly bum rush him in undisguised and very crude attacks. Perhaps Burton had never fought anyone like this before, because he seemed unprepared with how to deal with this heavy pressure style of fighting.
Don’t get me wrong, Burton laid into Swaby with brutal right hands each time he’d come rushing in at Burton, but Swaby showed an excellent chin and walked through these tremendous shots to get in his own punches. I got to hand it to Swaby, he showed a good chin, because he took a lot of punishment in his wild attacks. He’d lost five fights in a row coming into Friday’s bout with Burton, getting stopped by top cruiserweight Alexander Alexeev, but Swaby didn’t seem much bothered by Burton, despite the fact that Burton is a bigger puncher than perhaps any fighter that Swaby has ever faced in his career.
Swaby landed some big shots in rounds one through three, clearly bothering Burton who was used to stopping many of his opponents inside the distance. By the 4th round, however, Swaby began to slow down, losing power on his shots and looking fatigued. Near the end of the round, Swaby landed some huge clubbing shots. Burton took them without much trouble, and returned fire with blistering right hand to the round. Burton’s right hand is quite good and compares favorably with any top heavyweight in the division, and it was shocking to see Swaby take so many of them without going down. He was really getting tagged with some major shots in the 4th round by Burton, but seemed to be encouraged by the large crowd, who were really into the fight.
Burton dropped Swaby with a big right hand to the throat in the 5th round. Swaby, however, was unhurt, even laughing as he lay on the canvas on his back. He just didn’t seem to care how many big shots he was hit by and didn’t care how much punishment he absorbed from Burton in the fight. I was beginning to think he might be able to turn the fight around and somehow come up with a miracle stoppage of Burton. The problem was, though, Burton never stopped landing huge shots for an instant and every time Swaby would land anything big, Burton would answer back with a series of huge right hands.
Burton was cut on the side of his left eye in the 6th round, but didn’t let the cut, a bad one, stop him from attacking Swaby with punishing right hands. Swaby continued to throw mostly uppercuts in the final two rounds, but he was able to score much less with them because Burton would hit him with straight right hands or jabs before he could close the distance to the 6’5” Burton. In the end, Burton just had way too much fire power for the journeyman Swaby to deal with. This was perhaps Swaby at his finest hour, because a normal fighter would have been mowed down early on with the right hands that Burton was landing, but Swaby took the shots and made it interesting.