By Michael Liberman: One-time cruiserweight title challenger Marco Huck (21-1, 16 KOs) defeated a Frantisek Kasanic (12-3, 12 KOs) by a 9th round TKO to win the vacant IBF Inter-Continental cruiserweight title on Saturday night at the Oberfrankenhalle, Bayreuth, in Bayern, Germany. Huck, 23, looked vastly improved from his 12th-round losing effort in his challenge for IBF cruiserweight Steve Cunningham’s title in December 2007. Spending much of the fight boxing expertly, Huck dropped Kasanic in the 9th round with a left-right to the midsection. After Kasanic made it to his feet, Huck quickly finished him off a with a flurry of unanswered shots while Kasanic’s back was against the ropes, causing for referee Lindsey Page to halt the fight with Kasanic, 32, still on his feet.
Huck’s fighting style looked completely different from his last fight, in which he previously used to come charging after his opponents throwing wild punches every which way, missing often, tiring himself out, and taking shots from his more skilled opponents. His wild style of finally caught up with him when he faced his best opponent of his career, Steve Cunningham, who soundly defeated Huck, stopping him in the 12th round of a one-sided bout.
Many people figured that Huck was incapable of changing his style, considering it had been what had taken him this far in his career and he might not want to change it. However, change he is what he did, for Huck boxed skillfully for most of the fight, using his jab constantly, and punching well to the body. In contrast to his old style of fighting, which consisted mainly of Huck running at his opponents, trying to land head shots. If the knockout did come, Huck would typically tire out and look very mediocre. Against Kasanic, though, Huck looked good throughout, as he pounded Kasanic with jabs and digging body shots.
The shots to the body appeared to do most of the damage, particularly late in the fight when it began to take a toll on Kasanic. As good as Huck looked, however, he had a bad habit of constantly backing up to the ropes throughout the fight and covering up and trying to fight off the ropes. It wasn’t a smart way of fighting, and it caused him to take a lot of punishment from Kasanic, whom he probably could have taken out much earlier in the fight if he had stayed off the ropes and just fought him in the middle of the ring. I couldn’t really understand it, thinking maybe Huck needed to lie back on the ropes because of his poor stamina.
Indeed, he did begin to tire visibly by the 8th round. Yet, Huck had used this style of fighting for the entire bout and it rarely helped him. Other than that, Huck took a lot of punishment in the bout and at times, especially late in the fight, it looked for an instant that Kasanic had him in trouble and on the verge of a knockout. That’s not a good sign for Huck, who should be able to blow out easy competition like this within a few rounds.
What it does show, though, is that Huck isn’t ready to fight better fighters, at least not much better than Kasanic, because he’ll lose if he fights like he did on Saturday night. I mean, he looked great for the most part, much better than before, but he was an awful fighter in the past. He still needs to work out his other problems if he wants to challenge for the title and perhaps get revenge against Cunningham.
Huck landed some crushing body shots in rounds three though six, and I was frankly surprised that Kasanic was able to withstand the shots without going down. However, every time that Huck appeared to have Kasanic in some trouble, he’d back up and go to ropes and lean, as if he were an old man. I’ve seen other German-based fighters, like Arthur Abraham do this on occasion, but only in his bout with Edison Miranda, a knockout artist. Abraham had to fight this way because he would have had his head taken off if he stood in the middle of the ring for long. In Huck’s case, he didn’t have that kind of threat because Kasanic wasn’t all that much of a puncher, despite his impressive string of knockouts. All of those fights had occurred against weak opposition.
In the sixth round, fighting off the ropes much of the time, Huck took a lot of punishment from Kasanic. Huck’s German trainer was screaming at him like mad, his face turning a bright red as if he were about to blow a gasket or something, yet Huck continued to stay on the ropes taking head shots. Every once in awhile, he’d get off the ropes and attack with fierce body shots, but then obediently got back to the ropes, as if it were his chair.
Nothing much changed in the 7th and 8th rounds, other than both Kasanic and Huck looking tired. Huck seemed to notice finally that his body shots were doing much more damage than his head shots, and seemed to focus mainly on that during these two rounds. It looked as if Huck hurt Kasanic with a left-right combination in the 8th round, yet Kasanic came back firing with a big right hand that sent Huck retreating back to the ropes once again. It wasn’t much from Kasanic, yet it caused Huck to retreat like a scalded dog.
In the 9th round, both fighters traded big shots for the first minute of the round. However, Huck quickly hurt Kasanic with a series of big body shots, causing Kasanic to lose his mouthpiece on one occasion. After his mouthpiece was reinserted, Kasanic was dropped with a combination to the body while backed against the ropes. He lost his mouthpiece for a second time in the round, causing him to get a warning from the referee. After the action resumed, Huck went after him, tagging him with a flurry of shots of shots and causing the referee to stop the fight at 2:52 of the 9th round.