By Nate Anderson: In one of the more exciting bouts on Friday’s fight card on ESPN, undefeated light middleweight prospect Ruslan Provodnikov (8-0, 6 KOs) fought a war with previously undefeated Brian Gordon (4-1, 4 KOs), defeating him by a 6-round unanimous decision. The final judges’ scores were 59-55, 58-56 and 60-54. I personally had the fight scored a draw because Gordon , 28, appeared to out-land the 24 year-old Provodnikov in every round of the fight.
However, Gordon didn’t have the same kind of power as Provodnikov, who reminded me a lot of a smaller version of Vassily Jirov. Like Jirov, Provodnikov showed crushing power to the body, where he was able to hurt Gordon on a couple of occasions, especially early on in the fight. However, Provodnikov had little power when it came to landing head shots, and both his defense and stamina were badly lacking.
Gordon, who just finished serving two tours in Iraq, totally dominated the 1st round , as he hit the plodding Provodnikov with sharp jabs and powerful right hands repeatedly in the round. Provodnikov, for his part, mostly followed Gordon around, taking shots and landing to the body on occasion. Provodnikov looked nothing like a fighter that had won 135 of 150 amateur fights.
In the 2nd round, Provodnikov did slightly better, landing high number of body shots. The punches were thrown with enormous power and made a loud noise when landing. In contrast to other good body punchers, like Ricky Hatton, Provodnikov looked much better because of the power that he was able to generate. It’s too bad that he was unable to utilize the same kind of power when throwing head shots, because he would have likely stopped Gordon in short order if he could punch upstairs like he did downstairs. Again, I gave the round to Gordon, who was just landing the cleaner shots and making Provodnikov look, well, like an amateur.
Provodnikov’s body shots because to get toe Gordon in the 3rd round, as he seemed to have problems with his breathing after taking a number of shots. At the same time, Gordon was beginning to show signs of slowing down, tiring from the big body punches that Provodnikov was repeatedly blasting him with.
Gordon appeared to be hurt by a series of hard body shots in the 4th and it appeared that he might go down during one instance in the round. However, he continued to fight on, though much less successfully than he did in the first two rounds.
It appeared that Provodnikov had punched himself out in the 4th, because he had next to nothing in the 5th round, rarely throwing punches until the last minute of the round. Even then, Provodnikov looked weak, like he’d shot his wad and didn’t have much more to give. Instead of punching, Provodnikov continually followed Gordon around, looking as if he were trying to get his energy up to throw one or two shots. In the meantime, Gordon was tagging him with shots. Needless to say, I gave this round to Gordon. Provodnikov was letting him back in the fight, when he should have been finishing him off.
In the 6th round, Gordon landed an excellent right hand early on that snapped Provodnikov’s head back, appearing to hurt him for an instant. Provodnikov, however, responded well and summoned up his energy once again, landing a lot of big body shots in the final two minutes of the round, enough to win the round.
Overall, Provodnikov looked decent, but nothing like a future champion. He has too many problems with his game right now, such as speed, defense, and lack of power when going to the head, poor stamina and terrible movement. That’s a lot of problems for a fighter to have if their goal is to become a champion. At 24, I have serious doubts he’ll be able to fix any of them enough to make it into the 10, much less him ever becoming a champion.