Demers Defeats Hill

By Boxing News - 06/09/2008 - Comments

By Sean McDaniel: Once-beaten middleweight contender Sebastien Demers (25-1, 9 KOs) easily defeated a badly over-matched Sam Hill (17-8-1, 10 KOs) in an 8-round unanimous decision on Friday night at the Uniprix Stadium, Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Demers, ranked #5 in the WBO and #12 in the IBF, totally dominated the 37 year-old Hill, who was coming into the fight after having been out of boxing for the past year and half. Indeed, the fight was a terrible mismatch going into the bout as Hill had never fought anyone near the class of Demers.

Instead of making Demers look good, considering that he dominated every round, it seemed to make him look bad somehow, underscoring the fact that he has little in the way of power. It was notable that a fighter of Demers stature, an A-class fighter, couldn’t put away a fighter like Hill, who probably isn’t even what you could, even when hitting him with non-stop punches for 8 rounds. The Montreal crowd, also, seemed to be not too impressed with Demers’ performance, judging by their lack of applause for him during the bout. In past fights, he normally fights in front of screaming fans, but then those fights have been against a much better class of opponent than Hill.

For the most part, Demers used Hill as target practice all fight long, hitting him with hooks, jabs straight right hands and uppercuts. None of them succeeded in hurting Hill, who constantly taunted Demers during the fight, waiving him in and telling him that his punches were doing nothing. On the defensive side, Hill was quite good, blocking shots and showing an excellent chin. His movement was poor, though, in that he spent a lot of time with his back against the ropes. However, I figured it was because of his advanced age that he was going this more than a case of lack of experience or a planned strategy.

Demers staggered Hill with a heavy right hand at the end of the 2nd. I thought at the time that it wouldn’t be long before Demers finished him off, but I was way off the mark on that prediction. In the 3rd and 4th rounds, Hill stayed pretty much planted against the ropes, both hands in front of him playing a sick version of the rope-a-dope, made famous by heavyweight Muhammed Ali. Many of Demers’ shots were blocked by Hill, but many more than that split the guard of Hill and landed with full effect to his head. The punches weren’t hard, but due to the large amount of shots that were leaking through, it was brutal to watch.

The referee stood close and watched carefully during the rounds, looking as if he wanted to stop the boxing fight because of the one-sided nature of the bout. Ideally, it should have been Hill’s corner that asked for the fight to be stopped because he was doing very little other than taking punishment from Demers. In the 4th, Hill had one good flurry that landed well, backing Demers up and making him look uncomfortable. However, Hill immediately backed off once he finished unloading on Demers, and once again assumed the role of a human punching bag.

By the 5th and 6th rounds, the fight had turned ugly with Demers unceasingly pounding Hill with shots. There seemed to be no point in letting the fight continue, because Hill was essentially lying against the ropes and absorbing a lot of punishment. Every so often, he would throw a few shots, just to keep the viewers from falling asleep, I suppose.

Demers began to look more than a little frustrated in the 7th round, as he was unable to take Hill out with anything no matter how hard he tried. Demers, mostly a fighter with good boxing skills and zero power, tried to step it up in the 6th and 7th rounds, hoping to overwhelm Hill with shots. Instead, Hill continued taunting Demers’ efforts, waiving him in and making faces at him constantly. The referee, as I mentioned before, should have stopped the fight in the 7th, because Hill threw only two or three shots in the entire round and took a ton of shots, mostly to the head.

Hill came alive briefly in the 8th round, opening up with some nice right hands to the head of Demers. This succeeded in putting a slight swelling under Demers’ left eye, but did little else in trying to stop the avalanche of punches coming from him. Demers gamely attempted one last time to take Hill out, but it wasn’t happening and he had to settle for the lopsided decision. The final judges’ scores were 80-72, 80-71 and 80-70. One would hope that this is the last time that Demers dips down into the D-class to find opponents, because at 28, he needs to be fighting top level opponents like himself if he wants to keep moving ahead in the middleweight division.