By Manuel Perez: Light welterweight prospect Almazbek “Kid Diamond” Raiymkulov (27-1-1, 15 KOs) struggled to defeat former International Boxing Federation lightweight champion Javier Jauregui (53-16-2, 36 KOs) by a 10-round majority decision on Friday night at the Buffalo Bill’s Star Arena, in Primm, Nevada. The final judges’ scores were 97-93, 96-94 and 95-95. Raiymkulov , 31, a former 2000 Olympian for Kyrgyzstan, was pushed to the limit by the slightly smaller power-punching Jauregui and forced to trade shots with him in order to pull out the victory. While I had Raiymkulov clearly winning the fight by a wide margin, he was nailed often by big right hands from Jauregui throughout the bout, in particular in the first six rounds when Jauregui was at his strongest.
The first round was pretty much even, with both fighters standing close and trading big right hands to the head. Raiymkulov tried moving after getting hit with two big looping right hands from Jauregui, which seemed to be a wake-up call for Raiymkulov. In the second round, Jauregui landed some huge fight hand shots. However, Raiymkulov showed an excellent chin and took the shots well, showing no signs of being phased by them in the least. It wasn’t pretty seeing Raiymkulov get hit so easily, though, as it was like he had a sign pasted on his face, saying ‘hit me.’
Raiymkulov outworked Jauregui in the third round, hitting him with left hands to the head and combinations. Jauregui, however, continued to sporadically tag him with a big shot that would get the crowd screaming each time the big punches landed. Raiymkulov would make it a point to immediately fire back with several shots after getting hit like this.
Both fighters stood toe-to-toe in the 4th round, hitting each other with power shots one after another and blocking few, if any, of them. Raiymkulov appeared to get the better of the action but it was very close though. There was head butt that occurred near the end of the round, but thankfully no cuts resulted for either fighter.
Jauregui came back strong in the 5th round, tagging Raiymkulov with a handful of huge looping right hands to the head. Jauregui, 35, looked very impressive in this round, and if he were a able to fight at this sustained pace during the entire fight, he would have dominated Raiymkulov without a doubt because he looked awesome.
Raiymkulov began moving more, using his boxing skills to keep from getting nailed by Jauregui’s bigger shots in the 6th. It worked well, because Jauregui was much less effective when having to come after Raiymkulov rather than having him more stationary like he had been earlier.
Jauregui began tiring slightly in the 7th round, his punches coming in more seldom than they had in the previous rounds. Some of that had to do with Raiymkulov’s constant movement which was keeping Jauregui from landing his big power shots and making him use his old legs to move around the ring. Raiymkulov tagged Jauregui with two huge right hands near the end of the 8th round, as he continued to dominate the fight over the now weary looking Jauregui.
In rounds nine and ten, Jauregui continued to gamely come forward, throwing big shots but mostly missing due to Raiymkulov’s later movement.
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