By Dan Ambrose: Former 2004 Gold Medalist for the Cuban National team Yuriorkis Gamboa (11-0, 9 KOs), now fighting as a featherweight, goes up against undefeated Marcos Ramirez (25-0, 16 KOs) in a 10-round bout on Saturday at the Pechanga Resort & Casino, in Temecula, California. Gamboa, 26, is making his second fight at featherweight after moving down from super featherweight following a disappointing 10-round unanimous decision over Darling Jimenez in May, a fight in which Gamboa got dropped by a right hand from Jimenez and looked wide open defensively for most of the fight. At 5’5″, Gamboa was going to have potential problems once he started facing the bigger, stronger and better super featherweights in the division like Humberto Soto and Edwin Valero.
Perhaps with that in mind, Gamboa was moved down a weight class to the featherweight division where his awesome speed and incredible power would be even more pronounced than in the higher super featherweight division. In facing Ramirez, Gamboa is facing a good, if not proven, featherweight with not much power but decent overall skills. Without power, however, Ramirez is in deep trouble against Gamboa, and won’t likely have much if any chance at beating the former Cuban amateur star.
While Gamboa may have had his problems two fights earlier against Jimenez, he showed some improvement in his defense in his last fight, a 1st round TKO over Al Seeger in July. Seeger, however, never stood a chance as Gamboa tagged him with a blistering combination ending with a powerful left to the midsection and then a right to the head that put a badly hurt Seeger down for the count.
Gamboa, ranked #3 in the WBA, #4 in the WBC and #5 in the WBO, is within reach of a title shot against one of the featherweight champions Chris John, Steve Luevano or Oscar Larios. Gamboa would match up well with all of them, except for possibly Larios who might by a little too tall and skilled for the still sloppy defensively Gamboa. In terms of speed and power, few if any featherweights can match him in talent. However, in contrast to the current champions, Gamboa is much more raw defensively, despite the signing on of a new trainer, and still has a lot of work to do before he can be considered the finished product.
He does have enough offensive skills at this time to beat the likes of Luevano and John, but the fights will be harder than could be if he had a little more time to work on his defensive skills. Most of his problems with his defense stems from him keeping his hands too low which is made worse by the way in which Gamboa fights in an all style, leaving him open for an occasional big shot from his opponent. His speed is so good, however, that he’s able to hit his opponent many times in a fraction of a second, enabling him to score fast knockouts in the first couple of rounds. Yet when the knockout doesn’t come quickly, like in his fight with Jimenez, then the chances for Gamboa to get hit with something big goes up dramatically.