By Dan Ambrose: Fringe middleweight contender Sebastien Demers (26-2, 9 KOs) won a lopsided 10-round unanimous decision over former contestant from The Contender reality television series, Donny McCrary (24-9-2, 13 KOs), beating him soundly in a one-sided fight on Saturday night at the Montreal Casino, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Demers, 28, who has seen his rankings slide in the past year in the middleweight division with his two losses to Arthur Abraham and most recently Dionisio Miranda, dominated McCrary over the course of the 10-round bout.
The fight, presumably set up to try and rebuild Demer’s confidence following his recent 10-round split decision loss to Dionisio Miranda in August, showed Demers at his best, using his superb boxing skills to jab and pound McCray at will. In terms of boxing ability, Demers has few equals in the middleweight division, even among the current champions.
The problem is, his chin has let him down at times in fights against Miranda and Abraham, and his power is average at best. However, there’s nothing wrong with his technical skills, as he does everything well – blocks punches, moves well and has a vast offensive arsenal that is difficult to predict what he’ll do next.
McCrary, 26, a super middleweight, was clearly out of his league from the opening moments in the fight, taking hard jabs and left hands to the head in the first round. McCrary did little in the round, throwing one combination and spending most of the time trying to block Demer’s incoming shots.
In rounds two through four, Demers showed off his vast offensive arsenal against the badly outclassed McCrary, hitting him with hard combinations from many angles and giving him problems with his size. Although only two inches taller than McCrary at 6’0″, Demers looked huge next to him and looked to be in a higher weight class.
However, Demer’s punches appeared to be just a little harder than McCrary’s, but the difference here was that Demers was throwing many more punches than McCrary, and not giving him many chances to get in his own punches.
At the end of the 4th round, Demers unleashed a hard six-punch combination, battering McCrary as he attempted to cover up on the ropes. By the 6th round, it was apparent that McCrary had next to no chance to win the fight and was merely taking a savage beating in there against Demers.
I thought the fight needed to be stopped at this point, because McCrary was soaking up an awful lot of punishment and in not fighting competitively with Demers for an instant. I suppose he had a small chance given Demers’ history of being hurt in his fights, but McCrary didn’t have the kind of power than Abraham and Miranda brought into their fights with Demers, and had nothing comparable to answer Demers’ hard combinations.
What was the worst part, however, was that McCrary was throwing few punches in each round, other than a few token shots, and was taking a serious beating. Whatever the case, the fight wasn’t stopped and the beating continued in rounds seven through nine.
McCrary started clinching a lot, diving at Demers in what appeared to be a gesture to try and stop him from landing quite as often. It worked somewhat, but Demers continued to rain shots down on him whenever the two fighters were separated. McCrary had swelling under both eyes and looked as if he had been in a war by the end of the 9th.
In the 10th round, McCrary gamely fought back hard, landing a few nice combinations to the head of Demers and giving him some problems in the round. However, it wasn’t enough to hurt him, and as such, the fight ended as it had begun, with Demers blasting McCrary with combinations while he tried to cover up. The final judges’ scores were 100-90, 100-90 and 100-90.