Woods Needs to Retire

By Boxing News - 08/29/2009 - Comments

woods43534By Scott Gilfoid: It really saddened me last night to see Clinton Woods getting the stuffing beaten out of him by the young Tavoris Cloud. I kind of felt sorry for Woods when he started getting beaten to a pulp in the last four rounds of the fight. Woods was a decent British fighter, but he seemed out of his element against Cloud and was not ready for the kind of power shots that Cloud was tagging him with in the second part of the fight. Although Cloud ended up winning by a fairly close 12-round unanimous decision to capture the vacant IBF light heavyweight title, I had the fight scored much differently than the judges.

I saw Woods only winning one round of the fight, the 1st. After that, it was all Cloud, who was tattooing Woods’ head with huge shots from rounds two until the bitter end in the 12th. This wasn’t about age. It was about Woods being in over his head against a superior fighter.

Cloud was stronger, faster and above all, the smarter fighter. You could see early in the bout the wheels moving around in Cloud’s head as he understood that he had to get close to Woods so that he could land his power shots.

On the outside, Cloud would have stood no chance and that’s why he got right in Woods’s face and proceeded to hammer him with big shots for the full 12 rounds. Woods tried to touch gloves with Cloud on a couple of occasions, as if to make things nice between the two of them.

I saw it as a sign of weakness, as if Woods was hoping that Cloud would then take it was on him and not hit him so hard. Cloud wanted nothing to do with Woods’ appeasement offering, ignoring his outstretched gloved and continuing to drill him in the mug over and over again.

Woods tried to play it off by extending his arms out to the sides as if the punches weren’t bothering him, but it was clear that they were. In the 8th round, Cloud hit Woods with a short left-right combination and then a left hook that snapped Woods’ head back and sending him retreating straight back towards the ropes.

Woods then took an enormous amount of punishment for the remainder of the round. The fight stopped being interesting after that, because Cloud had it all his own way and essentially toyed with Woods in rounds nine through twelve.

I hate to say this but I think Woods needs to retire immediately. There’s nothing he can do in the light heavyweight division and if he continues on, he’ll continue to get beat up like he did on Friday night. Woods isn’t skilled enough to move down to the super middleweight division because tough fighters like Andre Ward and Andre Dirrell would make easy work of him. Woods is too slender to move up to the cruiserweight division and would equally be out of his league if he tried to move up in weight.



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