By Sean McDaniel: After having an easy time in his initial fight at heavyweight in beating 41-year-old Andrew Golota in October 2009, former International Boxing Federation cruiserweight champion Tomasz Adamek (40-1, 27 KO’s) was put in with decent heavyweight tonight in Jason Estrada (16-3, 4 KO’s), whom he struggled to beat by a 12 round unanimous decision at the Prudential Center, Newark, New Jersey. Adamek. Estrada, 29, landed early and often finding it very easy to connect with pretty much anything he threw at Adamek.

However, Adamek was the busier fighter and was able to win the crucial rounds down the stretch in the 2nd half of the fight. The final judges’ scores were 118-110, 116-112, and 115-113. I’m not sure which fight the judge was watching who scored it 118-110 for Adamek, because the fight I saw was very close and I had Adamek barely winning. The fight was close going into the last four rounds. Adamek came on in the crucial rounds and took them by landing combinations. He continued to get tagged more often than I would have liked by Estrada.

The problem for Adamek was his lack of defense. Indeed, Adamek blocked punches mainly with his face tonight rather than his gloves and he looked like a 50s heavyweight fighting in the 2010.
I had forgotten how poor Adamek’s defense was as a light heavyweight. After only one round of watching Estrada connect with punch after punch to the head of Adamek, it was like going back in a time warp to his two wars with Paul Briggs where Adamek’s face looked like it had been through a shredder.

Thankfully, Estrada didn’t beat Adamek’s face up like Briggs did, but he did land a lot of shots in the fight. For his part, Adamek was able to land effectively against Estrada with nice combinations. However, the punches failed to have any effect on Estrada whatsoever. The problem for Adamek is that he lacked hand speed and his shots seemed to suffer for that reason.

Plus, Adamek, at 220, really wasn’t punching like a big heavyweight. It’s possible that Adamek will gain more strength as he puts on more weight in the future. At 6’1” 220, Adamek doesn’t look like he can put on too much more size. The 20 pounds that Adamek has put on since moving up from the cruiserweight division makes Adamek look slightly fat and slow. It’s hard to imagine what he might look like if he puts on another 10 to 20 pounds.

Adamek has his work cut out for him if he wants to stay in the heavyweight division. Estrada is a heavyweight that Adamek should have been able to dominate without any problems, yet Adamek struggled badly against him. There’s talk of Adamek fighting heavyweight contender Chris Arreola in April. I think that might be a bad idea. Adamek doesn’t look ready for that fight, at least as far as I’m concerned. He can take the fight, but I think Arreola will beat him quite easily.