By Jason Kim: Shane Mosley and Sergio Mora fought to a 12 round draw on Saturday night at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, CA. Mosley, 39, threw more punches in the fight, but missed an awful lot of them and looked sloppy and tired in the 2nd half of the fight. At the same time, Mora landed the cleaner shots in the last half of the fight. The judges scored it 116-112 for Mosley, 115-113 for Mora and 114-114 even. I personally thought Mora had done enough to win the fight by at least four rounds, as Mosley just didn’t look at all good. You can explain away some of the reasons why Mosley looked so bad because he was fighting out of his weight class at junior middleweight.
Mora did a lot of moving and punching in the first six rounds of the fight. I thought he won at least three of those rounds with his effective punches and excellent defense. But it was in the second half of the fight where Mora seemed to really take control over the fight, because he was able to pound Mosley in close and rough him up with elbows, forearms and a lot of good wrestling.
Mosley was too small for the weight class six years ago when he was twice beaten by Winky Wright, which is why it seems all the more strange that Mosley, at the ripe old age of 39, would want to move back up to that class after all these years. In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t the smartest thing for Mosley to do, because he really struggled tonight against Mora. The thing of it is Mora isn’t even what I would consider a top 10 fighter at junior middleweight, and yet Mosley went life and death with him and barely scraped out a draw. I’d hate to see what would happen to Mosley if were to fight better junior middleweights like James Kirkland, Alfredo Angulo, Sergeii Dzinziruk or Paul Williams. I see those as all defeats for Mosley. Hopefully, Mosley takes this fight as a big hint that he needs to either move back down to the welterweight division or consider retirement.
The most critical aspect of tonight’s draw for Mosley is that it’s his second consecutive less than impressive performance. While it’s great that he was able to avoid getting beaten, it still doesn’t get away from the fact that he’s looked poor and didn’t win either of the fights. Since Mosley was trying to prove that he deserves a big money fight against Manny Pacquiao tonight, I think he failed in accomplishing that. If Pacquiao wants to fight him now, he and his promoter Bob Arum are going to have to try and ignore how badly Mosley has looked lately. I don’t know that they will. I think Pacquiao and Arum will stick to fighting the hot fighters and look for the best possible match-up after Pacquiao dispatches with Antonio Margarito in November.
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