By Jim Dower: Using heavy pressure and a good body attack, #1 WBC, Victor Terrazas (37-2-1, 21 KO’s) defeated former IBF/WBA/WBC super flyweight champion Cristian Mijares (47-7-2, 22 KO’s) by a 12 round split decision on Saturday night to capture the vacant WBC super bantamweight title at the Arena Ciudad de Mexico, in Mexico City, Mexico.
The final judges’ scores were 114-113 and 115-112 for Terrazas and 114-113 for Mijares. Terrazas was knocked down in the 12th round by a hard left hand from Mijares. Terrazas suffered cuts in the 5th and 10th rounds from a head-butt and then a hard left hand.
Terrazas made this fight a lot closer than it should have been by getting off to a late start in the first four rounds. He let Mijares control the action and was not letting his hands go. However, starting in the fifth round, Terrazas started taking the fight to Mijares and punishing him with hard body shots.
Mijares then started circling the ring constantly and bouncing around to keep from getting hit. Mijares would land occasionally but his whole body posture from the 5th round on was to avoid getting hit with Terrazas’ body shots. It was difficult to give Mijares any more rounds after the 4th until he finally woke back up in the 12th and was able to drop the badly bleeding Terrazas.
Instead of going after Terrazas after he got back up to his feet, Mijares wasted valuable time by showboating and spreading his arms out to his sides instead of just going after the hurt Terrazas. In hindsight, it was dumb move on his part because there was only a short amount of time left in the fight.
With this victory, Terrazas, 30, captures the WBC title that was recently vacated by Abner Mares.
Terrazas is a good fighter but he’s not quite at the same level as the other champions in division such as Guillermo Rigondeaux and Jhonaton Romero. Terrazas needs to avoid fighting any unification bouts with those guys because they would beat him.
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On the undercard, former two division world champion Juan “Juanma” Lopez (33-2, 30 KO’s) stopped a badly over-matched journeyman fighter Eugenio Lopez (31-25-1, 25 KO’s) by a 2nd round knockout. Juanma, 29, knocked Eugenio down with a big left hook to the head in the 2nd round that put him flat on his back. The referee Rafael Saldana didn’t even bother to count and immediately halted the fight at 0:59 of the round.
In the 1st round, Juanma staggered Eugenio with a hard jab near the end of the round. Eugenio was able to make it out of the round after Juanma held back like he wanted the fight to go a little longer.
For Juanma, this is his second tune-up fight after having been stopped in the 10th round last year by Orlando Salido. Juanma was suspended after that fight and missed 11 months of action.
It was interesting that Juanma was fighting on the undercard instead of a main event and fighting in Mexico instead of his home country of Puerto Rico. It’s hard to believe that Juanma would fight on an undercard in Mexico instead of in Puerto Rico where he draws huge crowds and makes lots of money.
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