N’Dam decisions Stevens, will face Soliman-Taylor winner

By Boxing News - 10/01/2014 - Comments

By Allan Fox: Former WBO middleweight champion Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam (31-1, 18 KOs) used constant movement and clinching to defeat the much shorter 5’7” Curtis Stevens (27-5, 20 KOs) by a 12 round unanimous decision on Wednesday night at the Barker Hangar, in Santa Monica, California, USA.

The final judges’ scores were 116-111, 116-111, and 119-108. Stevens was dropped in the 8th round by a right hand from N’Dam while attempting to hit him with his own right hand. N’Dam then briefly attempted to take Stevens out with a flurry of shots, but once Stevens nailed N’Dam with a couple of hard shots, he backed off and continued his moving around the ring.

http://youtu.be/TdZ_dPZ4Saw

The fight was less than pleasing to the eye because Stevens failed to put the kind of pressure on N’Dam that he needed to in order to win. With Stevens giving up 4 inches in height and 5 inches in reach, he needed to rush N’Dam and stay close to him on the inside. But instead of staying close, Stevens stayed on the outside and slowly plodded forward all night long. He ended up missing a great many of his punches because of his tendency to throw from too far away. Stevens also threw too many single shots instead of combination punching.

ndam1N’Dam showed excellent movement and did a good job of tying Stevens up when he got close. Stevens, if he’d been trained right, he could have continued to punch N’Dam while he was being tied up, but he willingly let himself be tied up.

N’Dam appeared to be knocked down a couple of times from shots that hit him first, in the opening round that caused him to slip to the canvas after being hit. You can make an argument that those should have been scored as knockdowns because he was hit first by the punches.

After the fight, Stevens bolted out of the ring without sticking around to be interviewed. He likely wasn’t too pleased with the scores that were handed down. He clearly lost the fight. The only thing he should be upset about is his failure to cut off the ring and stay close to N’Dam.

With this victory, N’Dam will now face the winner of the Sam Soliman vs. Jermain Taylor fight which takes place this month on ESPN 2 on October 8th. N’Dam will have a good chance of beating either of those guys as long as he doesn’t get hit with something big.

Soliman is a lot better at cutting off the ring than Stevens, and he throws many more punches per round.

Taylor has much better hand speed, a better jab, better size and equally good power compared to Stevens. Taylor is definitely an improvement over Stevens. That’ll be a tough fight for N’Dam because he’ll need to do more than just moving for 3 minutes of every round.

In other boxing results on the card:

Fredrick Lawson UD 10 Ray Narh
Miguel Marriaga TKO 6 Christopher Martin



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