Rios: I was terrified when I looked at Tim Bradley at face off

By Boxing News - 09/21/2015 - Comments

rios7By Dan Ambrose: #3 WBO Brandon Rios (33-2-1, 24 KOs) says he was afraid when he faced off with WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (32-1-1, 12 KOs) for their recent press conference to promote their November 7th fight on HBO Championship Boxing from the Thomas & Mack Center, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Rios, 29, obviously wasn’t serious about him being afraid of Bradley, but you can’t blame Rios if he was a little afraid. Bradley was really giving him dirty looks during the face off and trying his best to get in his head mentally with the stare down.

Rios doesn’t want to get involved with all the stare down stuff. He prefers to stay on good relations with Bradley during the run up to the fight, and instead focus on the actual fight.

“His eyeballs,” Rios said when asked by esnewsreporting what he saw in Bradley’s eyes during the recent face off with him. “I was terrified. I was scared. I never talked to him. I may have said hi once. I don’t know why he said he had a bad vibe with me, because I never even talked to him. I guess if Tim Bradley has a bad vibe with me, then he [Teddy Atlas] has a bad vibe with me. When I stood in front of him and looked in his [Bradley] eyes, he looked mad at me,” Rios said.

Bradley, 5’6”, looked a lot smaller than the 5’8” Rios when the two fighters stood next to each other on the stage. Bradley is not only shorter than Rios, but he looked a lot smaller. Rios will be taking off more weight to get down to the 147lb weight limit by November 7th, but he’s still going to be the much bigger fighter when the two guys get inside the ring for the fight.

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Rios has the bigger frame and of course the better punching power. Bradley had problems the last time he fought a guy with punching power in Diego Chaves last November. Bradley was held to a 12 round draw in the Chaves fight. While you can make the argument that Bradley was robbed in the fight, it was still very close.

Chaves’ punching power gave Bradley a lot of problems in the 2nd half of the fight. Bradley used movement to try and keep away from Chaves, but the Argentinian fighter kept cutting off the ring to force him to brawl with him.

If Chaves was able to cut off the ring on Bradley, then it’s very likely that Rios will be able to do the same thing because he showed a lot of improvement in that area in his last fight against Mike Alvarado last January. Rios didn’t used to be good at cutting off the ring on his opponents, but he’s now one of the best in getting to his opponents quickly when they try and avoid exchanging with him.

Bradley’s trainer Teddy Atlas is going to need a really great fool proof plan if he wants Bradley to win this fight against Rios because I think he’s running into Rios at the wrong time. Rios has improved a great deal and his punching power and size is going to be a real problem for him on November 7th.



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