By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA featherweight champion Nicholas Walters (26-0-1, 21 KOs) and Top Rank vice president Carl Moretti were not happy last night following Walters’ 10 round draw against 8 IBF, #11 WBO super featherweight contender Jason Sosa (18-1-4, 14 KOs) in a fight televised by HBO Boxing After Dark at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, New York.
Walters, 29, thought he should have got the victory by a nine rounds to one score. The judges saw it differently in scoring the fight 96-94 for Sosa, and 95-95 and 95-95.
It was Walters’ first fight at super featherweight (130), and it was a fight in which he was facing a guy that outweighed him by one pound. While Walters had been fighting at featherweight, he was sometimes the bigger guys in the ring. Last night, Walters weighed in at 141 compared to Sosa’s 142.
Without the weight advantage that Walters had had in the past over some of his opposition, he was not able to dominate the fight. Walters’ punches did not have the same effect against a guy his own weight than when he was fighting lighter guys at featherweight. This obviously isn’t good news for Walters, because I don’t think he can make 126 any longer to fight at featherweight.
In his previous fight against Miguel Marriaga last June, Walters came in over the featherweight limit and then rehydrated to 145lbs for the fight. The weight was as high as lightweight Felix Verdejo, who also rehydrated to 145 on the same card. The difference is Walters was fighting a lighter featherweight, while Verdejo was fighting a lightweight. As you can see, Walters was clearly not fighting in the right weight class. He was like the Saul “Canelo” Alvarez of the featherweight division at that point.
“Do I want a rematch with Sosa, or does Sosa want a rematch with me,” Walters said at the post-fight press conference. “Personally, I don’t think I lost this fight. I was the one that beat him up, not him beat me up. It surprised me the beating he took, because I thought he would have went down in the later rounds. If you watched the fight, you saw I gave him a number of body shots and I thought he would have gone down from those body shots. He took a beating and he was still fighting. In my heart, I knew I won the fight,” Walters said.
I think Walters is kidding himself if he thinks he gave Sosa a beating. It was an even fight with Sosa giving out just as much punishment as he took. It was interesting though listening to Walters try and do damage control at the post-fight press conference in trying to convince the media that he had dominated Sosa and given him a beating.
That was not the case. It was just a simple fight in which Sosa fought a good super featherweight, but not necessarily the best. Walters is clearly not a great fighter at super featherweight now that he is fighting guys his own size and not outweighing them by a huge amount. Sosa landed many hard shots to the head of Walters and fought him to a standstill in the fight.
I thought the three judges did a superb fight last night in scoring the Walters vs. Sosa fight. I could not give Walters the win because Sosa got the better of him in at least five of the ten rounds. It was a dominating performance like Walters thinks it was. It was a fight in which he was hit with some incredibly hard shots from Sosa, and he was hit a lot. It was an even fight. The shots that Sosa landed would have knocked out many fighters. You have to give Walters credit for taking terrible punishment to the head.
To show you how effective Sosa was in the fight, he actually caused Walters to start boxing in the last 2 rounds in the ninth and tenth. Walters changed his fight strategy completely in the last two rounds by fighting defensively. The only reason I think Walters would do that is because he did not like the head shots that Sosa was hitting him with.
You have to remember that Walters has been fighting featherweights all this time, and not all of them can punch. Last night, Walters was taking head shots from a legit super featherweight who weighed the same as Walters, and you could tell that Walters did not like taking those head shots. In other words, Walters could dish it out but he did not seem to like taking it in return. That is why he blew the last two rounds by choosing to box instead of slug. If Walters would have stayed in the pocket and punched with Sosa instead of moving, he might have had a chance to win. I do not think he would have, but at least he would have had a chance to win.
“We don’t know what other kinds of opponents that can take that kind of punishment that Sosa took tonight,” Top Rank vice president Carl Moretti said. “Even though he got outclassed by a great fighter, I don’t know how many guys could have stood up to what Nicholas threw tonight. That’s what really makes it intriguing in this division. If you list the top three in the world, you know Walters is one of them,” Moretti said.
Sosa landed 168 of 873 punches for a 19 percent connect percentage, according to CompuBox. Walters landed 281 of 622 punches for a connect percentage of 45%. I think Sosa’s punches were much more effective, as they seemed to snap Walters’ head around on many of the occasions.
It’s always tough for fighters when they move up to a new weight division and find out that they can no longer dominate like they did in the previous weight divisions. I suspect that Walters is going to struggle a lot more in the future when he starts fighting guys like Takashi Uchiyama, Rances Barthelemy, Roman Martinez, Orlando Salido, Takashi Miura and Stephen Smith. Walters will find out that those guys can punch just like he can, and he’ll find a new way of winning by using his boxing skills. I think Walters can still be successful, but I don’t see him being the same dominating force that he was down at featherweight. Against fighters his own size, I see Walters as no better than them, as we saw last Saturday. Walters was no better than the fringe top 10 contender Sosa.
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