(Photo Credit: Alex Menendez – HoganPhotos/Golden Boy Promotions) By Dan Ambrose: In a big shocker, former WBA featherweight champion Nicholas Walters (26-0-1, 21 KOs) and little known super featherweight Jason Sosa (18-1-4, 14 KOs) fought to a controversial 10 round draw on HBO Championship Boxing from the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, New York. The final judges’ scores were 96-94 for Sosa, and 95-95 and 95-95.
Sosa landed more power punches to the head, and was able to use his size and busy fighting style to get the better of Walters through the fight.
Walters fought well enough to win rounds 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8. Sosa did more than enough to win rounds 1, 4, 5, 9 and 10. Sosa finished very strong in the last two rounds of the fight to earn a draw in my view.
This had to have been a big shock for HBO broadcast team, as they felt that Walters won every round of the fight. I don’t agree with HBO for their heavily hyped fighter Walters. It was more of a case of the 29-year-old Walters moving up in weight to super featherweight where he fought someone that was roughly the same way as him in the 140s, and he wasn’t able to use his superior size to dominate like he’d been doing while fighting at 126lb in the featherweight division against lighter guys.
I had a feeling that Walters would eventually get exposed when he fought someone his own size like Sosa.
This performance from Walters suggests that he’s not going to be able to dominate at super featherweight like he was doing at featherweight. Unless Walters can move back down to 126, I see him continuing to have problems in this weight class, because he’s nothing special at this weight like he was when he was fighting at featherweight.
Top Rank vice president Carl Moretti wasn’t too pleased with seeing his fighter Walters having to settle for a draw in the fight. Moretti said to ESPN.com “They all stink. They shouldn’t judge again.”
HBO unofficial house judge Harold Lederman scored the fight 99-91 for Walters.
Walters connected on 281 of 622 punches for a 45 percent connect percentage, according to CompuBox. Sosa landed 168 of 873 punches for a 19 percent connect percentage. Many of Walter’s punches were to the body rather than to the head, and that might have had something to do with the judges being more impressed at times with the work Sosa was doing.
I don’t agree with any of these people with the decision. I could understand Top Rank and HBo not being happy with seeing Walters having to settle for a draw. After all, Walters is being heavily hyped by HBO, so they might not be happy to see him get brought down to earth like this. With Top Rank, they obviously don’t want to see their fighter Walters being seen as less than super. The fact of the matter is Walters is mortal and has major flaws in terms of defensive skills, as we saw in this fight.
Yes, Walters is a big puncher in both the featherweight and super featherweight divisions, but the problem is there are guys with punching power that is either close to being equal or better. In this fight, we saw that Sosa had punching power that was nearly as good as Walters, and he had a better punch output. The judges did the right thing in scoring the fight a draw because there were at least five rounds were Sosa proved to be as good as Walters.
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