By Jim Dower: Heavyweight contender Carlos Takam (34-3-1, 26 KOs) bounced back from a defeat to Joseph Parker to destroy an over-matched 39-year-old Marcin Rekowski (17-5, 14 KOs) by a 4th round knockout last Sunday at the Cotai Arena in Macao, China. In winning the fight, Takam captured the vacant IBF Inter-Continental heavyweight title.
With little worries about getting hit back, Takam unloaded on Rekowski with power shots the entire fight. It was practice on the heavy bag. In the 3rd, the 36-year-old Takam dropped Rekowski with a left hook to the head late in the round.
In the 4th, Takam unloaded on Rekowski at the start of the round with a flurry of shots that had him in bad trouble. During the flurry of shots, Rekowski got turned around completely and had his back towards Takam. He was then completely defenseless when Takam nailed him with a left hand to the head while he still had his back turned. The shot dropped Rekowski on his face on the canvas. Rekowski was completely out cold because he had never seen the shot.
It was a similar knockout to Mikey Garcia’s KO of Dejan Zlaticanin last Saturday night. Zlaticanin got his back turned to Garcia in their fight and was nailed with a sucker punch just as he was starting to turn around to face Garcia. Rekowski’s knockout was much worse because he never even had a chance to turn around to face Takam when he was hit from behind.
Takam did get hit with some solid right hands from Rekowski in rounds 2 and 3. Rekowski showed that he has very nice punching power. His problem is he doesn’t throw enough punches, and his defense is nonexistent. If Rekowski could improve those two areas of his game, he might be a good heavyweight. However, with Rekowski nearing 40, it’s not likely he’s going to improve enough to do much with what’s left of his career.
The loss for Rekowski was his fourth in his last five fights taking back to 2015. He appears to be on his way to journeyman status in a real hurry. The fact that Takam was able to knock him out wasn’t very special because he’d already been knocked out recently by Andrzej Wawzryk amd Magy Aquilera.
Takam is ranked 5 IBF, 8 WBC. He wants to get a title shot against one of the champions. Takam is not likely to get a title shot by any champions through the voluntary defense route. He’s probably going to need to work his way to a No.1 mandatory spot.
If Takam beat a solid heavyweight with talent, he could get quickly pushed to No.1 with one of the sanctioning bodies. Takam needs to fight better opposition than Rekowski though. If all he’s going to do is fight guys at this level, then it might take him a couple of years before he can get a No.1 ranking. I don’t see Takam getting ranked No.1 in 2017 unless he does something special.
Joseph Parker was able to nullify Takam’s punching power and high work rate by using movement and jabs to keep him from getting his shots off. Takam wasn’t able to land enough of his shots to get the win over him. In Takam’s knockout loss to Alexander Povetkin in 2014, he struggled with the punching power and the angles of the shots from the Russian heavyweight.
Takam fought well initially, but then struggled once Povetkin changed the angles of his punches. Takam is always going to have problems against fighters that use movement and angles on him, because he’s a straight ahead type of heavyweight who wins on volume punching rather than on clever boxing. Takam will have problems with the taller heavyweights like Deontay Wilder and Anthony Joshua, because those guys are hard to hit and they use their jabs.