Amir Mansour beats Travis Kauffmann

By Boxing News - 03/18/2017 - Comments

Image: Amir Mansour beats Travis Kauffmann

By Jim Dower: In a battle of fringe level heavyweights, 44-year-old Amir Mansour (23-3-1, 16 KOs) beat Travis Kauffmann (31-2, 23 KOs) by a 12 majority decision on Friday night to capture the USBA heavyweight title at the Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania. The fight was televised on Premier Boxing Champions on Bounce TV.

The judges’ scores were as follows: 117-111, 115-113 for Mansour and 114-114. Boxing News 24 scored the fight 115-113 for Mansour. He did enough to deserve the victory, but it was still close.

Kauffman, 31, fought well in taking the fight to the heavy handed Mansour. Kauffman focused on his boxing rather than looking to slug it out. Mansour’s pressure in the second hslf of the fight made it competitive. He was backing Kauffman up constantly in the last portion of the fight to win rounds.

Kauffman was there to be hit. Mansour didn’t have the accuracy needed for him to score a knockout. It was a fight that he could have easily won by a knockout if he could have landed more of his big power shots. The problem that Mansour had was he was loading up to badly on his power shots. Kauffman always knew was coming and was able to avoid the shots.

For Mansour, it was his first fight in over a year since his 5th round technical decision loss to Dominic Breazeale in January 2016. It wasn’t a bad performance tonight for Mansour considering that he’d been out of the ring for the past 14 months. But if you compare to the efforts of the top heavyweights in the division, it’s hard to get excited in how Mansour performed against a heavyweight that he should have been able to beat with ease.

For Kauffman, this was his first loss since his 4th round knockout defeat at the hands of Tony Grano in 2009. At the time, Kauffman was an up and coming heavyweight. Unfortunately, Kauffman has done very little since the loss to Grano. His boxing career has been largely stuck in neutral all these years since 2009.

37-year-old former IBF welterweight champion Kermit Cintron (39-5-3, 30 KOs) fought to a 5 round technical decision draw with David Grayton (15-1-1, 11 KOs) in the co-feature bout. The fight had to be stopped due to Cintron suffering a cut over his right eye from a head-butt. Cintron was dropped in the 5th round.

Fortunately for him, the fight was stopped in the same round due to his cut. Had the fight continued, it’s very likely that Cintron would have been knocked out. Cintron’s career has been on a slow downhill descent since his 6th round knockout loss to Antonio Margarito in 2008. Cintron has done very little over the last 9 years. He was beaten by Paul Williams, Antwone Smith and Saul Canelo Alvarez in one-sided contests. Cintron dodged bullets in his draws against Adrian Granados and Sergio Martinez. I saw both fights, and I thought Cintron lost them both, especially the Sergio Martinez fight. That was the fight where Cintron was clearly knocked out by Martinez from a big left hand that he landed in round 4. Instead, Cintron convinced the referee that he his head had collided with Martinez. The referee agreed with Cintron and let him continue despite him having been dropped by a big shot from Martinez.