By Stanley White: Former two time featherweight champion Yuriorkis Gamboa (28-2, 17 KOs) showed he still has a little left in the tank at 35 in beating former WBA super featherweight champion Jason Sosa (20-3-4, 15 KOs) by a 10 round majority decision on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The judges scored the fight 95-93, 96-92 for Gamboa and 94-94 even. Boxing News 24 scored it for Gamboa 96-92.
Gamboa was knocked down in round 7 by what appeared to be a slip. In round 10, the referee took a point away from Gamboa for excessive holding. Gamboa had been warned throughout the fight to stop holding.
Gamboa did look like the better fighter of the two. He was connecting with nice shots, and getting out of the way of Sosa’s wild punches.
Gamboa, 35, said afterwards that he would have liked to have done better, but he’d only had 3weeks’ notice. The lack of conditioning for Gamboa was seen with the frequent holding he was doing in the later rounds to try and catch a breather. The referee was giving Gamboa warnings to stop holding, but he was failing to heed them. Where there was a problem was when the referee would shout for the two fighters to break, Gamboa wouldn’t let go he would continue to hold for 1 to 2 seconds after he referee gave the command. It was clear that Gamboa was exhausted and needed as much time as possible to rest in between attacks from Sosa.
“I’m sorry I didn’t give you a better match. I only had 3 weeks to prepare,” said Gamboa. “I needed 2 or 3 weeks to lose the weight correctly. Of course, the decision was good. I think I won every round, except for the knockdown and the point deductions,” said Gamboa.
I don’t think Gamboa did enough to win every round, but he fought well enough to win the majority of the rounds.
This was a pretty stunning shocker seeing Sosa lose the fight. He came into the fight having recently lost to Vasyl Lomachenko. Before that, Sosa was WBA super featherweight champion, and he had some excellent wins under his belt against Stephen Smith and Javier Fortuna. Sosa had also fought Nicholas Walters to a 10 round draw 2 years ago. Sosa is in his prime of his career at 29, and it was impressive that Gamboa was able to beat him.
This was far from the prime Gamboa that we 10 years ago when he turned pro in 2007 after winning a gold medal for Cuba in the 2004 Olympics. Gamboa was already the finished product when he first turned pro. He was like a blinding fast mini-Mike Tyson during his best years as a pro. But even now, Gamboa still has enough left in the tank to beat a quality fighter like Sosa. That shows what a great fighter he is.
The fight started out like it was going to go Sosa’s away. He nailed Gamboa with a hand late in round 2 that seemed to stiffen his legs. From that shot, it looked like Gamboa was recently up against it in the fight. However, Gamboa fought well after that, avoiding many of Sosa’s attempts at landing his big power punches. Gamboa was hitting Sosa with a lot of faster shots that were connecting while he was coming forward. Sosa made things harder on himself by bull rushing Gamboa frequently instead of working his way into punching range by using his jab.
