By Jeff Aronow: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum surprisingly wasn’t disappointed in the performance of his fighter super middleweight contender Edgar Berlanga in his fight against Alexis Angulo last Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York.
While seemingly the entire boxing world has come down hard on the head of Berlanga (20-0, 16 KOs), particularly over his attempted bite of the 38-year-old Angulo (27-3, 23 KOs) in the seventh round, Arum feels he won it “big.”
Many fans view the wide scores handed down by the three judges as a sign of them giving the A-side fighter Berlanga a gift win and going overboard in doing so.
Many people saw Angulo as doing more than enough to deserve the victory, and they thought it was a tragedy that he was robbed.
Teddy Atlas said on his podcast that Berlanga’s decision to try and bite Angulo in the seventh round was a sign of weakness. “When you do that, you’re looking for an out, you’re looking for help,” said Atlas about Berlanga.
“Bullies are weak. He’s looking for something to make the guy quit, to intimidate to get him out of this jam against a guy that was threatening him, and the guy is not disappearing like 16 other guys,” said Atlas about Berlanga.
“People forget that he’s a young fighter, and with young fighters, they have uneven performances,” said Bob Arum to Fighthype when asked about Berlanga’s poor effort against Alexis Angulo last weekend.
Arum has got his work cut out for him in trying to promote Berlanga because even if he doesn’t want to admit it, he’s got a fighter that is going nowhere.
Arum sounded like a politician with his breakdown of Berlanga’s performance, which was sad. He can’t continue to spoonfed Berlanga his entire career because he’s never going to beat anyone of note. He’s the one that’s stuck promoting Berlanga, not the fans.
“He won the fight, and he won it big, but it wasn’t the most scintillating performance, but that’s to be expected,” Arum said, putting a positive spin on Berlanga’s questionable win over 38-year-old Angulo.
“A lot of people were disappointed in how he performed, but I wasn’t. I thought he showed good boxing ability, and he clearly won the fight. Yeah, ‘He’s a big knockout guy and all that sort of stuff,'” said Arum when asked if the expectations are too high from people about Berlanga.
“We’ve seen now in the last few fights that he’s a talented fighter, but he’s not a one-punch knockout guy. In his first 16 fights, he was a one-punch knockout guy, but a lot of that was the way we matched him.
“That could be and his timing and so forth,” said Arum about Berlanga’s power being ‘overrated.’ “I’m happy now that he’s experienced a longer fight, and he knows he can go the distance.
“If he knocks out a guy in 16 fights in one or two rounds, who knows if he can go eight rounds or ten rounds, right? But now we know he can,” said Arum.
