By Allan Fox: Carlos Adames powered past his best fringe contender Julian ‘J-Rock’ Williams, stopping him in the ninth round on Saturday night in a one-sided contest at The Armory in Minneapolis.
Williams and his trainer looked upset at the premature stoppage in the ninth round. They obviously felt that they should have been allowed to continue.
‘J-Rock’ gave Adames(23-1, 18 KOs) issues in the first three rounds, but then gassed out after being battered from the fourth round on.“I think it was a terrible stoppage, but what can I do?” said Williams.
Julian Williams’ reaction to referee stopping fight
“I’m healthy, and I feel fine. I thought it was pretty much even, and I was taking over while he was getting tired. Of course, I want a rematch. It’s not his fault that the ref jumped in early. It looked corny. It looked bad. It was a great fight, I thought it was an even fight, and he jumped in and stopped it because I got a little bit buzzed. It’s boxing.”
In fairness to the referee, Williams was no longer in the fight and was getting beaten up by Adames by the ninth round.
Yeah, the ref could have allowed it to continue, but what for? J-Rock was just soaking up punishment like a punching bag, and it was only going to get worse if the referee hadn’t stopped it.
It’s not as if Williams should have been out there in the first place. He’d lost two out of his last three fights since 2020, and his ONLY win was against an obscure fighter, 37-year-old Rolando Wenceslao Mansilla (18-12-1, 8 KOs). Get a lot of that record. Williams didn’t rate to fight Adames, and he wasn’t going to win, so the referee did the right thing.
With each round afteer the fourth, Williams seemed to drain like a battery, getting less effective with each passing round until he was stopped in the ninth.
Adames’ body punching affected J-Rock, as he worked him over with shots to the body. Williams was cut under his right eye in the third, which bothered him a lot. He didn’t fight with the same intensity when he saw his own blood.
Just when fans thought J-Rock was done in the sixth, he showed a brief bit of energy, landing some nice shots to the head of Adame to show that he wasn’t completely done.
Given how one-sided the fight was, it would have been more entertaining for the fans to see Adames face Sergiy Derevyanchenko in a rematch because at least he would have been competitive.
J-Rock was brought in as Adames’ opponent for things he did in the past, not what he’d done in recent years because he’d done nothing to deserve fighting for a title, even an interim belt like the one Adames has.