Sunny Edwards came up empty-handed in his flyweight unification fight last Saturday night, suffering an eye injury en route to a tenth round TKO defeat at the hands of the young Matchroom phenom Jesse ‘Bam’ Rodriguez.
The 27-year-old Sunny suffered a medial orbital fracture of his left eye, which he believes occurred in the second round after getting hit by a stiff jab from Rodriguez.
From then on, Edwards says he saw double out of this injured eye. He states that he couldn’t make it to the end of the fight due to his eye problem. Still, Sunny made it to the tenth round before the fight was halted, which showed a lot of heart.
“Sorry I couldn’t continue to the final bell; I was genuinely worried about my eyesight,’ Sunny said afterward.
Edwards (20-1, 4 KOs) came into the fight as the unbeaten IBF 112-lb champion against WBO champ ‘Bam’ Rodriguez (19-0, 12 KOs) at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona.
Fighting with blurred vision from the second, Edward couldn’t keep Bam Rodriguez off, as the younger fighter used relentless pressure to wear him down.
It’s admirable that Edwards chose not to give up because he was fighting a losing battle from the opening bell, trying to beat the younger fighter at his own game.
In the ninth round, Rodriguez put Sunny down after tagging him with a powerful left hand thrown straight down the pipe. Bam put everything into that shot, so it wasn’t surprising that Edwards went down like he’d been shot.
The way that Sunny went down face first was scary. His corner could have stopped it at that point in the fight, as he was obviously not going to be able to continue fighting.
Sunny took an odd approach to this fight, standing and trading with the bigger and stronger Bam Rodriguez in the trenches instead of using his normal hit-and-run style.
In hindsight, it was a mistake for Edwards to battle Rodriguez, trying to beat him at his own game rather than his usual finesse approach to fighting.
We’d seen the hard-hitting former world champions Srisake Sor Rungvisai and Carlos Cuadras fail at trading power shots with Bam Rodriguez, so it was senseless for Sunny to think he could do what these stronger battle-proven warriors couldn’t. Was it pride on his part that made Edwards take that approach?
Moving forward, Sunny will need time off and look to regroup when he does return to the ring in 2024.
