Irish welterweight Lewis Crocker (19-0, 11 KOs), who missed weight by three pounds, coming in at 150 lbs last Friday, used his superior size to stop journeyman Jose Felix (40-7-1, 31 KOs) in the fifth round on Saturday night at the Ulster Hall, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Weighing in as a junior middleweight, Crocker was much bigger than Felix inside the ring tonight. The Mexican native looked like he was fighting a middleweight tonight.
The 27-year-old Crocker nailed the much smaller Felix with a left hook that knocked him down. Despite Felix beating the count, the referee Marcus McDonnell halted it anyway. Felix was up at eight and looked fresh and ready to go.
Felix, 31, looked in shock at the stoppage, but it kind of went with how the whole had played out. He didn’t have a chance in this fight with the way it was being officiated. The time of the stoppage was at 1:54 of the fifth round.
In the fourth, Crocker dropped Felix with a left to the body and nailed him with two shots to the head for good measure while he was on the canvas. Interestingly, the referee didn’t do anything to police the two shots from the Irish lad, Crocker.
A round earlier in the third, Felix was penalized a point for hitting Crocker with a beautiful beltline shot, which should have been considered legal, but the referee still docked him a point. It was clearly on the belt line, but that was the kind of night that Felix was having.
Moments before that, Felix had hit Crocker with a low blow. When the beltline shot came in the same round, Crocker looked at the referee for help despite it being on the beltline, and he promptly took a point away from Felix.
In the first three rounds, Felix uses a lot of movement and fast combinations to tattoo the slow-moving, slow-punching Crocker. He was hitting Crocker at will with shots but lacked the power and the massive size to slow him down.
One got the sense from watching that Felix would get tired from moving and would eventually get stopped. That didn’t happen due to the quick hook that Felix was given in the fifth.
All in all, this writer can’t say he was impressed with Crocker. He’s not world-class, that’s for sure. If you put Crocker in with someone like Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis, he wouldn’t make it out of the first round, as he’s not that kind of a talent.
Crocker might need to move up to 154 if he’s going to be missing weight as badly as he did. If Crocker can’t make the 147-lb limit, he needs to move to 154 rather than weighing in at 150 lbs to crush journeymen-level competition.