Last Saturday night’s performance by the former unified light welterweight champion Jose Ramirez against Rances Barthelemy has fans wondering if the once steel-chinned Ramirez’s punch resistance is still there at 31.
Shaky Moments Lead to Speculation
Despite Ramirez (29-1, 18 KOs) winning a wide 12-round unanimous decision against the 37-year-old former two-division champion Barthelemy (30-3-1, 15 KOs), he was hurt by him four times in the fight at the Save Mart Arena in Fresno, California.
Some fans believe the referee prematurely ended the third round with 15 seconds to go, stopping it while the Cuban southpaw Barthelemy was heavily shelling Ramirez against the ropes.
Ramirez won the fight by the scores 118-110, 119-109, 119-109.
What is worrisome is that Barthelemy hurt Ramirez every time he hit him cleanly in the fight. The only reason he failed to knock him out was that his stamina gave out after the third. Barthelemy only rarely threw meaningful punches after the third but was still able to hurt Ramirez in rounds 4, 6, and 12, fighting on fumes.
Pro-Ramirez fans believe the sole reason he kept getting hurt was that he’d been out of the ring 13 months prior to the fight with Barthelemy.
They also say that Ramirez was hurt several times while he was on the canvas after being dropped by Bartheley in the third, which the referee Jack Reiss failed to score as a knockdown.
The shots that Ramirez was hit with while he was down weren’t huge ones that appeared to hurt him. He was already hurt, but he didn’t look worse off from the punches Barthelemy hit him while he was down.
The Taylor Fight and Lingering Concerns
Ramirez was hurt in his undisputed 140-lb championship fight against IBF/WBO champion Josh Taylor in 2021. In that fight, Taylor dropped Ramirez twice and cruised to a 12-round decision win. Since then, Ramirez has fought just three times, facing non-140-pounders Jose Pedraza and Richard Commey.
Ramirez hasn’t looked like the same fighter in any of his three fights that he’d been before his loss to Taylor, and the only conclusion you can come up with is he’s not the same guy.
Social media is abuzz with people saying that Ramirez’s promoters at Golden Boy need to put him in a cash-out fight before it’s too late to maximize the time they’ve got left with him. If Ramirez struggles against lesser opposition like Barthelemy, he’ll be over his head against upper-level competition, and he’ll be finished.
