Louie Espinoza - The "Sharpshooter" from Arizona

Flo, this is uncanny. I just watched the Espinoza - Sanchez fight last night. Man, this was a fun fight.

 

I read about Espinoza before I saw him. When he won his first title one of the boxing magazines opined that he was possibly the worst fighter to ever hold even a partial world title. When I saw him, I did not think that was fair at all. When he fought Cobrita Gonzalez at the Pond, in Anaheim, I saw him train and spar in preparation for the fight. He was a solid fighter with real pop in both hands and he always gave an honest effort and, if he was ever in a bad fight, I would bet it wasn't his fault.

 

Very good and tough fighter.

 

Fun fighter. His title winning effort over Tommy Valoy is a great little war.

Also when he travelled over to Italy to take on the undefeated Olympic Gold medalist and took his WBO featherweight title he had to come from behind to take out a younger, faster and naturally bigger foe in front of his rabid fans.

Showed his chin by taking vicious punching Pedro Decima (coming off and impressive 3 round ko of undefeated Jesse Benevides and future WBO champ) best blows before kayoing the future WBA super-bantamweight champ.

Not afraid to take anyone on.

 

Lately I heard he got reincarnated into a dude named Rafael,still with the same last name tho.

 

One of my favorite boxers who had tremendous power at jr.featherweight.
And he had a granite chin as well.
I remember that it was said he could bench press well over 200lbs.
If he landed on you at jr.featherweight he had the potential to hurt you.
Fast moving boxers could trouble him and Louie had a habit sometimes of being too economical with his punches.
He literally destroyed Lupe Guitterez in brutal fashion.
He was fun to watch and he never gave up but speed was a problem for him because he wasn't very fast.
But stand in front and try to bang with him and you are going to have a problem.

 

The Paez fights were a delightful contrast of styles: Paez throwing from angles that puzzle geometry majors and Louie throwing his arrow-straight shots; short vs tall; infighter vs outfighter; all-business rational thinker vs entertainer/free spirit.

I’ll definitely spend some time with these videos. Espinoza was a joy to watch.

 

Watching this made me realize that I am probably senile. I thought that I had never seen this before until about half way through the 4th round, when I realized that I had seen it and remembered the rest of the fight exactly.

 

Isn’t it wonderful?

We can discover ‘new’ fights over and over again with no spoilers. Give it a few years and you won’t even realize you have seen it before. Heck, we can watch the same fight every night for the first time!