............Either that or the "win" over Lockridge. That decision was a disgrace, but Gomez took a pounding and was standing at the bell. If you're a Puerto Rican fighting on your home turf, that's about all you need to do.
In fairness to Bazooka, that wasn't Gomez at, or near, his prime. Horrible decision, nevertheless. In terms of being at or near prime, I'd say his toughest win at 122lbs would be his fight with Pintor, followed by his title winning effort against Hwong.
Lockridge. He was battered most of the fight. Fair play, he hung on in there to hang on to the bell and suffer a decision loss...but a late rally by the judges saw him through. My No: 1 worst decision of the 1980s. Even ahead of Whitaker-Ramirez.
Did he ever have an easy win? A number of years ago, when you still had to buy fight films, I purchased tape of 5 or 6 of his fights and in every one of them Gomez got hurt, then won. I came to believe that he couldn't fight until he got hit on the chin and his legs looked gone.
Don't know if any of you speak Spanish buit I watched this cracking documentary the other day.[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR5E0dym7YA[/ame]. Documentary of his life. talks about the Pintor and Lockridge fights. He's suffering from his career a bit now but he's comfortable from good investments from whe he was fighting.
I only saw the Pintor fight for the first time recently, fantastic stuff from both loved every minute of it. One of my new favourite fights. Pintor's toughness was incredible but Gomez kept up the pressure and dug down to stop him late on. I'll admit I haven't seen a whole lot of Gomez fights yet. He was before my time so I'm kinda playing catch up on the 70s and earlier. Seen the Sanchez, Lopez, Zarate and Nelson fights and now Pintor but that's it. I'm gonna look out for more. If he had a tougher win than the Pintor fight then I can't wait to see it. I'll try and track down that Lockridge fight.
You mean Yum? That is an interesting one. He was dropped in the first round and rocked on separate occasions in each of the first 3 by single punches, and Yum was not a big puncher. With that said, the rest of the fight is the single most impressive, one-sided masterclass I've ever seen.
Sanchez fight really blew out a lot of candles on his career. Funny how those ko guys always seem to lose about 25% whenever they are the guy that gets licked and stopped. The boxer types just seem to rebound so much better than the hitters, after a bad loss. But that Sanchez fight pretty much showed he was not going to beat the guy, no matter what. Lots of folks liked his chances going in but he was just taken apart in there & no ponit in a rematch.
A bout not mentioned was his rematch with Juan Lopez #2. I couldn't believe it lasted anywhere near as long as it did. But those Gomez legs weren't as good anymore and that precision punching was off & now we had a bout going 11 rounds when you were thinking it looked like a 2 or 3 round blowout over a previous victim.
Gomez looked ****-poor in that one by comparison to how he looked in the first fight (another one of his better performances).