Agreed, if it is true, I'll be the first to say so. But at this point, all we have is the word of 3 Argentine officials. Trust your own baby blues.
Cobra, thanks for this, I'm going to watch this now, but I do want to mention that this is their 2nd fight not the first. But regardless, an excellent find.
Just watched the fight now. Of course this is not the Loche of five years earlier when he was schooling Fuji, so we only had brief flashes. As for the fight, Cervantes completely controlled the fight on the end of his jab. A very underrated jab in the whole scheme of things. He also mixed in those right hands over the top and body shots but it was the jab above all that controlled the tempo. Loche for his part, although never a banger, would counter when he could. I really tried to score something for Loche. He was especially effective with his counters in the 4th, 5th and 9th rounds, but he would counter and then stand back admiring his work. He never put a sustained attack together. The best I felt he did was the 6th round which I scored even. But it was 8-0-1 through nine completed rounds for Cervantes. How did everyone else see this fight unfold?
Aggression isn't a scoring criterion though. Effective aggression is. Can you really call what Cervantes did that round effective aggression? He was being made a fool of. I understand Locche wasn't doing **** in return but he was clearly the ring general that round and making a mockery of Cervantes. I will say that if that fight happened in Cervantes' backyard it probably would have been ruled a shut out for Antonio. The 15th round is probably a microcosm of what happened throughout the fight; Cervantes throwing much more, missing much more, being made to look silly, with Locche landing roughly the same amount of punches as him.
I thought of another one Starling vs. Honeyghan. I thought Lloyd would reach him after the Molinares fight when he stopped Starling. But Marlon looked good. I remember Tyson saying he didn't like Starling style of blocking with gloves, that blocking really was not real defense. That moving your head was real defense.
Starling vs Honeyghan is a great call.Getting Marlon motivated and trying to bombard him with speed and offense without having the requisite level if ringcraft to go with it was never a good idea. It's one of life's great tragedies we never got to see Starling issue a similar beating to Pac.
I once asked Georgie Benton about he, Joey Giardello and Holly Mims being known as cute fighters. He agreed that they were, but then made a dramatic point to me. He said, "You can be cute, but you still have to fight." That is how I would sum up Loche's performance in that 15th round. Maybe it was only the 15th round. Maybe the other 14 he wasn't mugging for his very vocal Argentine audience. I can't comment on those unseen rounds. But I don't give points for being cute. I don't care if he stood with his hands down trying to make a fool of Cervantes. Cervantes was throwing the punches, he was trying to make a fight of it. If Loche made him miss and then countered I would have scored the round for Loche, but he didn't. He did nothing. Effective aggression is how I score as well, but in a case where fighter A throws punches, while fighter B makes him miss but throws nothing in return, I'm going to give that to fighter A who is at least being aggressive and trying to make a fight of it. Perhaps it's judging criteria, but "you still have to fight."
Absolutely legendary. Benitez was a master that night..no excuses from Duran or the faithful Duran bandwagon.