Hopefully Sanchez and Ruiz know what they're doing having Ruiz arrive on Monday for the fight. Doesn't give him heaps of time to get used to the climate and time zone here. Just over a week to go, I can't wait!!! Going with a decent group, the atmosphere there is going to be insane
Ruiz says he is expecting to weight in at about 111 kg. He has weighed a whole lot more than that in some of his previous fights.
My take on Ruiz's weight loss is that he is preparing for a 12 rounder. Ruiz and co may see Parker as being difficult to put away, they may feel that Parker possesses a durable jaw and will stick and move all fight so thats probably whats behind the more athletic Ruiz.
I think that's the best we can really hope for. He has so much weight to lose that even showing up at 111kg or 244lbs is better than we could of hoped for and quite clearly the lightest Ruiz Jr we have ever seen. But even at that weight he's still basically the same weight as peak Arreola and he's much smaller of frame than Arreola. If you watch him sparring Evander who is the same height you can see he looks smaller than Holyfield, narrower shoulders, shorter reach, narrower back etc. When you consider Holyfield was 205-215 ish near his peak and he has a bigger frame than Ruiz Jr and Andy is going to be 30-40lbs heavier it's clear even at 111kg he's massively overweight.
I believe Ruiz is garbage. He would'nt be in my top 30 heavyweights. Big John Mcdermott could probably knock him out.
Not hugely sold on Parker to be honest, but he'll handle Ruiz. I just don't expect a war. Against Takam he chose to box more cautiously with more at stake and I think he may take the same route this time. He's got decent power but as he has moved up in class of opposition it has looked less devastating. And when I mean 'move up in class' I mean from the taxi drivers of his early career to actual ranked boxers. With a belt on the line, I'm sensing a safety-first Parker UD. Not hating on Parker in the slightest, but he has been well-matched throughout his career, although his last three wins have been quiet impressive. And by the way, had the Dimitrenko fight been for a title, Parker would probably have got DQ'd. So he needs to learn from that in regards to discipline.
no chance imo. ruiz has decent speed and combo punching, hes not a massive puncher, and hes not gonna have the stamina to keep it up. parker ko7
he would have, ruiz couldnt even stop liakhovic or love. hes fat and probably a lhw under all that flab
I think overall you're a bit harsher than you need to be, some of his matches were actually people he didn't get any huge kudos for but were clearly picked to test Parker and introduce him to new kinds of challenges as opposed to easy big jumps in the rankings. Compared to the likes of AJ etc, Parker has been thrown into a few fights which weren't there to make him look great so much as earn him his stripes "safely" but still test him and move him forward. Obviously not all of those were like that, or ended up like that. What I will agree with however was the Dimitrenko foul, at the very least he should have been deducted a point and Dimitrenko allowed to recover - a DQ probably is OTT as Parker was completely destroying him up to that point, but Parker SHOULD have been penalised in some way for that. Kevin Barry was on the other side of the opposite outcome of a similar thing when he had a messy fight against Evander Holyfield in the 1984 Olympics - Holyfield landed a KO shot on Barry after the ref split them up, and Holyfield was DQ'd. Barry expressed his shock at the outcome immediately, and he raised Holyfields arm to indicate that he even thought Holyfield should have won the fight that he was clearly dominating. THINGS HAPPEN when everything is happening fast, adrenaline is involved and people are trying to hit each other.
Yeah, DQ=OTT on reflection. I think I was trying to identify ill-discipline by highlighting this. But I guess he will learn from that. I take your point on his match-ups as learning fights. However, what he has not learned to do yet, as far as I can detect, is to move his head when exchanging. He's too easy to hit. But like they say, the proof of the pudding is in the punching. Time will tell and I guess we'll know a hell of a lot more once he's been tagged cleanly and how he deals with that. Until any emerging heavyweight is chin-checked we can never know how good they will become.