Valdes Highlight film (but McCallum has the body snatching ability and would be in the fight). This content is protected
Interesting match up. Valdez can give McCallum some trouble with his power and skill although did have trouble with lateral movement at times. McCallum would have to box carefully for the whole fight. Honestly a 50/50 kind of fight. Still on the fence with this.
Valdez is one of the very few fighters in the history of the Middleweight division that could ko McCallum if he caught him clean. Yes he hit that hard. But the rest of his game was average at best. McCallum, though past prime at middleweight would still have enough left to beat Valdez.
I do not like the McCallum wide right hand body shots he threw against this guy. Mike threw a ton of them but they were such a wide looping shot. You do not want to get beat to the punch w/ right hands by Rodrigo. I just don't picture Mek McCallum straying too far from what got him to that level. He's hardly going to stop his body attack, is he? Question becomes telegraphing his motives and getting clean by this guy when they both launch right hands. Decision bout given their whiskers & conditioning. Be a good one to watch in like 5 minutes, wouldn't it?
Valez is one durable fighter and in a 15 round fight he ain't going no where. I like Rodrigo to grind out a close decision down the stretch.
Nah, you're way off the mark there fella re:Valdez being average other than his power. His only less than average trait was his offensive footwork and balance trying to punch against a quick moving target. A relatively easy fighter to force a reset on. Other than that he was superb in every other regard from the knees up.
Completely agree with that. He was a shuffler with the sort of footwork that would barely have made Mo Hope envious, but upper-body wise he had all the tools, just like McCallum, though his jab was a lot worse as a reliable pointscoring tool. One other thing that I don't think is often said about him is that he was a small, short-armed middleweight that for years had many fights below the 160 limit before finally levelling out there in the early '70s. Valdez could easily have had a similar career to McCallum where he fights as a 154 title contender for the first , but for whatever reason opted to ignore the division. He's actually the smaller man in this fight and though his great chin and power meant his modest size was rarely a weakness, he never struck me as a physically imposing fighter on the front-foot, more as someone who it was immsensely dangerous to try and bull through. I think it's a great fight that McCallum should win closely most of the time if he uses his significant range advantage and full skillset smartly, and keeping things in the manner of a classy boxer-puncher vs classy boxer-puncher fencing with semi-regular intelligent exchanges sort of fight. But he did have that tendency to ignore his feet while trying to bully and really go to town with the combinations on smaller men , with those long, looping counterable bodyshots getting thrown often as mentioned earlier...this was often his style hen he fought as an oversized 154lber against men closer to Valdez' height/reach, and if he fights in this sort of aggressive manner he could well find himself badly hurt (possibly even knocked out), having to fight through fog and end up with the play taken away from him in the exchanges.
