LAS VEGAS – Michigan heavyweight Jermaine Franklin plowed through an inactive showing, handing Ivan Dychko his first loss.
Franklin, 24-2 (15 KOs), won on scores of 96-93, 99-94, 97-92, dropping Pittsburgh’s Dychko to 15-1 (14 KOs).
The pair took a deliberate path through four rounds, slowly moving into position but failing to unload a hammer shot. Dychko opted to attempt counters in the fifth as Franklin lunged forward and held, eliciting boos from the early arriving crowd.
Unwilling heavyweight combatants can make for the sport’s dullest action, and that’s how this continued into the fight’s second half. Missed punches generated holding. Long delays between punches worsened the fans’ distaste. Headlocks outnumbered clean punches.
A hard right by Franklin in the seventh helped his cause, and his free swinging accelerated in the eighth with a jarring head blow. Dychko increased his activity in the ninth, but he exacted no real damage, and a last-chance 10th round came and went with more yawns – and boos.
Previously, Raiko Santana pulled off the biggest win of his seven-year pro career, stopping Steven Nelson in the first round.
Santana, 14-4 (8 KOs), stunned Nelson, 20-2 (16 KOs), with a flurry of right hands and poured on the punches until referee Robert Hoyle waved off the 10-round scheduled super middleweight bout – perhaps prematurely – at the 2-minute, 38-second mark.
Santana, a resident of El Paso, Texas, who originally hails from Cuba, has now won four straight since his unanimous decision loss to Daniel Blancas in 2023, while the 37-year-old Nelson, a native of Omaha, fell to 0-2 this year, having lost a unanimous decision to Diego Pacheco in January.
Santana wasn’t the only fighter to score a first-round knockout in the undercard prelims. Japanese junior featherweight prospect Reito Tsutsumi finished off Javier Martinez just 2 minutes and 18 seconds into their six-round scheduled bout. Tsutsumi used body shots to open up a right hook to the chin that stunned Martinez, before a pair of lefts from the southpaw sent Martinez down. Martinez beat the count, but the referee ruled he wasn’t fit to continue.
Tsutsumi, 23, of Tokyo, raised his record to 3-0 (2 KOs), all in fights that took place on Riyadh Season cards, while the Dallas native Martinez dropped to 7-3 (4 KOs).
Mexico's recent Olympic silver medalist Marco Verde, 3-0 (2 KOs), stopped Sona Akale, 9-4 (4 KOs), at 1 minute, 11 seconds of the fourth round in a middleweight fight, while 17-year-old Saudi Arabia-based lightweight Sultan Almohammed had a successful pro debut, shutting out Martin Caraballo, 0-1-1, by unanimous scores of 40-36.
Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.
Ryan Songalia is a reporter and editor for BoxingScene.com and has written for ESPN, the New York Daily News, Rappler, The Guardian, Vice and The Ring magazine. He holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at ryansongalia@gmail.com or on Twitter at @ryansongalia.
