by David P. Greisman
MANCHESTER, N.H. – On a night set up for charity, there was little mercy shown.
Favored fighters punished designated opponents. Only one bout came close to going the distance. No other bouts lasted past the third round. And up-and-coming prospects Peter Quillin and Ronald Hearns added wins to their ledgers.
The annual “Fight to Educate” card ended with Quillin, the 25-year-old middleweight known as “Kid Chocolate,” tossing candies out to the crowd, as has become his tradition. He was the owner of a 10th-round stoppage victory over “The Punching Policeman,” 38-year-old St. Louis cop Sam Hill.
As with Hill’s decision loss to Sebastien Demers earlier this year, this proved to be little beyond a sparring session in which one person took an overwhelming majority of the hits.
Quillin started off patiently, fighting in brief bursts and going to Hill’s body. Quillin would stick with the hooks downstairs for the duration. Hill would occasionally show fire, but he seemed to take 20 for every two he threw.
A series of left hooks in the fifth led to Hill on the mat, but he would rise for more. Quillin attempted to put Hill away, but he eventually settled into a strategy of body shots and short leads and counters to the head.
Quillin never truly gave up on the knockout, though. In what was scheduled to be the fight’s final round, Quillin stumbled Hill with a good right hand. He closed in while Hill covered up in the corner, where he didn’t throw a punch until the moment the referee stopped the bout.
Quillin, who fights out of Brooklyn, is now 20-0 with 15 knockouts. Hill is 17-9-1 with 10 kayos, and is clearly resigned these days to taking far too many punches.
In the co-feature, Hearns made short work of Alexander Pacheco Quiroz, flooring the Miami-based Colombian twice in the first round and coming out triumphant via technical knockout.
A right-hand counter caught Quiroz coming in, sending the overmatched junior middleweight back to the ropes. Another right hand left Quiroz’s legs splayed out from beneath him, the first knockdown of the bout. Quiroz got up at the count of six, though he might as well have stayed on the canvas. A Hearns right hand landed high on Quiroz’s head, causing what appeared to be a slow-motion timber effect. Quiroz got up but didn’t show enough for the referee to let him continue.
The time of stoppage was 2:10. Hearns, a 29-year-old who fights out of Southfield, Mich., improves to 20-0 with 16 knockout victories. Quiroz, a 33-year-old who also has been on the bad end of early nights against Quillin, David Estrada and Francisco Mora, is now 14-7-1 (12).
In other action Wednesday:
- American Olympic alternate Danny O’Connor made a successful professional debut in front of a rowdy New England crowd, winning by second-round stoppage over Jose Guerrido.
O’Connor, a 23-year-old southpaw from Framingham, Mass., is being promoted by Seminole Warriors Boxing. They made his first fight an over-the-limit junior-welterweight bout, had bagpipes playing him to and from the ring, and gave him a 35-year-old winless opponent who would try to spoil the party but wouldn’t have enough skills or power to succeed.
O’Connor had Guerrido holding on toward the end of the first round, but he had Guerrido truly hurt in the following session. Guerrido for a time was bent forward in a turtle-like posture, allowing O’Connor to wail away to his body. A shot to the head, and Guerrido was down.
O’Connor closed in with more work to the body, coming up to the head occasionally. The referee ended the bout at a lull in the action, but the result was just nonetheless.
O’Connor, of course, is now 1-0 (1 knockout). Guerrido, who is from Bronx, N.Y., falls to 0-3.
- Bronx super-middleweight Hajro Sujak took New York bragging rights over his opponent, Daren Graham, sending the Conklin-based fighter down into a heap in the second round with one final, violent left hook.
Sujak and Graham first traded hooks in the opening stanza, with the man from Upstate getting the worse of the exchange. Sujak trapped Graham on the ropes later on, wailing away with a fusillade of unanswered punches. If that wasn’t bad enough, Sujak soon landed a jab that sent Graham reeling backwards and cartoonishly stumbling down to the mat.
Graham, whose plain white trunks had been up to his pecs in round one, brought them back down for the second heat – the first time in his career he had been this deep in a fight. Thirty-seven seconds later it was over, with the referee ending proceedings the moment Graham returned to the canvas.
Sujak is now 2-0 with one knockout. Graham is now 1-3 (1), having fought once in 2001, once in 2006 and twice this year. One imagines this is his ‘Welcome Back.’
- The show opened with an unnecessarily one-sided beat-down, as welterweight Osvaldo Rivera dominated Jose Velazquez for seven minutes en route to a technical-knockout victory.
If CompuBox were at this fight, the person assigned to Velazquez would have had an easy night. The man from Worcester, Mass., ate uppercut after uppercut and offered little in return. Velazquez finally took a knee, but his respite lasted less than 10 seconds. He got up, and shortly thereafter the referee finally called a halt to the bout.
Time of stoppage was 1:35 of the third round. Rivera, of Bronx, N.Y., improves to 2-0-1, with one win (this one) coming by way of knockout. Velazquez falls to 1-5 (1 kayo), and one hopes this latest defeat was worth it.
David P. Greisman is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His weekly column, “Fighting Words,” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. He may be reached for questions and comments at fightingwords1@gmail.com
