LAS VEGAS – For all the knowledge gained in higher education, Raymond Muratalla knew the lessons of the school of hard knocks would lift him to boxing’s heights.
Saturday night, in a punishing, dogged display, Muratalla retained his IBF lightweight belt by defeating Cuba’s 2021 Olympic gold medalist Andy Cruz by majority decision scores of 114-114 (Max DeLuca), 118-110 (Tim Cheatham) and 116-112 (Steve Weisfeld) at Fontainebleau Las Vegas.
“I deserved to be here and I showed it,” said Muratalla, 24-0 (17 KOs), who was raised in the blue-collar Southern California community of Fontana.
Cruz’s distinguished practice from the Cuban boxing school and his Olympic gold “didn’t matter to me – his background, who he was,” Muratalla said. “I was in the gym working hard.”
Muratralla’s plan was to keep the fight competitive through the first half, then rely on his comfort with going into late rounds to decide the outcome versus the Olympic champion who defeated former lightweight titleholder Keyshawn Davis in the 2021 Summer Games gold medal fight in Brazil.
But Cruz took this fight with only six pro bouts, and had never gone past 10 rounds.
“I’m not happy, but that’s life – and a loss will not define me,” Cruz, 30, said. “I always said it wasn’t going to be easy.”
Cruz beat Muratalla to the punch at the start, striking him with a fast right to the head and quick left to the face, displaying the hand-speed advantage that Muratalla answered with a clean right to the body.
The pair produced intense exchanges in the second, during which a Muratalla power right was the best punch, while Cruz dealt rapid responses and at one point landed a right flush after he made Muratalla whiff.
The third round heightened everything as Cruz and Muratalla exchanged body blows for quick head blows, the action gripping the crowd.
A similar display repeated in the fourth with Cruz withstanding the power to keep with his plan to land precisely.
Cruz’s sharpness and pedigree were on display, but Muratalla wasn’t deterred, reverting to his harder edges to pound the left side of Cruz’s torso and appear to hurt him early in the sixth.
Muratalla longed to dig deep, after hearing the snickers that he gained his belt only because Vasiliy Lomachenko retired.
“I’m a champion at the end of the day. I came to do what I had to do,” Muratalla said. “I was putting pressure and taking him into deep waters. I didn’t think he could handle it.”
The action remained even in the seventh when Muratalla was urged to throw more body punches by trainer Robert Garcia after smacking Cruz’s midsection. Cruz, meanwhile, worked to keep busy and close, willing to pay the price of doing so.
“He was trying to counter me, but I wasn’t allowing it,” Muratalla said. “I proved that I deserved to be a champion. I showed it.”
Staying busy and effective won Cruz the gold medal, and he relied on that same approach during the eighth.
He opened the ninth with clean blows, emphasizing the importance of timing, and then proved his substance, punching through Muratalla’s body punishment.
Cruz belted Muratalla with a hard right to the face early in the 10th, and flexed his smarts by turning to his jab into a difference maker in the narrow action that followed.
“I always want to do more, but I thought I did enough to get the victory,” Cruz said.
In the end, however, Muratalla was the one decorated in the gold of the belt that he now truly owns.
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.
