by David P. Greisman
Tony Harrison out-boxed Sergey Rabchenko for most of the opening eight rounds of their junior middleweight fight, picking up points but bringing on boos from the crowd — and then he brought them to their feet, stopping Rabchenko with a ninth-round technical knockout.
Harrison began the fight by establishing distance, jabbing to the body and occasionally pairing them with a follow-up right hand. His caution and movement allowed him to see and avoid Rabchenko’s telegraphed punches and land counters as Rabchenko came in. It wasn’t entertaining, but it was allowing Harrison to build a lead on the scorecards.
In the fourth, Harrison came forward more often and subsequently got hit by Rabchenko more often. It was no surprise, then, that Harrison returned to boxing in the fifth, even as parts of the arena vocalized their discontent.
About a minute into the ninth, Harrison sent out two jabs and a right hand that landed on Rabchenko’s temple, then followed that with a jab and a right hand down the middle that put Rabchenko down. Rabchenko got up at the count of nine on unsteady legs, and those legs didn’t look good enough to referee Arthur Mercante as Rabchenko stepped forward.
Harrison was well ahead on the scorecards at the time of the stoppage. One judge had it an 80-72 shutout through eight, while the other two judges had given a single round to Rabchenko — the seventh — and thus had it 79-73.
CompuBox statistics bore out the way the fight appeared: Harrison was 151 of 458, but he was mostly jabs, landing 94 of them and just 57 power shots. Rabchenko only landed 61 punches in total on the night out of 257 thrown, hitting his target with 14 jabs and 47 power shots.
Both men had been rebuilding from recent defeats. Harrison lost a ninth-round technical knockout to Willie Nelson back in July 2015. This was his third win since then; the other two came via a decision over Cecil McCalla and a stoppage of Fernando Guerrero.
The 25-year-old from Detroit is now 24-1 with 19 KOs. This was an IBF title eliminator, which will put Harrison closer to a potential fight against the winner of Jermall Charlo vs. Julian Williams.
Rabchenko dropped a split decision to Anthony Mundine in 2014. He’d won two in a row, a brief streak that has now come to an end. The 30-year-old from Belarus is now 27-2 with 20 KOs.
Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com
