3,425 stories on BoxingScene are published under the Cliff Rold byline.
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By Cliff Rold - Friday was a pretty good day for boxing. 2016 has been a year of mediocre to good matches so far with big stars spending a lot of time talking about fight they will take…later. Friday, a lot of fights arrived via a major announcement from Showtime. That’s exciting. It’s not here yet. This weekend, fight fans in the US...
By Cliff Rold - It wasn’t long ago that one could call him a genuine cult favorite. Lineal Jr. featherweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (16-0, 10 KO) has never been everyone’s cup of tea. He’s not an offensive minded fighter. His personality comes across to some as stoic, to others stodgy. It didn’t matter to the...
It looked like he’d been solved. Jessie Vargas was stunned and taking fire in the fourth round. As the round ended, Sadam Ali was fired up with momentum on his side. Ali didn’t win another round. In the best performance of his career, a fighter whose luck in decisions left many fans frustrated, showed a new layer of substance. Jessie Vargas might not ever be the best welterweight in the world but Saturday he showed the ability to adjust and the fire to finish.
By Cliff Rold - On Saturday night at the DC Armory in Washington, DC, in front of approximately 4,300 fans, Cuban-born 36-year old interim WBA heavyweight titlist Luis Ortiz (25-0, 22 KO) of Miami, Florida, scored three big knockdowns en route to a sixth round knockout of 44-year old former two-time heavyweight title...
Washington, DC - Jessie Vargas (27-1, 10 KOs) became a two division world champion with a ninth round stoppage of previously unbeaten 2008 Olympian Sadam 'World Kid' Ali (22-1, 13 KOs) to capture the vacant WBO welterweight world championship.
Washington, DC - In a bout competitive only briefly, 31-year old featherweight Oscar Escandon (25-2, 17 KO), 126, of Tolima, Colombia, came off the floor in the second to break down and knock out 33-year old veteran Robinson Castellanos (23-12, 11 KO), 124 ½, of Celaya, Mexico. With the win, Escandon wins the interim WBC featherweight belt. The current WBC champion at featherweight is Gary Russell Jr. who was sidelined with an injury prior to a scheduled bout with Escandon in 2015. The referee was Frank Garza.
In the opening bout of the evening, 28-year old light heavyweight Todd Unthank-May (9-0, 3 KO), 177 ¾, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, worked through some exciting early exchanges with 34-year old Alexander Johnson (16-4, 7 KO), 175 ½, to score a unanimous six-round decision. Unthank-May steadily took over the fight, walking down Johnson through the second half for a workmanlike finish. Scores came in at 59-55, 58-55, and 59-53 for Unthank-May.
by Cliff Rold - Conor McGregor is fighting this weekend! That one fact is going to mean a lot of overshadowing in the combat corner of the sports world. It would be a shame if boxing fans, that often are also UFC fans, missed what might be the best boxing match of the week (in the States anyways…it’s gonna’ be...
By Cliff Rold - Tyson Fury was the biggest domino to fall. It was only one of many in one of boxing’s most intriguing developments. Two fights on tap this Saturday could tell us something about just how immediate the trend of new at heavyweight really is. No matter how one feels about the quality of the Klitschko era, there is no denying that...
Cruiserweight: Marco Huck rebounded from losing his title with a solid performance against career favorite opponent Ola Afolabi. Afolabi loses the momentum of his win over Chakhkiev as he remained unable to solve Huck in his fourth crack at it.