I chronicled 2 events in my previous post outlining November’s schedule. The first event was the FOX PBC card headlined by Luis Ortiz which got some ad time during college football. The other was DAZN’s Florida card headlined by Devin Haney. In the 6 or so fights that got air time I don’t think a single A Side fighter lost a round. Furthermore, outside of the Haney fight, all the contests were early and non-competitive knockouts. I predicated DAZN would feature all showcase type of fights and the FOX card would have short fights between guys with firepower. What we got was what I expected but the FOX card was very unsatisfactory. Joey Abell was unable to continue after an arm injury. Alexander Flores went down with a body punch and beat the count but was deemed unable to continue. The main event lasted all of about 45 seconds. Joe Biden’s speech cut into the Carlos Negron KO and the Michael Polite Coffie fight. I know COVID has made things tough but FOX is a free network that had fights directly following NCAA football and there is a good chance of sports fans keeping the channel on. Cards like the one we got Saturday are not going to draw in new fans. I will give Frank Sanchez the game ball for FOX’s card. He put on a solid performance and went a few rounds of showing his skills before ending the night for Brian Howard in the 4th after putting him down 3 times.
On DAZN we saw Zhang and Hrgovic score stoppage wins over pudgy and overmatched opposition. While Hrgovic was fine, Zhang looked clumsy and uncoordinated in clubbing Devin Vargas out in the 4th round. Hrgovic dropped Booker in round 2 and outclassed him until the TKO in round 5. Booker looked like he got off the couch to take the fight. Devin Haney handled his business in there by taking a 12-0 shut out on my card but didn’t dazzle or make a statement. Gamboa held a lot and held back to avoid counters for much of the fight and it is hard to KO a good fighter who does not want to be KO’d. That said, Haney was in there to make a statement to match Lopez and Davis and I don’t think he did that. Lopez said he will base his decision on who he will fight next based on how Haney and Garcia look in their bouts. If Garcia defeats Campbell in style, Haney might be kicking himself if he loses out on the Lopez showdown.
Jersey George's Boxing Blog 