At times, Ruben Villa's slick boxing seemed to confuse the favored Emmanuel Navarrete and kept Navarrete at bay with wild swings that brought back memories of the wide swipes of 80s heavyweight title contender Renaldo "Mr." Snipes.
The problem for Villa was that two of those wild lefts landed in the first and fourth, knocked him down, and handed Navarrete two 10-8 rounds that he needed on the scorecards as Navarrette won a unanimous decision to pick up the WBO featherweight title vacated by Shakur Stevenson.
Had Navarrete not scored a knockdown in this fight, the fight would have ended in a majority draw as two judges scored Navarrete a 114-112 winner and that would have been a bit unfair.
I scored Navarrete a 116-110 winner (8-4 in rounds with two knockdowns), but Villa might have had a case to winning either or both rounds that he was dropped in and could have been a draw on my card under those conditions.
However, those weren't the conditions and the scores were not the greatest that I've seen- even compared to the awful scores many judges have been turning in recently.
It seemed like my card, while wide than the official scores weren't as wide as many viewers scored on their cards.
The scorecards seemed a little friendly to Villa, who I thought had plenty of moments that frustrated Navarrette, but in the end, just wasn't strong enough to earn Navarrete's respect.
Navarrete would make some interesting unification fights with IBF champion Josh Warrington, who has an association with Top Rank (Navarrete's promoter) and even though the WBA STILL has Leo Santa Cruz as their champion at featherweight (And holds their junior lightweight title AND could have one of their knockoff belts at lightweight, should LSC defeat Gervonta Davis later this month), they are expected to "promote" their "regular" champion (Bleech) Xu Can to their champion and Can has an association with Top Rank as well.
Both Warrington and Can are aggressive fighters that aren't power punchers, so fights against Navarrete could be filled with action, but could either hurt Navarrete and make him pay for the wide, looping punches with straight counters down the middle?
I might rate Navarrete a favorite over Can and a mild favorite over Warrington.
A match with WBC champion Gary Russell can be placed off the table as Russell fights for PBC and never seems interested in fighting more than once a year.
As for Villa, his boxing skills aren't going to be popular and I don't think many top featherweights are going to go out of their way to face him.
However, he's not a big puncher ( five KOs) and his lack of strength certainly hurt him against Navarrete.
If Villa can make the weight and I have no idea how well he makes weight, I bet he'd be smart to consider dropping to junior featherweight if he could.
It could help with his physical strength against smaller fighters and could give him the edge that he needs to win a title.
In the boxing challenge, Ramon Malpica added one point for the Navarrete win to cut my lead to 129-119.
As far I know, there is no live broadcast of middleweight contender Liam Williams fight today from the UK.
If I have a chance to watch it, I could do another post on that or update this post with the result.
UPDATE: Liam Williams stopped Andrew Robinson in the first round of their middleweight match in London.
I added two points for the Williams KO win, while Ramon Malpica picked up one.
The season total is 131-120.
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