KERMIT CINTRON W12 ALFREDO ANGULO

While Kermit Cintron boxed a smart, sharp fight and fully deserved his win, something seemed to be missing with Alfredo Angulo in Saturday night’s junior middleweight 12-rounder on HBO. Angulo pressed forward doggedly and showed heart and a good chin but the previously unbeaten Mexican fighter couldn’t seem to find the extra gear needed to put that little bit of extra pressure on Cintron that might have made the difference.

We now know that Angulo was not at his best physically. “He was sick, but Mexican fighters are tough and they don’t want to disappoint anybody,” Angulo’s manager, Mike Criscio, said over the phone from New Haven, CT on Tuesday. “I told him he shouldn’t fight, that we should cancel the fight, but he wanted to do it.

“He thought he could do it, but he had a virus in his body and that’s why he didn’t get there [to the venue] till the day of the weigh-in, basically. He was in Florida the night before and he stayed at [promoter] Gary Shaw’s parents’ house and he was feeling a little better, and he came over [for the fight].”

Boxers often go into a bout not feeling at their best, through illness, injury or personal problems (or a combination thereof), but the temptation is always to go ahead and hope that, once the fight starts, things will work out OK. This was one time it didn’t.

“He was really, really under the weather,” Criscio said. “He wouldn’t eat anything after the weigh-in. I think he drank some liquids but he didn’t eat anything, and I knew that was a problem, because he loves to eat. I told him not fight but he’s a proud Mexican and he didn’t want to hear it.

“Unfortunately it’s a step back, but no excuses, we’ve got to go on and make up for the loss. Every round, I knew he was losing. We were telling him what he had to do and he wasn’t listening and that tells me he wasn’t very well. There’s no doubt in my mind if he’d been 100% it would have been a different fight, he would have took it to him and cut the ring off, but he couldn’t catch up with him. But look, you can’t take anything away from Cintron — he did a good job.”

Angulo was unfortunate in that not only was he struggling physically but he was meeting a Cintron who boxed one of his best-ever fights. The Puerto Rican-born fighter from Reading, PA, showed clever moves, used the jab and punched in combinations. The strategy drawn up by trainer Ronnie Shields worked perfectly.

The big concern about Cintron was that he might fold when things got tough. When you think about it, though, although Cintron can be a bit emotional the only time he has flat-out collapsed in a fight was in the first bout with Antonio Margarito.

He held himself together admirably against Angulo, although he did dive into clinches a few times in the later rounds. Just when it looked as if Angulo might be starting to get a foothold in the fight, however, Cintron would hit him with the sort of eye-catching blows that bring “oohs” from the crowd and impress the judges.

Angulo was always in the fight, but he wasn’t winning it. He was often just out of distance with the right hands that might have made a difference if only he could have landed them. What Angulo needed was for Cintron to stand still and trade punches. His much more experienced opponent sensibly didn’t oblige him. When a frustrated Angulo gestured to his opponent to stand and fight it simply illustrated the fact that Cintron’s tactics were working beautifully.

In his third fight with Ronnie Shields, Cintron showed the technical acumen of a seasoned fighter who has worked hard at improving the tools of his trade, but his mental endurance was equally important. He looked a bit tired towards the end, but Cintron had a grip on the fight and he refused to allow himself to relinquish it.

Cintron showed the superior boxing skills and he was the puncher in the fight, as well as being the faster man. He outboxed Angulo and outthought him, and the unanimous scoring of the judges — 116-112 on all cards — reflected Cintron’s overall control of the contest.

Angulo will be back, of course. He is a crowd-pleaser, and Saturday’s loss has the mitigating factor of the fighter not being himself physically.

I think most boxing observers feared there was a problem with Angulo when the HBO pre-bout graphics showed his fight-night weight to be 159 pounds, with Cintron all the way up to 169. (Angulo had weighed 165 on the night for each of his last two bouts.)

Then HBO’s Bob Papa talked of Angulo looking “a little drawn” at the weigh-in, and Lennox Lewis remarked ominously that “something is seriously going on that his camp didn’t really want us to know”, and alarm bells started to ring.

For the first two rounds it looked to me as if Angulo was holding his own, but in the third a big left hook from Cintron had Angulo’s right foot coming up off the canvas, and in the fourth a crashing right hand rocked the Mexican fighter sideways, and at this point it was obviously going to be an uphill struggle for the betting favourite.

Perhaps a fully fit Angulo could have found that bit extra and won the fight, perhaps not — but against this improved version of Cintron he would surely have faced a very difficult night under the best of circumstances.

In the main event, Andre Berto boxed a tactically sound fight to retain his welterweight title against the strong but predictable Juan Urango. Berto was too fast and too talented for the heavy handed Colombian, and while he never remotely looked like stopping his man he hit with enough authority to get Urango’s respect. The wide, unanimous decision in Berto’s favour was of course a formality.

Berto wasn’t exciting, but he almost breezed to victory over a fighter who on paper seemed to have the potential to give him some problems. It wasn’t sensational stuff from Berto, but, for me anyway, it was at the very least satisfactory.