SELCUK AYDIN W12 JO JO DAN

Sometimes one punch can change the outcome of a fight, and it doesn’t have to be a knockout blow. Selcuk Aydin clinched victory over Jo Jo Dan in Saturday’s welterweight rematch when he floored his opponent with a right hand in the 11^th round.
 
At the end of 12 hard-fought rounds, Aydin got the unanimous decision to the delight of his hometown fans in Trabzon, Turkey.
 
However, two of the cards had Aydin ahead by just one point. That 11^th-round right hand was all-important because Dan had been having his best round of the fight, even seeming to stun his tough Turkish opponent as he landed some big left hands from his southpaw stance.
 
Yet just when things were looking very good indeed for Dan, the Romanian-raised southpaw from Montreal forgot to duck. A 10-9 round in Dan’s favour suddenly became a 10-8 round for Aydin. That’s what makes boxing such a compelling sport — fortunes can change inn the blink of an eye.
 
The Aydin-Dan fight was, for me, the highlight of last weekend’s boxing, an excellent match that saw both men give their all. Dan had seemed unlucky to lose a split decision to Aydin in June 2010, but on Saturday knockdowns in the first and, crucially, 11^th rounds sealed Dan’s fate on the scorecards.
 
Dan was much the busier fighter but Aydin’s punches were harder — he seemed to be hurting Dan every time he hit him. You have to admire Dan’s grit in battling through the last eight rounds with a broken jaw yet still coming close to winning the fight.
 
The big letdown of the weekend for me was Kermit Cintron’s collapse in five rounds in his junior middleweight title bout against Saul Alvarez. I didn’t think that Cintron would win but I did expect him to offer sufficient resistance to take the fight into the late rounds. Cintron was tentative and anxious, and Alvarez was simply walking through him by the third round. As Roy Jones noted in the HBO commentary, Alvarez knew he had nothing to worry about. Cintron’s body language in the fourth round pleaded: “Someone, get me out of here!” In the fifth round the referee obliged.