All photos by Mikey Williams/Top Rank
On Saturday, September 21, 2014, Iron Boy Promotions–together with Top Rank–brought an outstanding boxing card to Phoenix, AZ.
It was presented by Unimas’ Tecate Solo Boxeo and had two fights televised. The Celebrity Theater was the backdrop to this hard hitting night of action.
In contrast to the co-main event, the main event was a lackluster affair at best. Konstantin Ponomarev routed the older Cosme Rivera in a 10-round bout that made many in the small intimate Celebrity Theater take a beer/bathroom break.
As predicted, the younger, faster Ponomarev beat Rivera to the punch every time. Rivera for the most part of the fight employed the “move, get hit and move technique.”
Towards the end, Rivera threw caution to the wind and began to pressure the young Russian fighter, yet even fighting off his back foot, Ponomarev was still finding success where Rivera could not.
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In the co-main event, local fighter Victor Castro defeated Mexican Pablo Becerra by knockout at the very last second of the third round. It started ugly, as both fighters threw punches in bunches without landing.
After the second round, Castro finally seemed to have found his rhythm as he effectively hurt Becerra to the body. Still, with both fighters not landing the majority of their punches, Castro hit Becerra with a homer of a shot.
The Mexican fighter fell flat on his back and before the referee could count to 10, the commission inspector rushed in to check on the fallen fighter and the referee was forced to call the fight off.
On the non-televised portion of the card, the fight of the night has to go to Fransisco “Panchito” de Vaca who battled the tough Victor Serrano in a Super Batamweight match.
Both fighters fought hard and exchanged bombs, with Panchito getting the better of the exchanges.
Also on the card were three fighters fighting out of the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy, as Egis Kavaliauskas, Trevor Mccumby and Oleksandr Gvozdyk all won via knockouts.
Surprisingly, Shane Mosley Jr. fought and lost a split decision to Marchristopher Adkins that was a bit questionable.
Although both fighters did not do anything amazingly to clearly win the fight, I felt Mosley started out well enough to deserve the nod.
