This time Rocky Juarez got the bad news in the
ring instead of his dressing room.
The result was the same _ Marco Antonio Barrera was still the WBC
130-pound champion.
Barrera boxed his way to a unanimous decision Saturday night,
pleasing no one but himself with a workmanlike performance to keep
his super featherweight title in a fight that drew boos from the
crowd for a lack of action.
The fight was a rematch of their first fight in May when Juarez
left the ring thinking he had a draw, only to find out in his
dressing room that the scores had been added wrong and that he had
actually lost the decision.
There was no problem with the scoring in the second fight, with
all three judges favouring Barrera in a fight that ended the same
way it began _ with Barrera controlling the action and Juarez
chasing him around the ring.
One judge had Barerra winning 117-111, while the other two
favoured him 115-113. The Associated Press had Barrera winning
116-112.
``I went in with the same game plan as before. I felt like I was
the aggressor again,'' Juarez said. ``He didn't want to fight. He
never hurt me, not once.''
The fight had none of the drama of the first, and very little of
the action. There were no knockdowns, no big punches, not much of
anything that the near sellout crowd expected in the rematch of
their fight in May.
The most heated action came at the end of the fight when Barrera
taunted Juarez, the 2000 Olympic silver medallist, in the final
seconds and then tried to go after him after the final bell before
being restrained.
Juarez pressed the fight the entire way, but he missed constantly
and never landed the big left hook that
``You've got to go for the knockout out, you got to go for it,''
Juarez' father said after the 10th round.
Juarez, who felt he gave away the early rounds in the first
fight, had vowed to come out aggressive, and he did. He chased
Barrera around the ring the first few rounds, but Barerra controlled
them by skilfully boxing Juarez from the outside.
Juarez remained on the attack, landing occasionally while
following the circling Barrera around the ring. But Barrera's left
jab kept landing, and the right eye of Juarez began swelling in the
middle rounds.
By the eighth round, the crowd at the MGM Grand arena was booing
the action, though Juarez was doing his best to force the attack.
Barrera seemed content to stay on the outside, throw his jab and
stay away from the left hook of Juarez.
``Just don't let him catch you with a big punch,'' Barrera's
corner told him after the eighth round.
Barrera earned US$1 million for the fight, while Juarez was paid
$274,000.
On the undercard, Israel Vazquez came back from two knockdowns to
stop Jhonny Gonzalez in the 10th round to retain his WBC super
bantamweight title.
Gonzalez was ahead on all three ringside scorecards when Vazquez
landed a flurry of punches that put him on the canvas. Vazquez, who
had also been down in the seventh round, looked to his corner, which
threw in the towel to stop the fight at 2:09 of the 10th round.
Gonzalez won the early rounds and dropped Vazquez in the fourth
and sixth rounds with left hooks. Both fighters weighed the class
limit of 122 pounds.
In another fight, Joan Guzman won a split decision over Jorge
Barrios to win the WBO 130-pound title that was vacated when Barrios
couldn't make the weight limit.
Guzman, who improved to 26-0, was the stronger puncher and
appeared to control the fight, but lost by a point on one scorecard
and one by only one point on one of the other two. If Barrios
(46-3-1) hadn't had a point taken for low blows in the sixth round
the fight would have been a draw.
© The Canadian Press, 2007