WBA Regular champion of the Welterweight division, Keith Thurman has retained his title with a win from former WBA welterweight champion Luis Collazo.
Thurman started aggressively in the first two rounds. He gave Collazo three big shots in the second and a succession of punches which rocked the New Yorker in the fifth.
The 34-year-old Collazo had put up a fight winding Thurman with a brutal body shot. He pressured his opponent when he found an opening, but the Florida-native kept his ground in front of his home crowd in Tampa.
In the seventh round, Thurman avoided Collazo and his punches, but was able to land a great blow that cut the veteran badly. At the end of the round, he sat in his corner and informed his team that he could not see which prompted the referee to stop the fight at the beginning of the 8th round.
Thurman led 69-64, 69-64 and 68-65 on the cards.
"This performance man, we trained hard for this camp. Luis Collazo, I want to give it up to him, all respect. He is a great veteran. He came and he fought hard and caught me with a great body shot. But I took it and endured it like a great champion does and didn't go down," said Thurman after the match.
"We kept going. We kept digging him with shots, giving a little bit of power each round, and we broke him down."
Meanwhile, Collazo claimed that he thought he had a chance to win after his big shot on Thurman's body.
"I was trying to set him up for the left hand with him going to my left, and he was wide-open," Collazo said. "So I caught him with the liver shot. I think if I would have had a little more time...
"I guess in the seventh round he caught me with another clean shot and the blood just kept going in my eyes. I couldn't see nothing. I'm the type of fighter who just keeps going if I could. I couldn't see, so I'm better safe than sorry."
At the end of the fight, Thurman once again called out Floyd Mayweather to fight him next. However, his challenge seems futile as his last bout didn't live up to its hype.
0 comments:
Post a Comment