Boxing
Viloria holds on late to win flyweight crown by UD
HONOLULU — It must’ve felt like déjà vu for Brian ‘The Hawaiian Punch’ Viloria, as he held on and circled around the ring in the final rounds of his title fight against Julio Cesar Miranda. This time however, instead of fading and folding, he came out with a unanimous decision victory in front of a hometown crowd at the Blaisdell Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Viloria started strong, landing solid straights and hooks, and dropping Miranda in the opening round. He continued his assault and was getting the better of the exchanges up until the seventh round, while Miranda kept on coming despite showing more and more signs of fatigue.
That’s until Miranda’s body shots started to slow Viloria down a bit, and the Mexican champion slowly worked his way back into grabbing the momentum in the eight round, managing to open a cut on Viloria’s right eye.
Miranda kept applying pressure on Viloria, as the Hawaii native tried to dance his way from danger. In the 10th round, Viloria started to show signs of seriously gassing out, as the Mexican connected with solid shots that appeared to stagger the hometown boy a couple of times, and continued to pursue the fight all the way to the final bell.
In the last round, Viloria went down once and fell on his shorts, which was ruled a slip, and went on a knee which was also due more to fatigue than getting hurt. Miranda, who had looked more fatigued earlier in the fight, also slipped once in the final round.
It was definitely an all-out war that will go down as one of the best fights of the year. After 12 rounds, I had Viloria winning by a point thanks to the knockdown he scored in the first round.
Oddly, however, the official scorecards were announced as 91-98, 93-96, 93-97 all in favor of the new WBO flyweight world champion, two rounds short of the usual 12-round scores.
In any event, had the last two rounds been scored in Miranda’s favor, the scores would’ve ended up as 114-113, 115-113 and 116-111 giving Viloria the same result.
Dennis ‘dSource’ Guillermo is a prolific boxing writer. Follow him on Twitter, and for an archive of his work click here. You can e-mail him at DennisGuillermo2@yahoo.com
