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Showtime ShoBox Recap

March 13, 2009

Bell Centre-Montreal, Quebec

1. IBF Super Middleweight(168 pounds) 12-Round Championship Match:

Lucian Bute (23-0, 18 KO's, 167.5 pounds) (c) vs. Fulgencio Zuniga (22-3-1, 19 KO's, 167.75 pounds)

Bute won this title from Alejandro Berrio via technical knockout at 1:27 of round 11 on October 19, 2007 at the same building that is hosting this event. The champion is making his third defense of this title.

A native of Romania now living in Montreal, Bute had a solid amateur career that peaked when he won the bronze medal in the 152 pound division at the 1999 World Amateur Boxing Championships in Houston, Texas.

Bute now boxes exclusively in Montreal. This will be Bute's twelfth straight match from Montreal dating back to a June 3, 2005 knockout victory over Jose Spearman. It is Bute's eleventh straight match from the Bell Centre, where the champion customarily draws a sell out. Tonight's event has drawn a paying crowd of 12,153 fans. Bute enjoys a tremendous hometown advantage here and has no intention to box at any neutral locations.

Bute's last match was a controversial 12-round unanimous decision over Librado Andrade on October 24, 2008. Andrade knocked Bute down and out with less then 5 seconds to go in round 12. However, it appeared Bute used both the hometown and champion's advantage to keep his title. The referee, Marlon B. Wright who is from Montreal and was officiating the fifth straight Bute match, refused to call the knockout. Wright took about 25 seconds in real time to make his 8-count. The Montreal referee kept yelling at Andrade to go back to the neutral corner, that the American had never left. Even with the ridiculously long count, Bute was in no shape to continue after the 8-count. Therefore, the referee still should have ruled Bute knocked out. Since, the rules state that a boxer must answer the count and be in shape to continue. Wright never made the virtually unconscious Bute walk towards him. The hometown referee simply signaled Bute was okay to continue, then the final bell sounded to end the match before another punch could be thrown. A full recap of that abomination of a match can be found here: http://www.number1contender.net/the-latest/2009/1/30/recap-of-lucian-bute-vs-librado-andrade.html

Bute gave an interview beforetonight's match saying he has metaphorically forgotten what happened at the end of the Andrade match and is moving on to this match with no concerns. Considering Bute gave a concussed post-match interview following the victory over Andrade where the boxer displayed no memory of at least the last 10 minutes, the champion never knew that he was knocked out. That makes forgetting about the end of the Andrade match rather easy, and may possibly be the only good thing to come out of him being knocked out that night.

Bute is The Ring magazine's number 2 contender to their vacant championship at 168 pounds.

Zuniga had a respectable amateur boxing career where he won 2 national amateur championships in his native Colombia.

The challenger has had much better success boxing in his native Colombia then outside of it. In Colombia, Zuniga is 17-0 with all 17 wins coming by way of knockout. Outside of Colombia, Zuniga is 5-3-1 with only 2 knockout victories. There are some statistics starting to come out about boxers from Colombia having insane knockout rates in their native country and then having substantial drop offs in their knockout rates outside Colombia. Zuniga is considered a prime example of the statistic, and potentially a boxer with a heavily inflated record. In Colombia, he had a 100% knockout percentage in his wins. Outside of Colombia, he has a 40% knockout percentage in his wins. A boxer with a 40% percent knockout percentage in their wins is not considered to be that dangerous a knockout puncher.

Zuniga's last match was a round 3 knockout victory over Diego Castillo on November 13, 2008 at Estadio Metropolitano in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Zuniga is unranked by The Ring, and currently ranked by boxrec.com as the number 31 boxer in the world at 168 pounds.

At 29-years-old, Bute is 2 years younger then the 31-year-old Zuniga. Bute has the height advantage standing 6' 2.5" tall, while Zuniga stands 5' 10" tall. The hometown boxer has the reach advantage with a 72" wingspan, compared to the 71" wingspan of Zuniga. There are no unofficial weights of either boxer approaching match time. However, Zuniga is naturally a 160-pounder. That means Bute should be the heavier boxer in the ring. The champion will box out of the southpaw stance, and the challenger will employ the orthodox stance.

Zuniga tried to win the fan's over by entering the ring to a very good song and carrying a Canadian flag. However, this failed and the Colombian was roundly booed.

Then Bute entered the ring to a good U2 song and raucous cheers. The Showtime announcers, having learned their lesson from losing their voices trying to scream over the great Montreal boxing fans in the past decided go silent, while the champion made a very elaborate entrance to the ring with a video package and spotlight. Montreal does an amazing job with boxing events making it a true event rather then just a series of matches. With the elaborate events and great crowds, Montreal is probably the best boxing city in either Canada or the United States, today.

The unified rules of boxing are in effect for this match. Two of the judges keeping official score of this match from ringside are from Montreal and the other is from New Jersey. Zuniga is going to need a knockout to win. The referee is Lindsay Page, Jr. from New Jersey. Zuniga may only need a 10-count knockout to win.

Bute uses some tremendous counter-punching to win round 1, 10-9. The champion out-boxes Zuniga to win round 2, 10-9. There appears to be a huge skill disparity between these boxers in favor of the champion. In the first 2 rounds, Bute's offense had primarily been counter left hands. Then with about 2 minutes to go in round 3, Bute became more aggressive landing combinations at will on the seemingly helpless Colombian. Instead, of punching back or moving, Zuniga put up his gloves and seemed to accept getting hit. Bute easily wins round 3, 10-9, and leads on my scorecard after 3 rounds, 30-27.

With 1:39 to go in round 4, Bute lands a counter left uppercut to the body that has Zuniga crumpling to the canvas. That is only the fourth time Zuniga has been knocked down in his pro career. Zuniga is probably not going to get up from that. The challenger, still in agony, struggles to his feet at the count of 9. The referee held up at 9 to let Zuniga stand. Zuniga is going to be allowed to continue with 1:18 to go in the round. That was a very slow count in favor of the foreign boxer, which is very unusual. However, the challenger is still in terrible shape, and Bute should finish him with only a few punches. Zuniga never clinched but showed a lot of toughness trying to continue to slug it out with Bute. Finally, Bute was able to trap Zuniga in the corner with a combination that forced the referee to step in with 37 seconds to go in round 4. Itwas a good stoppage. That is only Zuniga's second knockout loss. The other knockout loss was to arguably the best puncher in the sport, pound-for-pound, Kelly Pavlik.

The official outcome courtesy of Pierre Bernier is that at: 2:25 of round 4 the referee has stopped the contest, making the winner by technical knockout, still undefeated and still the IBF Super Middleweight Champion of the World, Lucian "Le Tombeur" Bute. The win moves Bute to 24-0 with now 19 wins coming by way of knockout.

Bute said in his post-match interview that he wants Andrade, who was watching this match from the crowd. Bute was very good in this match against a severely over-matched opponent. There is probably only one minor criticism that can be made of Bute's performance. He probably could have finished Zuniga faster had the champion followed up on the knockdown with more body punches instead of throwing punches at Zuniga's head. Bute is scheduled to face the winner of an April 4 match between Andrade and Vitali Tsypko. Presumably that will be Andrade and the boxers' will rematch this summer. Sadly, that match is probably going to be in Montreal where Andrade will once again only be able to win by knockout. The winner of that match will probably move on to face Mikkel Kessler to determine the successor to Joe Calzaghe as the true champion at 168 pounds.

Zuniga was completely out-matched here. Nothing Zuniga did in this match gave Bute any problems. This is Zuniga's third failed attempt to win a title.The Colombian would probably be best off dropping back to 160 pounds, and winning some matches off television before trying to get in title contention, again.

This was an enjoyable event. It is a good infomercial for a rematch between Bute and Andrade. However, the NCAA tournament is starting and the first 2 days of the tournament are much more entertaining then this show. This is going to be replayed a lot of times for months. It is worth catching if nothing is on, but not worth rushing to see.

News and Notes: Amir Khan defeated Marco Antonio Barrera via technical decision on March 14 at the M.E.N. Arena in Manchester, England. The win makes Khan a mandatory challenger forone of the 135-pound titles that will soon be vacated Juan Manuel Marquez. The great Mike Sempervive wrote an excellent recap of that whole event that also featured Enzo Maccarinelli. It can be found here: http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/8658/105/

Somehow, John Ruiz has been named the mandatory challenger to the winner of the Nikolai Valuev-Ruslan Chagaev heavyweight title match. This will further delay any chance of there being an undisputed heavyweight champion.

However, there is currently some difficulty putting together the Valuev-Chagaev match. Chagaev is refusing to enter into negotiations for the title match. The WBA had ordered Chagaev to face Valuev by mid June or forfeit his "champion in recess" status. At this point, it appears unlikely that the match will happen by mid-June or that Chagaev will be forced to vacate his "champion in recess" status for seemingly ducking Valuev.

The deal has almost been finalized for Pavlik's next defense of his 160-pound titles. On either, June 20, July 18 or July 25, Pavlik will face Sergio Mora at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey as part of another split-site pay-per-view. This time, Pavlik will be paired with a Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. match from Mexico. The reason for this is that both HBO and Showtime refused to carry the Pavlik-Mora match. There was talk of doing the next Pavlik match in Cleveland, however the city was going to charge an additional 8% city tax on the event in addition to the regular taxes charged for running a boxing event in Ohio. Pavlik's promoter, Bob Arum,believes he can convince the city to waive the tax in the future, because a Pavlik match in Cleveland would generate over a million dollars in revenue that the city could desperately use. Unfortunately, a deal could not be worked out in time for Pavlik to have a match in Cleveland this summer. As a side note, Arum is talking about putting the suspended Antonio Margarito on the Mexico portion of the Pavlik PPV, but Arum does not sound serious about that at this time.

As noted above, it is NCAA basketball tournament time. This is the time of year, where lots of people compare underdog teams to Rocky. This is one of the worst analogies in sports. The analogy is supposed to refer to Rocky in the Academy Award winning Rocky I. Unfortunately, in that movie Rocky lost. No team in the NCAA tournament wants their season to end like Rocky's ended in Rocky I. A more appropriate combat sports analogy is probably from the Academy Award winning film The Karate Kid.

The next recap will be coming out Saturday or Sunday covering the Vitali Klitschko heavyweight title defense against Juan Carlos Gomez that will be airing on ESPN.

Sincerely,

Jereme Warneck

 number1contender.net

Boxing and Video Game Correspondent for f4wonline.com

Hidden Valley Lake, CA

I can be reached for feedback and comments at ZurRoadie@aol.com or as JeremeW on XBOX Live. I read everything.