Rocky faces hard day's night

Boxing | International

Roman Martinez © Gallo Images

 

Roman Martinez and Mikey Garcia will earn every dollar they are paid to fight each other this weekend.
Martinez, the WBO junior lightweight champion, faces Mikey Garcia in Corpus Christi, Texas, where spectators are likely to be well rewarded for whatever they paid for their tickets.
The 30-year-old “Rocky” Martinez, of Puerto Rico, has won 27, lost one and drawn two of his 30 professional fights. He finished 16 of them inside the distance. Garcia, 25, is from Oxnard in California and has won 27 of his 32 fights inside the distance.
Martinez, making the third defence of his title, could find himself fighting in the toughest test of his career. An aggressive boxer who throws lots of punches, he has lost only to Ricky Burns. That was in Glasgow on September 4 2010 when he lost the WBO junior lightweight belt.


When Burns moved up to lightweight and relinquished the title, Martinez regained it by beating Miguel Beltran Jr in September last year. He has made successful defences against Juan Carlos Burgos and Diego Magdaleno.
Garcia has a sound defence to go with good hand speed and punching power. In January this year he beat three-time world champion Orlando Salido for the WBO featherweight title.
The fight went to the scorecards when Garcia suffered a broken nose in a clash of heads. In the end he won by technical decision after eight rounds, having knocked Salido down in the first, third and fourth rounds.
However, he lost the belt in June this year when he was overweight for a fight against Juan Manuel Lopez, who came in at 33-2. He stopped Lopez in the fourth round.
Garcia likes to brawl and has plenty of power as shown by his knockout ratio of 84 per cent. He certainly has a chance of stopping Martinez, who will have a height advantage.
On the same card Vanes Martirosyan and Demetruis Andrade meet for the vacant WBO light-middleweight belt. Martirosyan as a 27-year-old California-based Armenian and Andrade, 25, is from Providence, Rhode Island.

Andrade, an undefeated southpaw with a record of 19-0; 13, was scheduled to challenge WBO champion Zaurbek Baysangurov in July, but the Russian withdrew because of an injury and was stripped of his belt.
Martirosyan made his professional debut in April 2005 and now boasts a record of 33-0-1, with 21 knockouts.
Andrade lost in the quarterfinals at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing after winning the amateur world title the previous year.