KING Arthur Villanueva won by a brilliant second-round knockout.
Donnie “Ahas” Nietes used surgical precision to score a flawless 12-round unanimous decision.
But, although Mark “Magnifico” Magsayo also took home a unanimous decision, it was not as magnificent a victory as many had predicted, including his manager Michael Aldeguer.
Villanueva used a crackling right to the jaw to flatten Jhoan Jimenez of Mexico and scored his 17th KO victory in 2:20 of the second round, improving to 31-1 and lining himself up for a possible world title fight.
The win also amounted to redemption for Villanueva, whose sixth-round KO victory over Jimenez in May in Bacolod was marred by controversy as the knockout came after both had collided head-on.
In that fight before a jam-packed crowd at the Bacolod La Salle Gym, Villanueva got floored in the third before coming back strong to knock the Mexican down in the fifth before that fateful sixth came, when Jimenez lay almost unconscious on the floor for several minutes following the head-on collision.
To Villanueva’s credit, he had begged, almost on bended knees, for a rematch with Jimenez “to prove that my win was not a fluke.”
His Sunday’s second-round knockout win said it all.
Nietes also nailed a more than impressive win, demolishing Sosa in easily pocketing a 120-108 victory as all three judges each gave the Murcia-born (Negros Occidental) idol all 12 rounds in the thoroughly lopsided fight.
The win was Nietes’s first in a rousing debut in the 112-lb flyweight division, vacating his World Boxing Organization junior flyweight crown in his bid to win another world title to add to his 105- and 108-lb belts he had won the last eight or so years—in the process becoming the longest-reigning Filipino world champion.
But Magsayo had become the favorite gym talk after failing to knock out Robles, a last-minute substitute with a so-so record of 13-5-1 as against the Boholanon’s untarnished 14-0, with 11 KOs.
Worst, Magsayo appeared spent beginning as early as the middle rounds of the 12-round fight. Sheer instinct made him save the fight.
OK, Robles showed a façade of the typical Mexican toughness.
But Magsayo also showed unpolished skills, negating what he had supposed to have learned while being trained before the Robles bout by the legendary Freddie Roach at the fabled Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles.
It’d be a waste of so much talent if Magsayo, again resorting to unnecessary, tiresome moves when being unable to connect properly against Robles, would continue to fight that way.
He is only 21. I hate to see him transform from “Magnifico” to “Magnifiction.”
THAT’S IT Condolences to Marites Vitug and to the many other loved ones of Vet V. Vitug, the much-revered poet of Lubao, Pampanga. He was my “glass-mate,” who loved to print my poems when he was Literary Editor of The Dawn, the influential weekly student newspaper of the University of the East, which had Ding Marcelo then as the paper’s brilliant editor in chief. Ding is still Manila Bulletin’s sports editor…Also, I join my sister’s children—Tonyfrank, Mabel, Kenneth and Gerard—in mourning the death of their father, my bayaw Ediberto “Kuya Eddie” Ibanez Causon, whose remains, like Vet’s, also lie at Loyola Chapel-Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City. Kuya Eddie it was who bought my first guitar as his birthday gift to me when I was in junior high school. He was an upright and honorable man…It’s a sort of a double whammy in the family as we had just buried my beloved brother Kuya Onie (Antonio S. Mendoza Jr.) last Saturday when my Kuya Eddie suddenly died last Sunday night following an aneurism attack. Dear God, indeed, has His own ways with us, mortals. We don’t question. We trust and believe—as always. Amen.