Toe to Toe Tuesday on Fox Sports 1 returns tonight with a main event that has the potential to get ugly. Two PBC staples meet when veteran Edner Cherry (35-7-2, 19 KOs) takes on once beaten prospect Omar Douglas (17-1, 12 KOs) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This is a fight they both need to stay relevant in the upper tiers of Junior Lightweight, but also one that could be quite dirty.
Edner Cherry has had a really strange career. He began his career 3-2-2 before rattling off 13 straight wins. In 2004, he began a run as a Friday Night Fights staple, appearing on the series six times through 2008. He pulled a respectable win over an unbeaten Monta Meza Clay, but narrowly lost eliminators to Ricky Quiles and Jose Armando Santa Cruz before being outboxed by Paulie Malignaggi on HBO. A few wins later, culminating in a tenth round stoppage of faded former long time 135 lb titlist Stevie Johnston that retired the former elite Lightweight, Cherry got his title shot up at 140 against then still unbeaten Timothy Bradley on Showtime. Cherry was outsized, outclassed, and soundly outboxed.
Then he kind of vanished. From 2004-2008, what looked like would be the peak of his career, Cherry fought sixteen times. From 2008-2012, Cherry fought seven times. Five of the fights were six or eight rounders and one of the two ten rounders was ruled a No Contest after just one round when Cherry landed a big shot after the bell.
Despite the lesser activity level and a huge drop in competition level, Cherry found himself in a 130 lb title fight in late 2015 on Showtime against Jose Pedraza. It was fitting that the fight was for a Junior Lightweight belt, a weight he had made all of twice in 42 bouts. After all, weirdness is his career’s hallmark and his other title shot, the Bradley fight, was up at a weight he had only fought at once before as well in the loss to Malignaggi. He gave a very, very spirited effort and probably deserved to win, but the judges gave it to Pedraza.
This has led to a resurgence in the perception of Cherry in boxing fans’ minds, but we need to step back and take on a perspective from a wider angle lens. Prior to the Pedraza fight, Cherry met then 21-3 (16 KOs) Luis Cruz. Cherry stopped him in the ninth, and he might have needed to. After a fast start, Cherry had faded and Cruz had come on more strongly as the fight progressed. Cruz is not a contender and, in fact, was coming off an eight round decision loss to a 7-13-3 fighter coming into the fight.
After the Pedraza fight, Cherry met then 23-1-1 Haskell Rhodes. It was an absolutely hideous fight, one I don’t want to get into any details about on the risk that I accidentally remember it. Many scored it for Rhodes, many more just shut the TV off. The judges gave it to Cherry in a fight that was too terrible to get really worked up about, but it was a bad decision at least in my opinion.
The Rhodes fight was really an excellent example with Cherry’s problems. He doesn’t want to fight on the inside, so he will clinch. He throws exciting, wild haymakers from the outside, but they often miss dramatically. While entertaining in the short term, those dramatic misses exhaust him and he clinches more. Even when they land they cause him to fall in on his opponent, where he doesn’t want to be, so he clinches. There is a theme here. Rounds exist here and there where Cherry works behind a jab and lands punches because of it, but he doesn’t maintain it and, at 34, he probably won’t. More often his switching to a jabbing based gameplan on the outside is a sign of his self inflicted fatigue.
His opponent tonight is Omar Douglas, a PBC prospect coming off a competitive, all things considered not too bad loss to recent champion Javier Fortuna. That fight was a bit too much too soon, but the PBC matchmakers thought they saw something he could work with there in his left hook. That punch, downstairs and up, is a really great weapon. It might be enough tonight and it almost was early against Fortuna, hurting and dropping the ex-champ in the first. In 44 fights, however, Cherry has never been stopped. Doing so would be a huge feather in Douglas’ cap.
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What I am honestly expecting, however, is a dirty, tedious fight with a lot of grappling and fouling in the clinch. Who wins? Cherry fights are tough for judges, so they will probably just flip a coin when it is done. I’ve got Douglas by a tails flip, but it could go either way.
The co-feature on the bill is pretty weak, pitting recent PBC losers 21-2-2 (9 KOs) Frank De Alba against 28-2 (8 KOs) Ryan Kielczweski. De Alba lost to Douglas in a close, but fair 2015 decision, while Kielczweski lost a wider decision to Miguel Flores at 126 last summer. This is them stepping back up for the first time against one another. The winner will likely be positioned to be an easy win for a higher level PBC opponent somewhere down the line. The fight is scheduled for eight and is almost guaranteed to go that distance.
According to the PBC website, the opener will be unbeaten Super Bantamweight prospects against one another in 10-0 (5 KOs) Stephen Fulton of Philadelphia versus 8-0-1 (7 KOs) Puerto Rican Luis Rosario. This will be my first exposure to both fighters.
The show starts at 9 PM Eastern on Fox Sports 1.
