A little late on this, but Diego De La Hoya, much younger cousin of Oscar, was predictably victorious Thursday night on Golden Boy’s ESPN series over gatekeeper Erik Ruiz. Undefeated Golden Boy super middleweight prospect D’mitrius Ballard also won, but with much more difficulty than Diego.
To be honest, I find these Diego De La Hoya (18-0, 9 KOs) fights a little tedious at this point. Golden Boy seems to want him to stay on this level while he gains experience and name recognition. That is fine and might be the right move for his long term career as he is only twenty two, but it isn’t particularly compelling to watch.
It was very obvious going in that Diego was going to both win every round and be unable to stop Ruiz. De La Hoya, unlike his more famous uncle, has basically no sting on his shots. They look good and can be flashy, but he so rarely has hurt his midlevel opposition that is is just time to accept that he is a soft puncher.
On top of that, Erik Ruiz (16-7-1, 6 KOs) had never been stopped despite being in with several good fighters. As basically anyone could have predicted, Diego bounced Ruiz’s head around for ten rounds while eating the occasional shot in return. Ruiz was never hurt.
Diego is clearly a plus athlete and has a good fundamental base, but he is not super hard to hit clean. I do believe that his lack of power coupled with his style may limit him from ever truly being a top fighter. He is not a blue chip prospect, but merely a pretty good one with a famous name. That is nothing to scoff at either.
In the co-feature former Maryland high school football standout D’Mitrius Ballard (17-0, 12 KOs) was given some reason to doubt his career choice by Adrian “Tyson” Flores (20-5-1, 13 KOs) of Mexico. Ballard had his moments in this fight including dropping Tyson Flores in the second round behind a big left hook that I briefly thought had ended the fight, but I actually scored this one 95-94 for Flores.
Flores took this fight on short notice and lost the first two rounds pretty clearly, but after getting dropped he really rallied back and did most of the damage. He had especially strong fourth and ninth rounds where he had Ballard in at least a small bit of trouble. Ballard did rally to win the tenth, however, which evened up the fight in terms of rounds on two judges scorecards. The knockdown proved to be the difference.
I did think Flores won this fight, but it was no robbery. Two judges had it opposite of my card with 95-94 Ballard. I cannot cry about one round difference.
I apologize for the delay in covering this. It was a very busy weekend in the sport and I am a one man show here at S8C. Despite airing first, this was the least compelling card of them all so it got pushed to the back burner.
