In what looked like a fairly evenly matched ShoBox main event between two top prospects, Regis Prograis proved his mettle. Prograis dropped his previously unbeaten opponent four times in the second round along the way to the stoppage. This should definitely be his graduation from the prospect series.
A New Orleans native who was relocated to Houston following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Regis Prograis (20-0, 17 KOs) should now be onto bigger and better things. It is difficult to deliver a truly star making performance on a series with as little viewership as ShoBox, but if it can be done he just did it.
Regis Prograis simply destroyed Joel Diaz Jr (23-1, 20 KOs). He also did it in an aggressive, fan friendly fashion that will be sure to endear him to the boxing public when he begins to receive more high profile fights. Diaz was able to land his shots for the brief round and a few seconds that he was actually in the fight, but in the end he was simply overwhelmed by an elite level prospect.
The first knockdown was questionable as it appeared Prograis may have at least partially caused it by stepping on Diaz’s foot. It spurned on Regis’s aggression whether it was real or not, however, and the last three left no question. The fight was rightly stopped when it was. Afterward Prograis even had the gall to call out Terence Crawford, a thing literally no one ever does.
On the undercard, 33 year old Canadian middleweight Steve Rolls (16-0, 9 KOs) appeared a little fortunate to get the decision against 24 year old Maryland native Desmond Nicholson (17-6-1, 16 KOs). Rolls dropped Nicholson in the first on a shot that was barely visible to the camera, but mostly from there on Nicholson seemed to control the rounds when he chose to. He did choose do things like be inactive for long stretches and clinch when he had Rolls hurt, however, so it is hard to get really worked up about this potentially being a robbery when it felt like Nicholson was doing the bare minimum he could in there at times.
Opening the show, Spanish Sergio Martinez promoted junior lightweight prospect Jon Fernandez (13-0, 11 KOs) received what amounted to a showcase fight versus dramatically overmatched Mexican fighter Juan Reyes (14-4-3, 2 KOs). Reyes’s wild, powerless aggression fed into Fernandez’s patient, sharp counter punching and the fight quickly turned into a savage beating. Fernandez put him out hard at the end of the second and the fight ended there. Of course Fernandez looked good here, but the matchup was designed for him to look good. It was hard to get a read on Spain’s Fernandez as a real prospect here due to the favorable matchup.
