It wasn’t super exciting at all times, but “The Miracle Man” Danny Jacobs got the job done in his HBO main event tonight. The fight was simply an outclassing. Jarrell Miller and Cletus Seldin picked up wins on the undercard.
Almost immediately in the main event, Danny Jacobs (33-2, 29 KOs) landed a solid shot on the temple that had Luis Arias (18-1, 9 KOs) off balance. Arias basically scored an MMA takedown to buy time to recover and it worked. From there the Milwaukee fighter mostly fought defensively. He didn’t run or hold excessively, but his focus was clearly more on not getting hit then backing up all his pre-fight trash talk about stopping Jacobs.
As the fight went on, Jacobs showed began to how his annoyance with Arias for both his pre-fight antics and some tactics that annoyed him during the fight such as hitting on the break. The Miracle Man stepped up his aggression and began jawing after the rounds ended, but he was unable to really hurt Arias despite his sharp performance.
This wasn’t an exciting fight. It fell into a rhythm in which Jacobs was clearly superior but unable to really hurt Arias and every round was increasingly the same, but it was still a good performance for the New York fighter at home. He did press in the tenth round and landed some real damaging shots, but Arias still got through and made it to the finish. Jacobs also scored an official knockdown in the eleventh, but it was a cuffing blow behind the head and should not have been scored as it was.
With the win Jacobs keeps himself in the mix at middleweight. He will have a difficult time finding a fight with Canelo Alvarez or a rematch with Gennady Golovkin, but there are plenty of good fighters in the deep division that he could headline shows on HBO with.
“Big Baby” Jarrell Miller (20-0-1, 18 KOs) picked up a ninth round stoppage win over his Polish foe Mariusz Wach (33-3, 17 KOs) that was at least a little marred by injury. For a few rounds, this was a fun heavyweight fighter. Big Baby seemed largely unconcerned with the power of Wach and fought inside with his high volume for a heavyweight style.
Wach was there and landing enough to make it fun, but he wasn’t giving quite as good as he got in return and was losing basically every round. Miller just kept landing more. Unfortunately the tenor of the fight shifted at about its midpoint when Wach suffered an injury to his right hand that left him unable to use it consistently the rest of the way.
From there the fight devolved into more of a beating until the doctor called the fight in the ninth when Wach had finally stopped using the right entirely. Miller now moves on as a potential Anthony Joshua opponent in the near future.
The opener heated up about two seconds into the fight when “The Hebrew Hammer” Cletus Seldin (21-0, 17 KOs) landed a big right hand that had Roberto Ortiz (35-2-2, 26 KOs) on the canvas at the immediate start of the fight. Ortiz rose and survived, but he was put down one more time before the round ended.
The second round continued to be a beating, but Ortiz was surviving until yet another big right hand opened a bad cut over Ortiz’s eye. Bloodied and beaten in the third, the fight was paused following an accidental foul in which the Mexican basically headbutted Seldin’s projected out elbow. During this time the referee consulted with the doctor and the decision was made to stop the fight on the cut giving Cletus Seldin the technical knockout win.
