It wasn’t a good night for either in house fighter in Oakland.
I criticized this Top Rank on ESPN+ show in my preview for it yesterday as a show of mismatches, but it turned out to be problematic for entirely different reasons. In the main event, super middleweight titleholder Jose Uzcategui (28-2, 23 KOs) did get the predictably easy win over completely overwhelmed Argentinian regional talent Ezequiel Maderna (26-5, 16 KOs). The normally powerful Venezuelan got the job done without issue from a results oriented perspective. He controlled basically every minute of what looked to be a shut out and got the seemingly appropriate 100-90 scores on two cards while the third came back 98-92.
Yet, this will likely go down as a loss in the public perception category. Jose Uzcategui was flat in there. He pressured all night and was able to land shots, but he never showed any real urgency in trying to get Maderna out to end the mismatch. He seemed to let his foot off the gas intentionally whenever getting close to doing real damage too. The fight became even more anti-climactic when the Argentinian b-side seemed to hurt his hand in the middle of the fight. Not that he was using it a lot, but it didn’t help.
Post-fight Jose indicated that this was an intentional strategy in order to look less impressive as to not seem so intimidating to the other top fighters at super middleweight. I can’t speak to the validity of the claim, but I can definitely second the notion that it wasn’t impressive. The largely booing fans agreed. Mandatory challenger Caleb Plant is almost certainly up next for Uzcategui unless the PBC side decides to pass on that fight, but the titleholder called out Zurdo Ramirez post-fight for unification instead. Few would complain if that great match was made, though Uzcategui did little to drum up potential excitement for it here.
I was very wrong about the co-main event not being competitive. Talented Filipino super flyweight Jerwin Ancajas (30-1-2, 20 KOs) was stiffly tested by young Mexican challenger Alejandro Santiago (16-2-5, 7 KOs). In fact, Santiago had every bit the argument to win the fight on the cards at the end as Ancajas did. The official judges came back with widely differing scores of 116-112 Ancajas, 118-111 Santiago, and a 114-114 card that ended up making the contest a split draw overall.
Initially this fight looked more like what I expected. I thought Jerwin’s straighter, more precise shots were carrying the fight competitively but cleanly over its first third. Alejandro was landing a bit more than expected, especially with his right hand, but he wasn’t carrying rounds with work over three minutes. He did land a big right hand to close the second though. The tempo changed in the middle of the fight when that right hand lost the ability to miss. The 22 year old was peppering the titleholder with clean shots all around the ring. They weren’t huge punches and they weren’t wobbling Ancajas in the middle rounds, but the blows were outstanding scoring shots.
The Filipino defending titleholder fought his way back into the contest for a tense final third. While he was losing the previous few rounds clean, rounds nine, ten, and twelve were all very competitive frames that probably shaded most cards one way or another. The eleventh was a big one for Santiago in the middle of all that. Ancajas’s eye was increasingly a mess and I thought a Santiago right hand hurt him for the first time at the tail end of the action. He came out strong in the twelfth despite this, however, and probably edged a round that he very much needed to hold on to his belt.
In the end I scored the co-feature a 114-114 draw and I’ve seen scores about as all over the place as the official judges. The scoring range seems to go from about 115-113 Ancajas to 116-112 Santiago just from glancing around media cards. It was one of those fights with a lot of close rounds that could have reasonably gone in either direction. More importantly, it was a pretty good fight.
