LAS VEGAS – Blood, guts, skill and will made for a powerful mix. It was a shot of prime time, just what NBC ordered.
Keith Thurman and Robert Guerrero delivered Saturday night at the MGM Grand with a compelling welterweight bout full of more drama than the story told by scores on one-sided cards.
Thurman was the winner. The 120-107, 118-109, 118-108 scorecards seemed to say that it was easy. It wasn’t. That was as plain as Thurman’s battered face. There was a huge welt on the left side of his forehead from an apparent head butt in the third round. Streaks of blood and bruises framed his weary eyes.
Thurman won, all right.
In the ninth round, he knocked down Guerrero and cut him above one eye with a successive right uppercuts and a glancing left hand. Guerrero was flat on his back, blood streaming across his face and onto the mat from a deep gash across his left eyelid. It looked as if he wouldn’t get up, as if he was about to get stopped for the first time in his long career. But there’s no if in his courage.
“Robert Guerrero was a tremendous warrior,’’ Thurman (25-0, 21 KOs).
Was and is.
Guerrero (32-3-1, 18 KOs) got up and took the fight to a tiring Thurman. It was if Guerrero knew he needed a knockout and Thurman was protecting the victory he knew he had on the cards. Thurman backpedaled. Guerrero moved forward.
In the 10th, there was a collision. Guerrero’s pursuit put him with range and he capitalized, landing straight right hands that seemed to stun Thurman. The crowd of 10,107 went wild. NBC had the round it wanted in its first prime-time telecast of boxing in three decades.
“I fought my heart out,’’ Guerrero said. “That’s the the kind of performance that wins over the hearts of fans, even if you don’t win.’’
Adrien Broner has a fast jab, a faster mouth and collection of nicknames. The jab was enough to a score a 120-108, 118-110, 120-108 decision over John Molina Jr., whose only real counter was an awkward lunge.
But the speed in Broner’s jab was absent in his feet. Broner (30-1, 22 KOs), who landed 141 jabs, was often as flat-footed as Molina (27-6, 22 KOs) was off-balance. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even competitive. Molina landed only 54 punches throughout the 12 rounds.
Yet, Broner never displayed a finishing touch. He calls himself AB. But Broner’s performance put some new meaning into the acronym. About Billions? Not quite. About Boring was more like it.
It was a junior-welterweight fight that took the prime out of time. The MGM Grand crowd booed. NBC can only hope that the viewers didn’t reach for their remotes, especially after Broner repeated a version of a slur that insulted a pay-per-view audience in May, 2014.
That’s when Broner said: “I’ve beaten Afri-cans and I just beat the bleep out of a Mexi-can” after a victory over Carlos Molina on the undercard of Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s decision over Marcos Maidana.
This time, Broner tried to offend a network audience.
“Anyone can get it,’’ he said to as the crowd tried to silence him with boos. “African’cans, Mexi-cans.’’
At least, nobody in the NBC audience had to pay to hear that one.
In the wake of a knockout loss to Jhonny Gonzalez, nothing has been easy for Los Angeles featherweight Abner Mares (29-1-1, 15 KOs), who won his third straight since the defeat, yet continued to look less than spectacular in a unanimous decision over Arturo Reyes (18-5, 5 KOs) of Mexico.
Mario Barrios (8-0, 4 KOs), a 6-foot featherweight from San Antonio, employed every inch of his advantage in height and reach against overmatched and overwhelmed Justin Lopez (5-3, 5 KOs), a fellow Texan who was down late in the second round and finished at 1:53 of the third.
With Robert Guerrero’s volatile dad, Ruben, in his corner, Mexican featherweight Jorge Lara (27-0-1, 19 KOs) was a buzz saw, walking through and over fellow Mexican Mario Macias (25-15, 13 KOs) for a first-round TKO
First, there were the lights. Then, there was the music. Then, there were Ladarius Miller and Ryan Picou, who were the first fighters to walk across a new stage, down ramps and into a ring beneath the brightest high def this side of Jerry Vision at the Dallas Cowboys home stadium.
Miller and Picou must have been tempted to look at themselves on screens that cost $3.5 million apiece.
But they couldn’t. They had to keep an eye on each other in the opening bout on Al Haymon’s first card in his new circuit, Premier Boxing Champions, at the MGM Grand.
Miller, a Mayweather-promoted junior-welterweight, and Picou battled through four crisp rounds Saturday night in the first non-televised bout on a card featuring Keith-Thurman and Adrien Broner-John Molina Jr. in NBC’s first primetime telecast of boxing since a Larry Holmes’ victory over Carl “The Truth’’ Williams in 1985.
With Floyd Mayweather Sr. in his corner, Miller (6-0, 1 KO) employed his superior reach and quick hands, scoring a four-round unanimous decision over Picou (2-7), who lost every round on each of the scorecards.
On the card’s second bout, lightweight Robert Easter (13-0, 10 KOs) of Toledo didn’t leave it up the judges. He knocked down Alejandro Rodriquez (22-16-1, 13 KOs), three times in the second for a TKO victory at 1:15 of the round.
