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A career that once seemed so promising and had some strong early results may have come to an end tonight. Yuriorkis Gamboa quit on his stool after seven rounds of largely one-way action tonight, giving veteran Robinson Castellanos another big win.
Gamboa (26-2, 17 KO) was down in the third and fourth rounds of this fight, and just never found much success at all. Fighting a fellow natural featherweight at lightweight, Gamboa didn’t have some of the physical issues in the matchup on paper that he can against natural lightweights, but he was overpowered and seemed to have lost much of the speed that once made him such an effective professional fighter, and won him a gold medal in the Olympics.
Now 35, Gamboa’s career has been stalled out for about half a decade, and his signing with Golden Boy seems to have simply come too late to help him get back in the game for real. Against Castellanos (24-12, 14 KO), he just looked tired and out of his depth. If this is the end for Gamboa — and even if it’s not, it’s hard to imagine him having much left to turn it around — then we’re going to wonder “what if” for a really long time.
Puerto Rico’s Jesus M. Rojas scored an impressive stoppage in a WBA featherweight eliminator, battering previously-unbeaten Abraham Lopez in a fight that wound up being fairly one-sided.
Rojas (25-1-2, 18 KO) dropped Lopez in the second, fourth, and eighth rounds, stopping him in the eighth. Rojas, 30, simply overpowered the 29-year-old Lopez (22-1-1, 15 KO), who looked flat-out overmatched in this one. Rojas showed no respect for Lopez’s power, baited him into an inside firefight, and beat him down over the course of the fight. It was a really strong showing.
2012 Olympic bronze medalist Yamaguchi Falcão of Brazil won handily over 10 rounds against Morgan Fitch, taking Fitch’s “0” in the middleweight showcase bout. Falcão (13-0, 6 KO) outlanded Fitch about 2-to-1, and won on scores of 100-90 across the board. Fitch falls to 18-1-1 (8 KO).