Lucian Bute (27-0, 22 KO) eased past a tough Jesse Brinkley (35-6, 22 KO) in Montreal, winning by ninth-round stoppage to retain his IBF super middleweight strap.
Brinkley simply wasn’t in the same league as Bute, who dominated the early rounds before knocking the American down with a body shot in the fifth. If Brinkley hadn’t spat out his mouthpiece to gain much needed recovery time, Bute would have probably finished him off right there. The fight went on more of the same, with Bute flooring Brinkley once in the eighth, and again in the ninth.
This is not a massive win for Bute by any stretch of the imagination, but he won, and can look forward to big fights in 2011. Rumours suggest that Kelly Pavlik will be next up for Bute, which is a perfect style match-up for the Montreal-based fighter.
On the stacked undercard, Adrian Diaconu outpointed Omar Sheika, while Benoit Gaudet and Ionut Dan Ion recorded stoppage victories.
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Antonio Tarver (28-6, 19 KO) was unimpressive in his heavyweight debut, outpointing Nagy Aguilera (16-5, 11 KO) over ten rounds via scores of 98-92 across the board. The Boxing Tribune scored the fight slightly closer at 97-93.
“Magic Man” was sluggish early on, showing signs of ring rust since his last fight was in May 2009, but Aguilera didn’t press enough to make the most of the lack of ring action that Tarver had gotten over the past twelve months. In the middle rounds, Tarver came into his element, outboxing Aguilera and landing good power punches. But he didn’t hurt Aguilera once in the fight, which makes me question whether we should scrap the idea of Tarver as a heavyweight contender. Simply put, he’s easy meat for the top 3.
On the undercard, Shawn Porter (17-0, 13 KO) impressed in his ninth round stoppage win over Hector Munoz.
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