Vásquez bests Beleño,
but that’s not
the night’s most
impressive victory
by Eric Jackson
Fight
Night at the Figali Convention Center, October 1: it was a full card with a bunch of regional
championships, topped by a junior flyweight bout wherein Panama’s Roberto
“La Araña” Vásquez defended his WBO Fedelatin and WBA Latino belts against
Venezuelan Freddy "El Bagresito" Beleño.
Maybe it was too full of a card.
It was past midnight when the main bout got going. Earlier in the night,
Jean Piero Pérez took a decision over Ezquiel Asprilla, Whyber García
bested José Pablo Estrella in a split decision, Carlos Melo beat Orlando
Fidel Ordóñez on points and Jorge Noriega humiliated Wilmer Gómez, showing
mercy on the fans with a fourth round knockout.
After all that came down, the night’s
best performance came in the form of Vicente “El Loco” Mosquera’s
impressive win over Colombian Edison García, by TKO when the latter
couldn’t come out for the ninth round. Then the veteran Carlos "Púas"
Murillo made his successful return to the ring with a close but unanimous
decision over Johnatan Aguilar in a pretty good bout.
La Araña is the talk of Panamanian boxing
these days. Were it not for a silly argument about officiating before his
last bout, wherein the Vásquez camp conceded the opponents demand for a
switch, only to offend one of the sanctioning organizations and thus lose
his promised title shot despite an impressive victory, this would have
been the time for him to fight for the junior flyweight (108-pound) world
championship. Or one of them, anyway.
Going into this fight Vásquez was ranked
as the number two challenger (that is, number three in the line headed by
the champ) by the WBO and the bankrupt WBC, who recognize Nelson Dieppa
and Jorge Arce respectively as their champions, third challenger by the
WBA (whose co-champions are Rosendo Alvarez and Beibis Mendoza) and tenth
challenger by the convicted racketeering organization IBF (which calls
Víctor Burgos the champ). Such is the disarray of professional boxing
these days. More impartially, Ring Magazine and the Fight News both call
Alvarez the champion of that weight classification, with the former rating
Vásquez ninth and the latter tenth.
It seems, then, that Panama has in the
spiderman a good prospect to join our extensive pantheon of world champion
pugilists.
The thing is, on this particular night he
won his fight rather handily, but he may not have shown the skills needed
to get to the top.
With but one or two exceptions, Vásquez
won every round. He set the tone in the second, when he knocked Beleño to
the canvas. The problem was, the latter also managed to bash the hometown
hero upside the head much more frequently than one would expect would be
the case with a world champion fighter --- and Beleño doesn’t show on
anyone’s world rankings.
Some of the shots that La Araña took were
pretty hard. So can we say that our nation’s principal championship hope
of the moment showed deficient defensive skills on this night, or should
we look at it more positively and say that he proved that his jaw is not
made of glass? Probably a little bit of both.
In any case, the bout went the 12-round
distance, with two judges scoring it 118-112 and the third 118-110, all in
favor of Vásquez. They had it about right.
As noted before, Mosquera stole the show
when it came to showing off boxing skills, but maybe the most important
story of the night wasn’t in the ring.
The latter bouts of this fight night were
broadcast on TVN, with sports journalist Héctor Villarreal back at his old
network after a stint with public TV and before that a bout with
underemployment and poverty. It has been some years since the national
boxing scene has been televised, and this has got to be seen as a victory
for the sport.
