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President Martín Torrijos poses with Vicente "El Loco" Mosquera (left) and Roberto "La Araña" Vásquez, who respectively became the World Boxing Association's super featherweight and junior flyweight champions within 24 hours of each other. Photo courtesy of the Presidencia Panamanians back at the top of the boxing world by Eric Jackson It was boxing night at the cavernous unfinished Figali Convention Center, and the top event on the card, Panamanian Roberto "La Araña Vásquez versus Colombian Beibis Mendoza for the WBA junior flyweight belt, started fast and furious. It was a rumble rather than a dance in the first round, with Mendoza doing a rather orthodox bob and weave while the southpaw Vásquez circled to his left, moving up and down from a full crouch to knees slightly bent, flicking out jabs that seemed to invariably connect. But the Colombian apparently figured it out quickly, finding his range with a left hook and driving the Panamanian back onto the ropes. There, with Mendoza hammering away and Vásquez counterpunching just as rapidly, they exchanged combinations that in either instance might have floored a lesser boxer and which suggested that this fight might not go the distance. But if this was the course that the bout was fated to take, it must have been cause for concern in the Mendoza corner. The interim champ had about a decade more of experience in the professional ring than the challenger, but hardly any knockouts. On the other hand, the great majority of Vásquez's half as many victories were by knockout. I called the first round a draw. The Panamanian may have landed more blows with his flicking jabs, mainly to the body and one just before the end of the round squarely on his opponent's chin, but the Colombian appeared to have landed the harder punches and was the aggressor for most of the round. (Yes, I know. Most of the judges who score world championship bouts rarely call a round a draw while I frequently do, but in the end my scores usually show similar results as theirs.) The second round had Vásquez popping up and down even more, but on one of those down cycles Mendoza tagged him with a right to the right eye, causing it to swell. Give this round to the Colombian, and shift the cause for concern to the Panamanian corner. Then in the third, Vásquez kept up with his precise right jabs, mainly to the body, and busted Mendoza upside the head with a couple of hard lefts. This was the Panamanian's round. The fourth was an all-out slugfest in which both fighters got their good licks in, but I gave it to Mendoza on the strength of some early scores with the left hook and a two rights and a left combination later in the round. At the end of the second it was Araña's right eye that looked injured, but now his left eyebrow was beginning to swell to impressive proportions. The fifth I also gave to Mendoza. The challenger came out in this round as the aggressor, but he was a bit wild, throwing a number of punches that would have been the stuff of which knockouts are wrought had they only connected, which they didn't even come close to doing. Vásquez's jabs were still working though --- lucky for him, because Mendoza took the initiative toward the middle of the round and those jabs appeared to be the only thing holding him off. As it was, Mendoza not only got in some good body shots in the latter part of the round, but tagged Vásquez in the head four of five times before the bell rang. Now, in the sixth round, I wondered if La Araña had been blinded in one eye. He came out the aggressor, as in someone who has taken a beating and can only hope to win the fight via a knockout. Mendoza still has a head thanks to Vásquez missing his most powerful shots, but this was the Panamanian challenger's round. In the closing seconds a solid right sent the Colombian back onto the ropes, and though Mendoza made a show of bouncing back, he looked as if the blow had knocked the wind out of him. This round belonged to Vásquez. In round seven Mendoza went down, but on a slip rather than a knockout. This was as thrilling as boxing gets, with La Araña playing the aggressor, Beibis holding him off with some hard counterpunches, but still leaving the observer with an impression of the Panamanian's inflation and the Colombian's corresponding deflation. Round seven went to Vásquez and the question now was whether Mendoza had been worn down to the point that he was likely to be put down. When the bell next rang Mendoza came out to prove it wasn't so and we had another furious slugfest, with the aggressor role flowing back and forth but Mendoza scoring on flurries of left hooks and straight rights that in this reporter's opinion gave him round eight. At the end of this asalto, however, Vásquez looked battered --- two black eyes, the left one swollen to about the size of half a Boquete orange, and his nose looking bashed to one side --- but not particularly weary. Mendoza didn't look nearly as beaten up as his opponent but seemed exhausted. More ominously for his corner, the punches with which I figured that he won the round didn't seem to affect his opponent. These impressions must have been shared in the Vásquez corner, because in the ninth Araña let his guard down and just pounded on Mendoza. The Colombian fought back, but now it seemed that every ounce of his waning energy was dedicated to defending himself so that he could go the distance and take his chances with the judges in what must have still been a closely scored fight. That was not to be, however. In the tenth round, with his face looking more or less rearranged, Vásquez shrugged off Mendoza's accurate but weakened combinations and started to beat a rhythm on the Colombian's body. A hard left seemed to take the stuffing out of Mendoza, and the following right to the head put him on the canvass for five seconds and the remaining three of the mandatory eight count. Not long afterwards, with more than a minute remaining in the round, Vásquez crumpled Mendoza with a body shot and knocked him off his feet with an uppercut. This time the Colombian didn't get up. Thus went Panama's thrilling reentry into the ranks of countries with world champions. It was a classic, but if La Araña's future at the top holds the promise of more fights like this it's likely to be the curse of being punch drunk by age 40. The young man surely can take a punch, but let's hope that in his upcoming defense and what Panamanian fight fans hope will be a serious quest to unify the title in his classification, he doesn't have to. The most likely route to Vásquez becoming undisputed king of the junior flyweights would be via Asia, as most of the WBA's top contenders are from there and the purses that a boxer can command in Tokyo or Manila are far larger than those that are earned in Panama. Because boxing is fragmented into the WBA, WBO and IBF --- the WBC having gone into bankruptcy after an American court intervened in a dispute over who should have been champion --- it will give the young fighter several steps before any unification bout, and time for a genuine champion to blossom into a great champion, it that is to be his fate. And the following night... Alas, this fight was in New York and at the time this reporter was at the Golden Gloves in Panama City. But less than 24 hours after Araña Vásquez won his belt, Panamanian super featherweight Vicente "El Loco" Mosquera got one of his own to match. In this case it was a unanimous 12-round decision over Thailand's Yodsanan Nanthachai, who hadn't been beaten in more than a decade and was heavily favored. In the course of the fight Mosquera knocked the champ down three times and in the end the judges didn't score it as remotely close. Now possessed of the WBA's belt, Mosquera now finds himself atop what may be boxing's most talented weight classification of the moment, the 130-pound category that includes the likes of Erik "El Terible" Morales and Manny Pacquiao. Several are the formidable obstacles between where he now is and undisputed status, but Mosquera won't look like the crazy one if anyone takes him lightly along the way.
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