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Samuel Peter At The Inaugural Brawl; Scores Knockout
by
Buster Paris
1/23 - The usual pre fight hype is being shown for the Samuel Peter vs Yanqui Diaz bout. At this point I’m uninspired, I’m only tuning in for the Mayweather fight. I’ll watch these guys, but with my feet up and pen on my desk.
Then they showed this clip of Peter launching a mammoth left hook at Jeremy Williams that knocked him down like a tree struck by lightning. I sat up, took my feet down (which made my wife happy) and picked up my pen. Larry Merchant introduced tonight’s fights as the inaugural brawl. Yes, HBO’s first fights of 2005.
The talk for this fight is that Samuel at 21 wins and 0 losses is the harder and stronger puncher and that Yanqui 13 wins and 1 loss has the better boxing skills.
Round one starts and Sam is all over Yanqui who at one point has to take a knee, which was a very smart maneuver as Peter was completely overwhelming him. You could tell that Diaz wasn’t even sure where Samuel was.
With each hammering hook the crowd in unison moans “ooow” and “awww” even my cat had to look away from the screen and nurse his own ribs. They were those kind of punches.
Round two looks more promising for Diaz, he’s winning the round. His boxing skills are finally showing up and he’s moving and scoring, then in the last seconds Peter pops out a double jab followed by a huge right body shot and Yanqui goes down hard, but Sam hits him again anyway. The ref takes 2 points away for hitting him while he was down.
Round three starts with a weird mood in the ring that carried over from the clumsy ending of round two. Nothing of note really happened.
Round four continues with the establishing theme of Sam being the aggressor and Yanqui on the verge of demonstrating his skill. The round did have this great moment when Peter got Diaz in a corner and simply lined him up with one hand and went to town on him with the other. Sam knocked Yanqui down twice in the last thirty seconds.
Round five started with Diaz looking tired and Peter lands an almost perfect body shot, but does hit him on the way down again. It’s the 5th knockdown of the fight, Diaz gets up and Samuel let’s lose a flurry of hard and heavy unanswered punches which causes the ref to stop the fight.
Peter landed 33% of his punches. He threw 151 power punches and landed 38% of them.
Samuel Peter now has 22 wins and 0 losses. 19 of those wins came by way of knockout.
Is he the up and coming contender in the open heavyweight division? I’m not sure.
There are a lot of us who want the next great heavyweight champ to show up and save us and at this moment it’s not Samuel Peter. His victory tonight has put him on our radar screen, but he’s still a little awkward and unpolished. At some points during the match he seemed to be only looking for that one big punch and at other points he put punches together rather nicely and fought smart.
Samuel Peter has an incredible left hook and showed us that he actually has a nice right as well. He’s 24 years old and could possibly be a very strong force to be reckoned with in the heavyweight division.
At this point in time there is absolutely no way he is ready for the likes of a James “Light Out” Toney or a Chris Byrd. He needs more fights. Here’s my advice:
Two to three more fights with opponents of the same caliber of Yanqui Diaz and then three to five more fights with some of the top 10 ranked opponents, then a match with David Tua or Mike Tyson to get that real credibility and then a shot at the big enchilada, the Heavyweight Championship of the world.
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