Joe Smith Jr. worked on his technique in preparation for his meeting with Eleider Alvarez on Saturday night in the MGM Grand “bubble” in Las Vegas. And he took his time in the fight, focusing on volume punching to wear Alvarez down.
However, in the end, it was the one quality most associated with Smith that ended matters: power.
Smith dropped a weary Alvarez with a brutal straight right hand, followed by a left, early in the ninth round of a scheduled 12-round bout and the former 175-pound titleholder was unable to get up. Referee Tony Weeks stopped the fight 26 seconds into the round.
With the victory, Smith is expected to face the winner of the Maxim Vlasov-Umar Salamov fight for the vacant WBO light heavyweight title.
“I feel this one is a big one,” Smith said of the victory. “I really needed it. I wanted to prove I’m not just a knockout guy. I proved my boxing ability, too, and I showed that tonight.”
Smith (26-3, 21 KOs) more or less chopped down the 36-year-old Alvarez (25-2, 13 KOs), who couldn’t keep pace with his fresher, 30-year-old opponent.
Alvarez had his moments, including a few solid right hands that got Smith’s attention in the eighth round. However, by the ninth, Smith had pounded most of the fight out of the former champion. He was ripe for a knockout.
Smith then did what he does best, deliver a decisive blow.
“Coming into this camp, I knew I had to work on my boxing,” Smith said. “I wanted to be sharp, throw a lot of straight punches. I watched his fight with [Sergey] Kovalev, and Kovalev kind of set the way to beat him. So we watched that and worked off of it.
“I knew coming in today I had to box a little more because he’s got that great right hand. He caught me with it a couple times, but I can take a punch, too. Every time he hit me, I wanted to come and stop him in his tracks, and I did that. I stuck to my game plan, and it was a great fight.”
Smith made a name for himself in 2016, when he knocked out Andrzej Fonfara and Bernard Hopkins in succession. He had a bad stretch after that – losing to Sullivan Barrera and Dmitry Bivol for a title in a span of three fights – but he has now beaten Jesse Hart and Alvarez back to back.
As a result, the union worker from Long Island, New York, is once again in thick of the title picture.
In preliminarys, Rob Brant (26-2, 18 KOs) stopped Vitaliy Kopylenko (28-3, 16 KOs) in the fifth round of a scheduled 10-round middleweight fight.
Junior welterweight prospect Julian Rodriguez (20-0, 13 KOs) knocked out Anthony Laureano (13-1, 4 KOs) only 2:50 into their scheduled 10-round bout.
And the popular Clay Collard (9-2-3, 4 KOs) continued his winning streak, stopping Maurice Williams (7-2, 3 KOs) at 1:54 of the second round of a scheduled eight-round middleweight fight.