Amanda Serrano put the perfect punctuation mark on an excellent performance Saturday in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the country of her birth.
Serrano, the 126-pound champion and resident of Brooklyn, had outclassed Daniela Bermudez for eight-plus rounds before ending the fight with two body shots in the ninth of a scheduled 10 rounds.
Bermudez moved up from 122 pounds for the fight, which raised questions about whether the Argentine could withstand Serrano’s power.
However, for most of the fight, that wasn’t the primary issue for her. Her biggest problem was the superior skill level of Serrano, which allowed the seven-division titleholder to outclass her challenger from beginning to end.
Bermudez (29-4-3, 10 KOs) was typically aggressive, stalking Serrano for much of the fight. And she landed clean shots here and there. However, she simply wasn’t able to box effectively enough to win rounds against one of the best fighters in the world.
Serrano (40-1-1, 30 KOs) outboxed Bermudez from distance when she chose to and got the better of inside exchanges when she had to, which made the fight easy to score.
Serrano was on her way to a wide decision victory, as she won every round on all three cards through eight rounds. Then came a perfect left hook to the body, followed by a right to the gut, which forced Bermudez to take a knee.
The challenger knew immediately she couldn’t continue, shaking her head to her cornermen and spitting out her mouthpiece. The official time of the stoppage was 1:33 of Round 9.
“I knew I was going to be able to walk her down,” Serrano said. “I knew that I was a lot bigger than her, that I had a lot more power than her. I knew it was going to come. I was listening to my corner. They told me to box, to put on a show in front of my island. So that’s what I did.
“And the knockout came in the ninth, which shows I have power until the very end.”
Serrano, who was making the first defense of the WBC and WBO titles she won by outpointing Heather Hardy in September 2019, already is one of the most-accomplished boxers in history.
But she wants more. She wouldn’t say specifically who she’d like to fight but she made her objective clear.
“I want to become undisputed, I want to be the first undisputed champion coming out of my beautiful island of Puerto Rico,” she said. “So I definitely might go IBF, WBA. Nothing against any champion. I want those belts. And if they want to become undisputed champion they have to come through me too. We need each other.”
That could result in a showdown with either Sarah Mahfoud or Jelena Mrdjenovich, who hold the IBF and WBA titles, respectively.
