Emanuel Navarrete broke down and stopped Uriel Lopez in the sixth round Saturday at the TV Azteca Studios in Mexico City.
It takes a while for Emanuel Navarrete to get rolling. Once he does, though, you don’t want to be the guy standing across from him.
Navarrete did what everyone expected him to do on Saturday night at the TV Azteca Studios in Mexico City, which was to stop overmatched Uriel Lopez in a non-title fight with no spectators because of the coronavirus. And the long, powerful 122-pound champion did it in brutal fashion.
The Mexico City native unleashed a torrent of hard, damaging shots in the sixth and final round, putting a badly beaten Lopez down on all fours and giving the referee no choice but to stop the onslaught. The official time was 2:22.
Navarette (32-1, 27 KOs) has now scored six consecutive knockouts since he outpointed Isaac Dogboe to win his title in December 2018.
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Lopez (13-14-1, 6 KOs) was game until the moment the fight ended. The journeyman, also from Mexico City, was competitive in the first few rounds as the much taller Navarette was finding his rhythm and range.
He found both by the third round, when he shifted into a higher gear, picked up his punch rate and began to beat the stuffing out of his poor opponent.
Navarrete put Lopez down with a body shot a little over a minute into Round 5 and then, the second Lopez got to his feet, pounded him from every conceivable angle. To his credit, Lopez showed impressive resilience … until Round 6, that is.
It seemed as if Navarrete had an appointment for which he was late in the final round. He wanted out of there. And did what it took to get that accomplished, firing shots to the body and head at a rate that broke Lopez down. The big blow was a straight right to the stomach, followed by a left hook.
Lopez fell to his hands and knees, with his head hanging. He was done.
“I have the utmost respect for Uriel Lopez. He put forth a courageous effort, but I was coming to win by knockout,” Navarrete said.
What’s next for the winner?
Well, don’t expect him to rest for long. The victory over Loppez was Navarrete’s sixth fight in 13 months, which is unheard of for a titleholder. The man likes to keep busy.
The question is who will he face and at what weight. He has difficulty making 122 but said he’d like to unify the titles before moving up to 126. That means he’d have to fight either Murodjon Akhmadaliev, who holds two belts after outpointing Daniel Roman in January, or Rey Vargas. Akhmadaliev’s promoter, Eddie Hearn, has expressed interest in a showdown.
“I want to unify titles,” he said, “but if nobody accepts my challenge, I’ll move up to featherweight.”
The elite 126-pounders are on notice.
In preliminaries, Edwin Palomares (13-3-1, 4 KOs) scored an upset by stopping Carlos Ornelas (25-3, 14 KOs) in the fifth round of a scheduled 10-round junior lightweight bout.
Palomares overwhelmed Ornelas with relentless aggression, barely giving his more-experienced opponent room to breathe. In the final round, Palomares landed what seemed to be a grazing body shot but Ornelas took a knee. At that moment, one of Ornelas’ cornerman signaled that his fighter had taken enough and the fight was stopped.
Palomares literally pounded the fight out of Ornelas to record the biggest victory of the 24-year-old Mexico City resident’s career.
Also, Sergio Sanchez (15-1, 9 KOs) gave an impressive performance against Alan Pina (8-3, 5 KOs) in a scheduled eight-round featherweight bout, stopping Pina with one punch in the opening seconds of Round 3.
Sanchez put Pina down with a left hook in the final moments of Round 1 and landed a number of hard, accurate shots in Round 2, which was only a prelude of what was to come. Pina was moving forward when Sanchez landed a perfect left uppercut, rendering Pina unconscious the moment the punch landed.
Pina lay motionless on his back for several minutes but was able to get up. The official time was six seconds into the round.
And Armando Garcia (6-0, 3 KOs) survived a cut in the fourth round to outpoint Roberto Palomares (5-5-1, 1 KO) in a six-round junior bantamweight fight between Mexico City residents. The scores were 59-55, 59-55 and 59-56.
The card was the first in Mexico since the pandemic took hold.
