GLENDALE, Arizona – Jaime Munguia has navigated narrow bouts before, sweating out scorecards and fretting in the center of the ring waiting to see if the referee will raise his hand.
As Friday’s super middleweight fight with Canada’s Erik Bazinyan started to take on the form of those others, Munguia flipped the script by ripping his fists toward his opponent.
Thanks to that extended barrage of blows that sent Bazinyan reeling from one side of the ring to the other, Munguia eliminated any of that past tension and set forth on a new segment of his career by knocking out Bazinyan 2 minutes and 36 seconds into the 10th round.
“It was a fight I had to dig in to win. I had to be smart and break him down,” Munguia said. “In the 10th, I came out with everything.”
Returning from an action-fight defeat on Cinco de Mayo weekend against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, the 27-year-old Munguia (44-1, 35 KOs) made a power move toward free agency after fighting this bout under the Top Rank banner following an extended run from his time as a junior middleweight titleholder to the Canelo setback.
“He’s going to make the decision,” Munguia’s Mexican promoter Fernando Beltran told BoxingScene minutes after the bout’s completion.
Top Rank President Todd duBoef, whose company has expressed interest and plans for retaining Munguia, said he was impressed with both the enthusiasm of the 6,000-plus fans at Desert Diamond Arena and the way Munguia answered the challenge of Bazinyan (32-1-1).
“I thought there were a couple rounds he fought brilliantly, and a couple rounds he let [Bazinyan] dictate the pace,” duBoef said. “And that’s all part of this next chapter for him. It’s a comeback. Like the ebb and the flow of the fight … when he decided, ‘I’m going to motherfucking press it,’ he pulled it out. He proved he’s a guy who can finish, and always photogenic.”
Munguia laid the heavier leather on Bazinyan through three rounds, starting swelling under the Canadian’s left eye in the third and pressing the action as Bazinyan worked for opportunities to counter.
Munguia seemed willing to accept those punches as petty inconveniences to the more disabling heavier blows he was seeking to land. His continued steps forward in search of that damage brought the same kind of entertainment he created in the Alvarez loss to this evening.
But as Bazinyan’s counterpunching gave Munguia some problems in the fourth and fifth rounds, the bout seemed to turn.
“I was feeling very comfortable and felt good – he was frustrated,” Bazinyan said. “He wasn’t comfortable with my counterpunches.”
Munguia tended to body work in the sixth, and then rocked Bazinyan back to Munguia’s corner with an extended combination that featured hard right hands.
But Bazinyan answered the pain, banging his gloves together and backing up Munguia with a right hand to the face.
New Munguia trainer Erik Morales admitted to duBoef that he was influenced by his own fighting days – “the judges like me” – in instructing Munguia to take it easy in the ninth round and go all out in the 10th.
The strategy was sublime, showing Munguia as a battering force capable of destructing this top-five super middleweight contender and moving his career forward as top-ranked contenders such as Top Rank’s Christian Mbilli, along with Diego Pacheco and recent fellow Alvarez foes Caleb Plant and Edgar Berlanga, await.
“This was a great experience … [those contenders] are capable of making great wars, too,” Munguia said.