We’re through the prelims on tonight’s Rey Vargas vs O’Shaquie Foster card from San Antonio, with plenty more still to come!
Let’s run down the early results with some highlights, with Filipino Olympic star Eumir Marcial and the debuting David Whitmire among the winners.
Vargas vs Foster live coverage continues, click here!
Claudio Marrero TKO-5 Gonzalo Fuenzalida
Big respect to Chile’s Fuenzalida (12-2, 3 KO), who was taking a huge step up and trying his luck against the veteran Marrero (27-5, 19 KO), but Marrero just had too much skill and firepower.
Fuenzalida went down on a body shot in round three, went down again on a body shot in round four, and then was finished on — you guessed it! — a body shot in round five. Marrero is campaigning at lightweight now, and while he’s not likely to emerge as a serious contender at 135 given that he’s 33 and is past his best, he’s still hanging around and is a reliable guy for PBC undercards.
Eumir Marcial TKO-2 Ricardo Villalba
Marcial, who won bronze at the Tokyo Olympics for the Philippines, improves to 4-0 (2 KO) as a pro. He showed a good, snappy jab here, and some nice power to the body, too, looking like he might really be getting his feet under him as a pro. Defense still looks slightly leaky to me, and he has been in trouble in prior pro fights.
Marial is 27, there’s not forever for him to get going, and he’s a middleweight, so there will be punchers around him. But he is an interesting elder statesman/standout amateur sort of prospect. Villalba is now 20-8-1 (8 KO) and is now 1-5 fighting outside of Argentina.
Dainier Pero UD-4 Daniel Zavala
Zavala (2-2-2, 0 KO) is 32 and turned pro right about a year ago. He’s gone the full four-round distance in every fight he’s had. He’s not good, but he is tough, and he had the stones to get into the ring with a former Olympian he had zero business fighting.
The greater interest here, of course, is in Pero (3-0, 2 KO), a 23-year-old Cuban and former Olympian who never seemed to push beyond 70 percent speed in this fight, and probably hovered closer to 50 percent.
There are a lot of ways to take that, but it’s worth noting that he displayed zero desire to finish a very finish-able opponent. Pero going a full four here is not good; it may not be a genuine concern, but in no way is it good. The idea that he “got rounds” doesn’t even work here. He could have gone for a finish in the fourth.
Listen, maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s something we look back on someday as an early sign that Pero just didn’t have real professional instinct and prospects. Better amateurs than him weren’t quite cut out for the pro ranks at a high level.
David Whitmire TKO-1 Keith Foreman
Pro debut for Whitmire, a 17-year-old from Washington, DC. He was presented as a “junior middleweight” but he’s a welterweight; both these guys weighed in 149 or less, nowhere near the 154 limit, and when fighters weigh in like that it’s just “division below but a couple extra” on the contract.
Anyway, not much to learn here. The 28-year-old Foreman (0-1) actually turned pro last September in Hidalgo, Tex., and was stopped in two by Alexis Balderas, who is not a blue chip prospect, but that result was overturned by the Texas commission two months later. Foreman did come here to fight, it’s just that so did Whitmire, and Whitmire is a lot better.