Molina And De La Torre BOTH Crash Through The Ropes As Part Of Ring Collapses!
In a fight that flew almost entirely under the radar, long-time heavyweight contender Eric Molina scored a second-round KO over journeyman Mexican fighter Alejandro de la Torre in Matamoros, Mexico at the weekend. The fight took place on August 28 and has had very little coverage. And while the fight was no big event, instead a return to action, keep-busy affair for 39 year old Molina, who was coming back from a stoppage loss to Fabio Wardley in Gibraltar – what took place was wild.
In the second round, with Molina being bulled into a corner, the entire corner post collapsed, with the ropes rendered useless. Both men had nowhere to go other than to go crashing through what was left of that section of the ring and onto the table that was at the ringside.
“Landing on that table saved my ass,” Molina told this writer. “That saved me from injury for sure. It could have been a lot worse. Thankfully neither of us was injured. It was crazy down there in Mexico! Something just snapped in the ring and the pole gave out.”
Molina went down hard, landing on his back in a not too dissimilar manner to when Bernard Hopkins was knocked out of the ring in his losing fight with Joe Smith Jr. But unlike Hopkins, Molina was able, somehow, to carry on with the fight – but not until after a TWO-HOUR delay. When action did resume, Molina, no doubt angry, wasted no time in ending matters, his right hand dropping 44 year old La Torre flat on his back, totally out.
But how badly Molina, in fact both men, could have been hurt during the fall! We have seen fighters fall out of the ring, or get pushed out of the ring, but never have we quite seen a quarter of the ring collapse the way this one did. What the local commission will have to say, or do, about this turn of events we can only guess. Embarrassing is not the word.
As for the particulars, Molina is now 28-7(20). La Torre, who was in poor physical shape, falls to 2-11 with 2 KO’s. Molina was kind enough to share with this site how he will likely take another stay-busy fight in October in Costa Rica, and that he has been offered a fight with Sergey Kuzmin in Russia in November.