Luis Alberto Lopez (30-2, 17 KOs) put on an impressive punching display to hold his grip on his IBF featherweight title with a dominant eighth-round TKO victory over his mandatory challenger Reiya Abe (25-4-1, 10 KOs) on Saturday night in Verona, New York.
Things off got off to a bad start for the challenger, Abe, when his right eye begin closing in the second round after the champion Lopez hit him with a left hand. The thumb portion of Lopez’s glove hit Abe in his right eye, causing it to start swelling shut immediately.
It appeared that once Abe had problems tracking the left-hand power shots from Lopez once his right eye began swelling shit. Interestingly, Lopez focused mostly on throwing to the body from until the seventh round.
With Abe only able to see partially out of his right eye, he was forced to constantly to keep Lopez from closing that injured eye entirely. What made matters worse for Abe was the ringside doctor checking on him in between rounds, sounding like he wanted to stop the fight after a moment’s notice.
Abe’s trainer was pressing on his wounded eye rather than using end swell, which Tim Bradley of ESPN felt was the wrong thing to do. Ultimately, it didn’t play a part in the fight’s ending. Lopez finished Abe with a flurry of punches in the eighth, and that was that.
Lopez Capitalizes on Opportunity
Lopez took advantage of Abe’s compromised vision by turning up the pressure in the seventh round, hitting the challenger with speedy combinations, focusing on volume rather than power.
Once Lopez stopped loading up on shots, that was the beginning of the end for Abe, as he was getting hit directly on his swollen eye a lot more than he had been in rounds three through six.
Lopez peppered Abe with punches in the seventh, forcing him on the defensive and unable to get any punches in between like he’d been doing. It was difficult to watch Abe get hammered unceasingly by Lopez the way he did, making it clear by the end of the round that the fight would soon be stopped.
At the end of the seventh, Abe’s nose was bleeding, and his right eye was almost completely swollen shut.
Referee Halts One-Sided Fight
By the eighth round, Lopez’s punishment of Abel was undeniable. When Abe came out for the eighth, he looked like he’d been hit by a street car, with his face swollen from the heavy shots he’d absorbed in the contest.
Lopez turned to the crowd at the start of the eighth and waved for them to begin cheering for him. At that point, Lopez drank in their applause and used it as motivation to go for the finish, charging forward and tagging Abe with shots that he couldn’t see coming.
The referee Mark Nelson, sending that Abe’s hopeless situation, stepped in and stopped the fight at the 39-secpind Mark, giving Lopez a TKO victory.