As expected, the 24-year-old WBA interim super featherweight champion Chris Colbert (16-0, 6 KOs) retained his unbeaten record and title with a dominant 12 round unanimous decision over replacement opponent Tugstsogt “King Tug” Nyambayar (12-2, 9 KOs) in the main event on Showtime on Saturday night at the Dignity Health Park in Carson, California.
Featherweight Nyambayar, 29, took the fight on two weeks’ notice as a replacement for Yuriorkis Gamboa pulling out. King ug looked like he was too small to compete in the fight, and his lack of hand speed compounded his problems.
The fight was a one-sided affair with the much larger 5’8″ Colbert using his height, reach, and particularly his weight advantage to get the better of King Tug Nyambayer.
Colbert showed a nice jab tonight, but not much else besides that. With only a jab, Colbert will have a lot of problems with the best fighters in the 130-lb division.
The scores were 117-111, 118-110, 118-110. King Tug was too short, too light, and too slow for him to compete with Colbert. Where the 2012 Olympic silver medalist Nyambayer really messed up his chances of winning the fight was his anemic work rate.
It was surprising that King Tug didn’t throw more punches because he had a chance of winning if he’d let his hands go. He looked like he wasn’t capable of throwing a lot of punches.
He wasn’t active enough in each round in terms of his punch output for him to have a shot at winning the fight.
Final punch stats:
- Chris Colbert landed 218 of 662 for a 33% connect rate.
- Tugstsogt Nyambayar landed 78 of 332 shots for a 23% rate.
Overall, it wasn’t a great performance by Colbert. He showed an excellent jab and hand speed on his shots. Unfortunately, Colbert did little more than jab all night, and he looked reluctant to sit down on his shots.
The performance by Colbert showed how far away he is to the talented fighters at 130. He doesn’t have enough pop in his punches to beat the better fighters in the super featherweight division.
You’d have to favor these fighters to beat Colbert:
- Jamel Herring
- Shakur Stevenson
- Miguel Berchelt
- Oscar Valdez
- Shavkat Rakhimov
Colbert’s promoters need to decide what they want to do with him. As he showed tonight, he’s capable of beating featherweights. But I don’t think Colbert is ready to beat the elite-level fighters in the division.
It won’t be surprising if the fight with Yuriorkis Gamboa is rescheduled to give Colbert a sure thing win.
