Jesus what a fight

If you missed the HBO Boxing After Dark card last night, people, take it from me - you got to see that replay. The Jason Litzau/Jose Hernandez featherweight bout is a serious candidate in Large's book for Fight of the Year.

I mean, what more do you need? You got a highly touted, hard-punching prospect, Litzau (pictured right), going up against a hard-nosed, Mexican-by-way-of-Chicago, former national Golden Gloves champ, Hernandez (and here's how off the radar he is - I scoured the web and did not find a single photo of the guy). You got Litzau bobbing and weaving and landing at will in the first until, WHAMBAM, right uppercut and overhand right catch him flush and he's on his knees with his mouth open trying to remember his name. With ten seconds to go in the round, it was a race to the finish line, as Hernandez jumped in and shoe-shined his ass and Litzau held on for dear life.

From there, the second phase of the fight began, the phase where Litzau bounced back from the first-round knockdown and looked every bit like the big-money-prospect he's been made out to be, loose, long-limbed, and dangerous. He moves beautifully, he throws from all angles, he throws punches in prodigious bunches. From the second to the seventh, Hernandez took a tremendous amount of punishment and got killed in the punchstat numbers. His face was swollen, his nose and eye were bleeding. In the seventh, Kellerman even mentioned that he thought a stoppage was imminent.

Litzau's corner, however, saw something else going on in there. In the breaks after the fifth, sixth AND seventh rounds, his handlers practically begged the kid to start boxing a little, to move to his right to avoid the Hernandez right that continued to pepper Litzau's right eye. The last thing his trainer said to Litzau before he sent him out for the eighth was, "You're winning this thing big, you've done plenty for this HBO crowd, don't stand and trade with this guy."

Suffice it to say, that advice fell on deaf ears. Litzau went into the round looking to mix it up and came out of it on his back. Hernandez, in a positively Gatti-esque performance, went for broke and found it, tattooing Litzau with a series of straight rights before connecting with a HUGE overhand right that rendered Litzau lifeless before he hit the canvas. Prohibitively ahead on all scorecards, The American Boy was down for the count.

A MAMMOTH No Mas props to Jose Hernandez. A lesser man would have lost heart in those middle rounds. This kid never stopped looking for his opening, never stopped believing he had the pop to end the thing, in spite of all those rapid-fire combinations he ate. Here's hoping the KO on an HBO card earns him some street cred and a big payday sometime soon. He earned it.

p.s. The main event was a one-round debacle. Willie Gibbs did not do his Philly roots proud, went in the ring wearing a purple/black fringed skirt-and-trunks abomination, through a few lazy, purposeless jabs, and then did the dance when Edison Miranda snapped his head with a straight right in the first. Goodnight Irene. Can't tell much about Miranda from that outing other than something we already knew - he can knock people out for reals.