Peter Brawls His Way To a Heavyweight Title

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Of all the places in the world for a heavyweight title fight to take place in, Cancun, Mexico was likely not high on the list.

However it was in Cancun Saturday night that Samuel Peter became the first Nigerian to hold a heavyweight boxing title with his sixth round TKO of Oleg Maskaev for the WBC heavyweight championship.

The sixth round came on the heels of Peter beginning to run away with the fight on scorecards, but decided to end it when he saw his opportunity in the final minute of the round. Peter battered Maskaev almost around every corner of the ring before referee Lupe Garcia put an end to it with four seconds remaining in the round.

“That’s a real heavyweight knockout,” Emmanuel Steward said after the bout.

The fight came on the heels of the poor reaction that Wladimir Klitschko’s unification victory received a few weeks ago; likely this fight will be spoken of in a better light.

The fight itself was not the worst fight in the world and was better than I had expected it to be considering the styles of the two and the generally methodical pace of the heavyweight division these days. What these two fighters did do for six rounds was drop bombs whenever they could (Peter more than Maskaev) to try and match the excitement that Nate Campbell & Juan Diaz’s lightweight title match had provided earlier in the evening.

That excitement was almost eclipsed, as the third round of this fight should go down as one of the better rounds of heavyweight boxing in recent years. Both fighters slugged it out almost from bell to bell with the round being a tail of halves: for the first minute and thirty seconds, Peter dominated the Ukranian with a flurry of power punches to the face that had Maskaev on the rund, then in the final minute and a half, Maskaev came back and nearly ended Peter before the bell rang ending the round.

The third turned out to be Maskaev’s best round of the fight as his hesitant yet methodical approach—sizing up his opponent and waiting for a weakness to show—did not match with Peter’s more efficient approach and that may have been the factor in the end.

The win gives Peter the WBC title and cause for a rematch with current IBF and WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, the only man to defeat Peter in his career. The two met in Atlantic City around 2 ½ years ago with Klitschko walking away with a unanimous decision victory.

With Peter’s win, and a potential rematch with Klitschko, the unifying of the heavyweight title just took a big step towards becoming a real reality.