Boxing Results: Xander Zayas Overwhelms Slawa Spomer With Relentless Attack, Securing TKO Victory

Xander Zayas (21-0, 13 KOs) stopped Slawa Spomer (20-1, 11 KOs) in the ninth round of a non-competitive fight at junior middleweight on Friday night in a Top Rank-promoted event at the Madison Square Garden Theater in New York City.

Zayas, 22, used his defense to hit and not get hit all night, making the light-hitting, wilde-punching Spomer miss with mostly everything he threw. It was surprising how bad Spomer was tonight, as he didn’t have the kind of talent to take it an entertaining fight.

Body Blows Tell the Tale

In the ninth, Zayas landed a left to the midsection of Spomer that hurt him. He then tagged him with several more body shots, causing the fight to be stopped. Spomer wasn’t happy about the stoppage, but he wasn’t throwing anything back to make the referee to allow him to stay in there.

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The time of the stoppage was at 2:01 of the ninth. Given how one-sided the rounds were, the contest should have been halted by the seventh because Spomer was taking a beating.

Early on, Spomer connected occasionally with his looping shots, but by the seventh, he was tired from Xander’s body and headshots. Zayas’s frequent low blows didn’t help. The referee took a hands-off approach of policing the shots below the belt that Zayas was connecting with. There should have been a point deduction.

“I knew from the first round that he would wear down little by little. In the third or fourth, I hurt him, and he got me with a good shot,” said Zayas. “But I went to my corner, and they told me to keep fighting intelligently because we had 10 rounds to wear him down. And by the eighth and ninth, they told me, let’s step it up with the combinations, and we started to land with more power to get the finish.”

This was perfect matchmaking by Top Rank, choosing #11 WBO contender Slawa Spomer as Zayas’ opponent rather than a higher-ranked fighter, like# 2 Charles Conwell, Serhii Bohachuk, or Israil Madimov. I think he would have lost to all those guys tonight, but that would defeat the purpose. The point to build a pseudo star and the way to do that is to find a lower-ranked contender with no power or hand speed. Hence, Spomer was chosen as Xander’s opponent rather than Madrimov, Conwell, or Bohachuk.

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