Leo angling for title shot after defending continental belt
Round by round, the fight was competitive.
Add them up, not so much.
Albuquerque native Angelo Leo, tattooing Eduardo Baez’s midsection and landing hard right hands over Baez’s jab, defeated the Mexicali, Baja California fighter by unanimous decision on Wednesday in the main event of a pro boxing card in Plant City, Florida.
The judges’ scores: 97-93, 98-92 and 98-92.
With the victory, Leo retained the WBA Continental North America featherweight title he’d won in his previous bout.
Continental titles are fine, but Leo wants more. The former WBO super bantamweight (122-pound) champion is looking for a world title shot at featherweight (126).
Former WBA welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi, a commentator on Wednesday’s streaming of the ProBox card, believes that featherweight title shot might not be far away.
“He’s a handful,” Malignaggi said of Leo (24-1, 11 knockouts) after Wednesday’s bout. “… He’s gonna be a handful for any world champion right now.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in a big, big fight at any point this year.”
Baez (23-6-2, nine KOs) won the first round (but only the first round) on the Journal’s scorecard, which read 99-91.
From the second round through the 10th, it was Leo landing the more telling shots — thudding body punches, the landings occasionally audible on the ProBox stream of the bout — and clean shots to the head.
Baez landed some hard shots as well, though fewer and with less force than Leo’s.
Leo never put the strongchinned Baez on the canvas or had him in serious trouble; the Mexicali, Baja California fighter has been stopped short of the distance just once, by then-WBO featherweight champion, now WBO super featherweight champion Emanuel Navarrete.
MOREU/TCL: On Wednesday in Philadelpia, Albuquerque’s Sharahya Moreu split two rounds against a former world champion in helping her Philadelphia Smoke defeat the LA Elite in a Team Combat League match.
Moreu, 2-0 as a professional with one knockout, was facing Argentina’s Erica Anabella Farias, a seasoned pro with a 27-8 pro record and 10 KOs. Farias has held the WBC lightweight and junior welterweight titles, successfully defending each of those belts several times.
Now 39, Farias entered Wednesday’s TCL card having lost six of her last seven bouts. But three of those losses came in world title fights against champions Jessica McCaskill and Mikaela Mayer.
GOLDEN GLOVES: Saturday’s Colorado-New Mexico Golden Gloves regional tournament in Longmont, Colorado, won’t take long to conduct.
Only six bouts are scheduled, with two New Mexico boxers and five Colorado fighters advancing unopposed to Golden Gloves nationals (May 13-18 in Detroit).
Among the bouts scheduled to be contested on Saturday, a men’s 125-pound match between Albuquerque’s Yoruba Moreu Jr. and Colorado’s Mariano Martin.
Moreu defeated Martin by unanimous decision last month at the USA Boxing National Open at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Moreu went on to the 125-pound final before losing to Olympic Trials champion Jordan Fuentes.
Two National Open champions from New Mexico will advance unopposed to nationals, though one of them — 146-pounder Ariana
Carrasco — would have fought for Colorado on Saturday had there been a New Mexico opponent.
Carrasco, a Las Cruces native, fights for the U.S. Army boxing team based in Fort Carson outside Colorado Springs. She’ll advance to GG nationals.
Albuquerque’s Leroy Clark, the National Open super heavyweight champion (203 pounds-plus), is unopposed at GG regionals and will advance.
New Mexico 112-pounder Jimmie Perez also is unopposed and will advance.
New Mexico boxers scheduled to compete on Saturday, other than Moreu, are:
■ Trevion Boyd, 132 pounds., vs. Colorado’s Adan Villa;
■ Devon Garcia, 147, vs. Colorado’s Prakasa Sunawar;
■ Ruben Farfan, 156, vs. Colorado’s Brandon Lanza;
■ Kevin Whitaker, 165, vs. Colorado’s Francisco Hernandez;
■ Alvaro Garcia, 176, vs. Colorado’s Quais Alizada.