Former IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute stopped Andrea Di Luisa at 1:53 of round four of a scheduled 10?
Saturday night at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, former IBF super middleweight champion Lucian ?Le Tombeur? Bute (32-2, 25 KOs), from Laval, Quebec, Canada, by way of Pechea, Romania, returned to action after a 15-month layoff to TKO Andrea Di Luisa (17-3, 13 KOs), from Viterbo, Lazio, Italy, at 1:53 of round four of a scheduled 10.
Fighting out of the blue corner in white trunks with red trim, Bute looked like the winner we knew and have since forgotten. With the losses to Carl Froch in 2012 and Jean Pascal in 2014 behind him, Bute, fighting out of the southpaw stance, moved well, firing off shots at odd angles, and more often than not made his opponent miss.
Di Luisa, fighting out of the red corner in black trunks trimmed with gold, had never fought outside of Italy. He?s a competent fighter, if not world-class. He walks straight in with no discernible head movement. He doesn?t bob and weave. He is considerably less athletic, less skilled, less talented than the former champion.
However well-intentioned, or bad intentioned, Di Luisa was no match for Bute. He caught him a few times, but was caught many times in return, until a left hook dropped Di Luisa hard in round four. He got to his feet, only to be met with a barrage of punches. The Italian?s corner threw in the towel, literally, and that was all she wrote.
Bute landed 64 of 158 punches thrown to Di Luisa?s 35 of 205.
The co-main event between unbeaten light heavyweights Eleider Alvarez (17-0, 10 KOs coming in), from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, by way of Apartado, Colombia, and Ranoni Prieto (24-0-3, 20 KOs), from Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, by way of Capiata, Paraguay, was the more interesting of the two bouts.
Fighting out of the blue corner in burgundy and gold trunks, Alvarez was the favorite fighting in front of his hometown fans. With the exception of a fight in a Monte Carlo and a fight in Chicago, all his fights have been in Canada, and all but three of the have been at the Bell Centre.
By contrast, Prieto, fighting out of the red corner in blue trunks with white trim, had only fought in Argentina and Paraguay. A self-taught fighter with virtually no amateur experience, Prieto put on an exceptionally good showing, especially in the early rounds.
With heavy hands and befuddling head movement, Prieto rocked Alvarez several times with a sledgehammer lead right. But he has no jab to speak of and as the rounds progressed, the better schooled Alvarez took control of the fight to cruise to a unanimous decision.
Kudos to both fighters, and to PBC on NBCSN, for fighting as if their their lives depended on it. The bout wasn?t, like Friday night?s war on Spike TV between Marco Huck and Krzysztof Glowacki, a candidate for fight of the year. But competitive fights are what this sport, what every sport, is about.
