Abregu Denies Dulorme Via Seventh-Round Knockout

by Eric Raskin

Thomas Dulorme - Photo Credit: Ed Mulholland

As 1940s and ’50s major league pitcher Preacher Roe once famously said (and as the film The Big Lebowski more famously adapted), “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.” Highly touted 22-year-old Puerto Rican welterweight prospect Thomas Dulorme stared down the bear on Saturday night in the form of Argentine bruiser Carlos Abregu. And, as happens sometimes when talented but inexperienced fighters are willing to step up and take risks, the bear ended up with a full belly.

Abregu (34-1, 28 KOs) scored a violent knockdown in the third round, then finished off Dulorme (16-1, 12 KOs) in the seventh with another knockdown that prompted the younger fighter’s corner to halt the bout. The end came at the 2:35 mark of round seven at Turning Stone Casino in Verona, New York.

The Dulorme bandwagon will empty quickly because of a single unexpected defeat; that’s the way things tend to go in sports these days. But it’s not necessarily a fair or even correct response. This fight didn’t expose Dulorme as a fraud. It merely exposed him as a fighter with a lot of room to improve, particularly defensively. And it happened because Abregu was a high hurdle for any developing fighter to clear, a heavy-handed, in-his-prime warrior who had only lost once in 34 previous pro bouts, against the excellent Timothy Bradley.

“We analyzed [Dulorme], and we saw that he was too young,” Abregu said afterward when asked how he scored the mild upset. “Maybe with time, he could be a great fighter.”

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Prospects and Power on Tap for Saturday’s Triple-Header

by Kieran Mulvaney

Timothy Bradley, Luis Carlos Abregu - Photo Credit: Will Hart

Following the “rock’em sock ‘em robots” performance for the ages by Brandon Rios and Mike Alvarado, and the technical precision and punching power of Nonito Donaire, HBO’s Boxing After Dark returns on Saturday with a triple header featuring some of the sport’s more promising prospects, as well as some contenders who have been knocking on the door and looking for a breakthrough.

Tomas Dulorme  (16-0, 12 KOs) v Luis Carlos Abregu (33-1, 27 KOs), welterweights

Puerto Rican Dulorme is widely regarded as one of the brightest prospects in boxing. He brings blinding fast hand speed with one-punch knockout power and a body attack that some have compared to that of countryman Miguel Cotto.  But he faces a big step up in class and experience when he takes on hard-hitting Argentine Abregu, whose only loss was a decision to then-junior welterweight titlist Timothy Bradley, and who has won four in a row since then. This will go a long way toward showing us whether Dulorme is the real deal.

Mauricio Herrera (18-2, 7 KOs) v Karim Mayfield (16-0-1, 10 KOs), junior welterweights

The last time we saw Herrera, he was in a fantastic action fight with Mike Alvarado that was a Fight of the Year candidate until Alvarado’s battle with Brandon Rios usurped all other contenders. Herrera came out on the losing end of that contest, but the bout went to the scorecards and the decision was close. He feels that level of experience and quality of opposition will prove the difference against the heralded but relatively untested Mayfield.

Miguel Vazquez (31-3, 13 KOs) v Marvin Quintero (25-3, 21 KOs), lightweights

Vazquez turned professional against a young fellow Mexican by the name of Saul Alvarez, and dropped a four-round split decision. Since then, his only defeats in 33 fights have been in a rematch to Alvarez, now a junior middleweight titlist, in which Vazquez went 10 pounds above his normal weight, and to Tim Bradley. He has held a lightweight title since August 2010 and was the first man to hang a loss on the record of Air Khan’s nemesis Breidis Prescott. Quintero has knockout power, but he can also be knocked out – all three of his losses have been by stoppage, two of them within the first two rounds. As a result, one way or the other, this could be an explosive start to the evening.

CompuBox Analysis: Vazquez vs. Quintero

On a night where contrasting styles are pitted against each other, the IBF lightweight title match between the defender Vazquez and the challenger Quintero is the most stark. Vazquez prefers to operate at long range while Quintero is at his best when he brawls. Vazquez is a right-handed stylist while Quintero is a southpaw stalker. At 5-10 with a 72-inch wingspan, Vazquez's body is built for speed while the squat 5-7 Quintero has a 65-inch reach made for the trenches.

The gulf between their approaches is as evident as those between red states and blue states. Which method will cause the other man's madness? Their CompuBox histories offer the following clues:

See more Compubox analysis of Miguel Vazquez vs. Marvin Quintero on HBO.com.