By Steven Cummings
IBF junior welterweight champion Richardson Hitchins (20-0, 8 KOs) punished George Kambosos Jr. (22-4, 10 KOs) for seven rounds with precise shots, mostly from distance, and closed the show in round eight with a brutal body shot. Kambosos Jr. got up at 10 but was in great pain and the fight was waved off. Official time of the stoppage was 2:33.
You can’t do much better for sticking to the game plan than Hitchins did, keeping Kambosos Jr. at distance and peppering him with left jabs and right hand power shots. Kambosos Jr. tried to get inside and fired off some good body shots but they were few and far between. Hitchins was like a metronome.
Kambosos Jr. was hurt by a body shot in the fifth and Hitchins jumped on him but wasn’t able to end the fight at that point. Still, it was just a matter of time.
The punch stat numbers were incredibly lopsided. Kambosos Jr. was marked up early and took repeated clean shots throughout the fight.
The end came when Hitchins buried a left hand in Kambosos Jr.’s right side and the pain was obvious. When he got up, he didn’t look like he was in any condition to survive the remaining 30 seconds.
There was incredible theater in the final round as Hitchins asked Kambosos Jr. in the middle of the ring if he still wanted more of this. Then he turned to Kambosos Jr.’s corner and told Sr. if he loved his son he would stop the fight. After the knockdown, Hitchins looked over again as he walked to the neutral corner and said that he had told them to stop it.
After the fight, with WBO 140-pound champion Teofimo Lopez in the ring, Richardson Hitchins called out Devin Haney. Lopez then said he would be agreeable to a unification match.
