Round Up: Rios Wins the Lightweight Title

Fight:   Champion MIGUEL ACOSTA, 28-8-2, 22 KOs, Caracas, Venezuela vs. BRANDON RIOS, 26-0-1, 18 KOs, Oxnard, Ca.

Division: WBA Lightweight Championship – 12 Rounds

Result: Rios Wins by KO

Detail:  The lightweight division is chockfull of talent, and these were two of its best. It was a highly entertaining, action-packed fight that pitted Acosta’s fleet feet and blinding hand speed against Rios’s punching power and relentless pressure. Rios’s raging bull style won–big.

For the first four rounds Acosta dominated Rios, catching the 24-year-old with right hands and using the ring to his advantage. In the fourth, Rios looked beat; he’d stopped coming forward and was eating shots. It was something of a miracle that he survived. Who knew Rios had such a strong chin.

The story began to change course in the fifth, however. Though Rios was still getting caught with clean blows, he was landing more hard punches of his own. Rios stalked Acosta ceaselessly; and in the sixth his persistence paid off, when he caught Acosta with a left that knocked him down and opened a cut under his right eye.

A bloodied Acosta battled on, and in the seventh it became a test of wills, as each man fired away at the other. After the eighth, Rios’s trainer, former champ Robert Garcia, implored his pupil to throw three-punch combinations. Rios answered by pinning Acosta to the ropes and pounding away for most of the ninth. Head shots were followed by body shots in a painful display that wore Acosta down to a winded, battered nub.   

In the tenth, Rios finished it in emphatic fashion by trapping Acosta in the corner and knocking the champ out cold. A new king of the lightweight division was crowned–and a new star was born.