With less than ten seconds remaining in the fight, Dmitry Bivol landed a right hand and a left hook counter, then did it once more to send Joe Smith Jr. reeling into a corner. For twelve rounds he had landed as clean and as frequently as he’d wanted to but couldn’t hurt his opponent, and now he’d had his chance to get the knockout.
“Show me something, Joe! Show me something, Joe!,” referee Gary Rosato said. The bell sounded at just about the moment when Rosato would have had to wave his hands, and if there had been another couple of seconds we may have gotten a stoppage at around the same time as Chavez-Taylor I.
Of course this fight was far less dramatic than that night in 1990, and Bivol rightfully earned the unanimous decision on Saturday night, with two judges scoring it 119-109 and the third at 118-110, allowing Bivol to retain the WBA light heavyweight title at Turning Stone Casino and Resort in Verona, N.Y.
The CompuBox numbers told the story of Bivol’s domination: 714 punches thrown to 395 from Smith Jr., while Bivol outlanded him by an unbelievably lopsided margin of 208 to 39, for a 29% to 10% edge in accuracy. Still Smith, a blue collar worker with the Laborers Local 66 union out of Long Island, was able to rock Bivol’s world with right hands in rounds three and ten.