LEO SANTA CRUZ defended his WBA featherweight world championship in convincing fashion on Saturday night, knocking down Kiko “Sensación” Martinez twice in the first round, then ending it on a barrage of punches as the fight was called at 2:09 in the fifth round in the main event of a Showtime championship boxing doubleheader at Honda Center in Anaheim, California.
In the co-feature 29-year-old Hugo Ruiz (36-3, 31 KOs), Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico, regained his WBC super-bantamweight World Title with a devastating early knockdown with just 51 seconds into the 12-round fight against 23-year-old Julio Ceja (30-2, 27 KOs) of Atizapan De Zaragoza, Mexico, in a highly anticipated rematch of their August fight won by Ceja.
Fighting just 10 miles west of his hometown of La Habra and before 7,780 enthusiastic fans, the 27-year-old Santa Cruz (32-0-1, 18 KOs) continued to establish himself as the King of Southern California as he punished the game 29-year-old Martinez (35-7, 26 KOs) of Alicante, Valencia, Spain, with 570 total punches in just five rounds. There were 1,038 total punches thrown during the fight.
“The fans love it when two fighters go toe-to-toe,” Santa Cruz said after the fight. “I wanted to give the fans a great fight. I knew I could hurt him with a right hand. He’s a fighter and when he’s knocked down, he’s going to come back. In the fifth round I knew I had to finish him off and I did.”
Santa Cruz continued, “We were going toe-to-toe from the beginning. He’s was throwing good punches I was throwing out good punches and the crowd was loving it. Then my dad told me to slow down and be smarter so we started boxing.”
Santa Cruz wasted no time getting the upper hand as the opening bell rung. He knocked Martinez out twice in the first round; the first just 23 seconds into the fight and the second on a devastating right hand two minutes into the round.
Martinez fell into a groove in the third and fourth rounds, but got into trouble two minutes into the fifth round as Santa Cruz had him up against the ropes connecting on numerous body shots, uppercuts and combinations before referee Raul Caiz Sr. signaled the end of the fight for Santa Cruz’s second straight world title defense in Southern California.
Martinez said that Santa Cruz, “started to move a lot and he broke my strategy and he fought a great fight. The second round I was getting looser and I was starting to feel much better.”
