‘Ghost’ in vintage form Friday
SAN JOSE — In front of his hometown crowd, he celebrated at each corner of the ring in HP Pavilion while his stricken opponent, Efren Hinojosa, quietly made his exit.
Nothing, not even another nasty cut, was going to stop Robert Guerrero from savoring this moment.
“I had a smile from ear to ear.”
With his victory by technical knockout after eight rounds against Hinojosa, one could argue “The Ghost” is back, but where has he been?
That he beat up a 37-year-old, who was slated for the fight on short notice, doesn’t scream redemption — not that it had to. Guerrero (24-1-1, 17 knockouts) wasn’t out to answer critics as much as he was out to take care of business.
The lefty is a fighter, not a showman. In case you forgot, he’s also a two-time featherweight champion.
Guerrero treated Friday’s nationally televised junior-lightweight main event, aired on ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights,” like any other fight. There was no break from the ordinary. There was no kamikaze attack. There was no first-round knockout. There wasn’t even a knockdown.
Using a steady right jab, well-calculated counter-punches and a myriad of textbook combinations, Guerrero, 26, picked apart his heavy-legged foe, leaving Hinojosa with a busted nose, lumpy face and a crimson-streaked pair of once-pearly-white trunks.
“I just relaxed and kept working,” Guerrero said. “You get excited — that’s when you start running into more headbutts and elbows.”
Only the ignorant criticized Guerrero after his last fight — a March 7 bout against Daud Yordan, also in HP Pavilion — which ended in no decision because of an infamous deep gash above Guerrero’s right eye.
“The referee asked if I could see. I said, ‘no,’ and the fight was stopped,” the Gilroy native said in an interview on “Friday Night Fights.” “If I knew that was going to happen, I would have said, ‘yeah, I can see.’ ”
Instead, Guerrero left the ring with a serenade of boos, a moment he stewed over the last three months while training in Los Angeles.
“Last fight was a disappointment to me, the fans, and I gotta get right back on it,” Guerrero said last week. “(Criticism) comes with the territory. Boxing is a rough sport, and everyone wants to see a rough fight.”
Oh, Friday’s fight did get rough, somewhat, for Guerrero. He suffered another bad cut — this time over his left eye — during the seventh round, but kept the fate of the match in his own hands. He ended the round with perhaps his best combination of the night, a left uppercut followed by a sharp right jab and a left hook.
Sitting in his corner before the start of the eighth round, Guerrero cracked a smile.
“He landed a couple good shots, solid ones,” he said. “He didn’t hurt me at all.”
The fight panned out much differently for Hinojosa (30-6-1). Working quickly off the opening bell, Guerrero landed a three-hit combination in between relentless jabs. He worked the body in the second round while keeping his distance. Hinojosa had no pop in his punches and little defense for Guerrero’s devastating left hook.
“He needed the work. He’s been out of the ring too long,” Guerrero’s co-manager, Shelly Finkel of Golden Boy Promotions, said.
Hinojosa was just trying to hang on by the third round. Guerrero, meanwhile, looked only stronger and stronger. He finally started working the head more in the fifth round, marking the beginning of the end for Hinojosa.
For Guerrero, Friday’s spectacle was a mere steppingstone toward something much bigger. After the TKO was announced, Finkel announced Guerrero’s next fight: an Aug. 22 title match in Houston against IBF junior lightweight champion Malcolm Klassen (24-4-2, 15 KOs).
Guerrero’s critics are invited.
