Proksa deserved to lose to Hope

By Sean McDaniel: Last Saturday night EBU middleweight champion Grzegorz Proksa (26-1, 19 KO’s) was shockingly beat by a big Welsh fighter named Kerry Hope (17-3, 1 KO’s) by a 12 round majority decision at the Motorpoint Arena, Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom. The loss has a lot of Proksa fans crying foul, feeling that the 27-year-old Proksa did more than enough to handily win the fight or at worse get a draw. I don’t see it that way. Proksa deserved to lose that fight and my guess is he’d lose again to Hope in a rematch if one takes place.

The 30-year-old 5’10″ southpaw Hope exposed all of Proksa’s flaws for the world to see. Proksa came into the fight having knocked out almost all of his opponents with his weird looking fighting style. Proksa had knocked out most of his overmatched opponents early in his fights. It’s always nice to get early knockouts, but getting nothing but early knockouts probably has hurt Proksa by keeping him from developing his stamina.

Hope took Proksa’s best pot shot punches in the first three rounds of the fight and when the 4th round came around, Proksa looked completely spent like a three round fighter having gone beyond what he was capable. From there, Hope pounded the exhausted Proksa against the ropes repeatedly for the next eight rounds and really worked him over. Proksa was like an old man, incapable of fighting in the center of the ring and needing to rest his spaghetti-like legs against the ropes. He looked exhausted.

Hope won the fight by a 115-112, 114-113 and 114-114 score. Proksa suffered a cut over his left eye in the 2nd from a clash of heads. The cut obviously didn’t help things for Proksa any but what he did in response to it made things worse for him, because he started fighting like he was panicking like an amateur. Proksa seemed to lose his senses completely by trying to take Hope out in the 3rd. It wasn’t going to happen because Hope had too much size on the little 5’8″ Proksa and could take his best wind up shots without any problems and answer back with nonstop punches. That’s the other thing. Hope was just too big and strong for Proksa to handle. Hope isn’t a big puncher, but he can hurt you when he hits you a lot as he was against Proksa, and he doesn’t even break sweat when throwing a lot of punches. With Proksa, he had wind up to put everything he had in his shots to try and hurt Hope, but with Hope he just had naturally heavy hands and he really gave Proksa a beating.

Proksa will be making a huge mistake if he agrees to fight Hope again, because this guy will do exactly what he did last time and beat Proksa again. Hope is too big and too strong for the little 5’8″ Proksa. What Proksa needs to do is move down to junior middleweight division where his lack of size won’t get him beaten up like it did last Saturday. If you think what Hope did with Proksa was bad just think of what a good middleweight would do to him. He’d get pounded.

Proksa’s problems in the Hope fight were as such: 1. His stamina prevented him from fighting hard for more than three rounds. 2. He was too little to fight a big middleweight like Hope. 3. Proksa’s low guard made it easy for Hope to land his shots. 4. Proksa should have never fought of the ropes because that was really stupid. 5. Proksa failed to throw combinations and got nowhere with his pot shots. 6. Proksa wasn’t in condition to fight hard for more than three rounds at best.