By Sammy Rozenberg

Ricardo “El Matador” Mayorga (28-6-1, 22KOs) won a majority decision over “El Feroz” Fernando Vargas (26-5, 22KOs) in an action-packed fight at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The bout was fought at a catch-weight of 166-pounds.

The fight was called "The Brawl," and the first round lived up to the billing. Mayorga charging Vargas with power punch flurries to back him up. A hard combination sent Vargas down in the final seconds of the round. In the second, Mayorga continued his assault by buckling the legs of Vargas with some telling blows that backed him up.

The third saw Vargas begin to battle his way back, landing hard punches to the body and coming back with right hands over the top. A cut opened up near the left eye of Vargas during an exchange.

In the middle to late rounds, the two fighters exchanged punches and neither seemed to gain a clear advantage. Mayorga fought the most composed fight of his career, staying away from his usual wild swinging punches and targeting the body with combinations. Vargas on the other hand was a shell of his former self.

As the fight appeared to be on the table in the championship rounds, a solid right hand by Mayorga once again dropped Vargas in the final five seconds of the eleventh round to secure the decision on the scorecards. The final round saw both of them pick their shots and battle in the final twenty-seconds.

The scores were 113-113 a draw, 114-112 and 115-111 for Mayorga. There were no excuses from Vargas after the fight, who also announced his retirement at the young age of 29-years-old.

"I take nothing away from Ricardo Mayorga, he was the better man tonight," Vargas said. "This is it for me. This is my last fight."

Vargas burst on the scene in 1997, a young welterweight from Oxford, California with power in both hands and savage intensity in the ring. In his fist year as a pro, Vargas fought nine times, winning all of them by knockout. He also built his body into a full fledged junior middleweight by the start of 1998.

In 1998, Vargas fought six times, ending the year by with a seven-round stoppage of veteran Yory Boy Campas (72-2) to capture the IBF junior middleweight title. At 21-years-old, he became the youngest junior middleweight champion in boxing history. The Campas bout was also his first major showcase on HBO.

He was undefeated, 17 wins that were polished with 17 knockouts, when he took on Ronald "Winky" Wright in 1999. For the first time in his career, he was unable to stop an opponent in Wright who pressed the action with a solid jab. In the late rounds, sensing that he was behind in the fight, Vargas stepped up the pace to win a controversial majority decision.

The win over Wright was a black spot on his record that was quickly forgiven in his very next fight, a unanimous decision win in a twelve-round war with Ike "Bazooka" Quartey in 2000. The win over Quartey helped setup his first pay-per-view headliner, a unification scrap with undefeated Felix "Tito" Trinidad (38-0).

If there was a single fight to define the career of Vargas, the bout with Trinidad would have to be the one. Vargas was outgunned and overmatched, blitzed in the very first round to take two trips to the canvas in less than two minutes. Vargas showed just how much heart he possessed by making it out of the round and getting himself back on the scorecards by hurting Trinidad in the third and knocking him down in the fourth. The remained of the fight was a war of wills with both men unloading an arsenal of power punches. In the final round, Vargas, behind on the cards, went for broke by standing his ground for the final time in the contest. Trinidad knocked him down three times before the ref stopped the contest. Vargas suffered his first loss, but his popularity soared by leaps and bounds. He produced one of best fights of the last ten-years, certainly one of the best of 2000. It was also the fight where Vargas took such a beating that many experts have said he was never the same boxer again.

It only two fights later that Vargas won the WBA junior middleweight title. In 2002, he was able to finally secure a fight with the man he disliked more than anything, Oscar De La Hoya. For years, Vargas had called De La Hoya a fake Mexican and called him out to a grudge match.

In a pay-per-view extravaganza, Vargas showed his warrior's heart by absorbing another beating, this time at the hands of De La Hoya, in a close eleven-round knockout loss. The second loss of his career only raised the bar of his popularity yet again. In the mandatory drug test after the fight, Vargas tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol. The Nevada Athletic Commission fined Vargas $100,000 and suspended him for nine months. Vargas claimed the steroid was given to him without his knowledge, but accepted full responsibility.

Numerous injuries, namely to his back, caused him to take a layoff from Dec. 03 until Mar. 05. He was never same fighter after he returned to the ring, appearing lackluster in wins over Javier Castillejo and Raymond Joval. Then, he put on a better than expected performance in another loss, this time by tenth-round knockout to Shane Mosley in Feb. 06. The fight was close and stopped by referee when a grotesque swelling on Vargas' eye had closed it shut and he was unable to properly defend himself.

The fight with Mosley was exciting enough and did well enough at the box office to justify a July rematch. The rematch was the low-point in Vargas' career, he was dominated and stopped in the sixth round. The loss was bad enough that even his most loyal fans were asking him to retire. Later, he would request a fight win Mayorga as a final send-off before going into retirement to focus on his many businesses. He went out like a warrior.

Mayorga goes on to bigger things, setting up big rematches at 154-pounds with junior middleweight champions Cory Spinks and Vernon Forrest.

On the undercard;

In an unexpected war of attrition, Kermit Cintron (29-1, 27KOs) stopped Jesse Feliciano (15-6-3, 9KOs) in the tenth-round to retain his IBF welterweight title at the Staples Center in California.

Feliciano showed an abundance of heart by standing his ground and taking some deadly power punches to the chin and body. The fight appeared to be in the books after Cintron rocked him with hard rights in the first round, or so we thought. At the start of the second, he stayed in Cintron’s chest and traded power punches with the champion for the rest of the fight.

Cintron caught him with some thunderous punches and Feliciano took them and kept moving forward with his own counters. In the ninth-round , Feliciano was feeling so much confidence that he actually walked Cintron back to his corner.

In the tenth, a right hand started the damage and some deadly combinations followed to have Feliciano out on his feet as the referee stopped the action.

Following the stoppage, Cintron dropped on the mat in pain, favoring the right hand. Cintron said that he felt a crack in his right hand in the very first round.  Cintron has a unification bout scheduled against WBO champion Paul Williams on Feb. 2, the extent of Cintron’s injury is unknown.

In a battle of former junior middleweight champions, Roman Karmazin (36-2-1, 23KOs) knocked out Alejandro "Terra" Garcia (25-3, 23KOs) in the third round with a vicious combination of punches.

Karmazin put Garcia down in the first round after a hard shot to the body. Garcia complained the punch was low, but the ref still ruled it a knockdown. Garcia was able to land a hard combination to push Karmazin back at the end of the first. In the second, Garcia tried to slow the pace by boxing and staying away from Karmazin's power by landing counter shots. One of them hit Karmazin right on the ear and he said after the fight that his ear was still ringing from pain.

The third saw a combination by Karmazin send Garcia down on his hands and knees. He was never able to make it up as the referee counted him out.

Undercard results by Mark Vester