Jones stops Sheika in five!

Roy Jones Jr TKO5 Omar Sheika... On Saturday night, at the Pensacola Civic Center in Pensacola, FL, former Pound for Pound king Roy Jones Jr was too fast and had too many tools in his arsenal for Omar Sheika, as he outboxed him for four one sided rounds. In the fifth round, the referee saw fit to end the contest [I felt prematurely] awarding Jones the TKO victory in the fifth round. I'm going to go out on a limb and call that the worst stoppage I've seen in recent memory. Sheika was clearly losing each and every round, but it's not like he was taking punishment from Jones that could cause him serious bodily harm. Sheika was still trying to compete, and it was only the fifth round, so the referee probably should've given the man a serious fighting chance to win the bout and allowed the fans to see the fight that they had paid good money attend live as well as watch on PPV.

Although Jones appeared to be well on his way to winning a lopsided decision, anything could've happened in the remaining five and a half rounds had the referee not jumped the gun so quickly. My guess is that the fight was in Jones's hometown of Pensacola, this was a Roy Jones show both from a promotional and geographic standpoint, and the referee did a little hometown cooking by sparing Jones from being taken the full distance by a fighter of Sheika's calliber. Furthermore, it's fortunate that nobody was seriously injured and Jones performed well in front of his adoring hometown crowd.

BJ Flores W10 Jose Luis Herrera... In the co-feature, top cruiserweight contender BJ Flores thoroughly outboxed Jose Luis Herrera, who I had last seen stopping previously undefeated Aaron Williams on ESPN2 Friday Night Fights, and won an easy 10 round unanimous decision. Official scores of the contest were 98-92 and 99-91 (twice) all in favor of Flores. Flores is a really good technically sound boxer; if he had more punching power he could probably do even more damage. According to Flores in an interview he did with Boxingtalk's Greg Leon, he broke his left knuckle in the third round and couldn't really use his left hand as much as he would've liked. Although the fight was deprived of any type of excitement, Flores still put on a boxing clinic even with the broken knuckle and showed why he's one of the best cruiserweights in the world today.

television: Square Ring PPV