National middleweight champion Rikardo Smith (left) in action on a recent local boxing card. - Winston Sill

Rocky 876, the new boxing/party series of events designed to further popularise the sport in Jamaica, had a successful launch at the Liguanea Club in New Kingston last Saturday night with a four-fight card.

Promoted by MJK Productions and sponsored by J. Wray and Nephew and Wisynco through their Boom and Wata products, the series is projected to run on a quarterly basis, and although the promoters said they would have liked to have seen a few more hundred spectators, they were not unhappy.

Wray and Nephew Middleweight Contender 2011 Rikardo Smith, from Hard Knocks gym, was the featured boxer on the show. He went up against Derrick Spencer from G. C. Foster gym in a fight scheduled for eight rounds. Spencer was no match for Smith, however, and the fight ended by way of a third-round technical knockout (tko) when Spencer failed to answer the bell for the start of the round.

attack

Spencer went on the attack at the start of the fight and scored with a few jabs as Smith took some time to settle into his rhythm. The first hard punch that Smith threw, however, which was a hard left jab to the head, visibly shook Spencer. He did not flinch and kept trying to score with his jabs, but Smith used his defensive skills to stay away from trouble. Near the end of the round, Smith went on the attack and scored at will with a two-fisted attack.

At the start of the second round, Smith continued to be aggressive and unleashed jabs to the head, hooks to the body, and the occasional uppercut that rattled Spencer and put him on the defensive. In the last 10 seconds of the round, Smith attacked his opponent with a barrage of punches that took him to the brink of a knockout. At the end of the one-minute break, Spencer signalled to the referee that he was not going to continue because of an injury to his jaw, so the fight was called off and a tko victory recorded for Smith.

In the other professional fight, Dwayne Rose, from Sugar Knockout gym, scored a unanimous points-decision victory over Rohan Robinson from Negril gym over six rounds. Both boxers were only having their second professional fight and it showed. They still have a lot to learn about the sport called the 'Sweet Science'.

The two amateur bouts were action packed and ended inside the distance. In the first bout, welterweight Julian Jackson from Sugar Knockout gym had too much power for Nickoy Jackson from Boys' Town, and the referee stopped the contest in the second round.

In the other bout, promising middleweight Kemahl Russell, also from Sugar Knockout gym, forced the referee to stop the contest in the third round of his match-up against Jermaine Brown from Hard Knocks gym.