By Lindy Lindell
Photos: Bob Ryder

When a scheduled dozen fights reduced to six and four of those six are little more than walkovers, it doesn’t bode well for an evening of boxing. Sunday night at the Dearborn Entertainment Center, Promoter Eddie Jaafar of Jaafar Promotions was defensive at the end of the evening, but also indignant: “I guess they really don’t want boxing here in Michigan,” he railed. He was referring to the “good fights” that he had put together, but were killed by the State’s demands that the boxers’ tests were not in order.

At least Jaafar had professional fighters lined up–unlike the undercard of a show in Flint the month before in which five of the six boxers involved were MMA “fighters,” not real boxers.

At least the stench of the undercard had wafted away with the final two bouts of the evening. In the six-round main-go, Monroe’s DeAndre Ware, 168, easily kept his undefeated skein going at eight wins with a shutout over a game, but outgunned Troy Artis, 3-7-1, New York.

Artis is a tough guy and came to fight, and one would have thought that a championship fight had taken place at the end of the evening with Ware’s handlers, hanger-ons and friends, about thirty strong, gathered in the ring for a photo shoot. Ware won convincingly, steadily moving forward, but did not seem to be hurting his man until the fourth when a right put Artis against the ropes; the bell rang soon after, and Ware did not jump on his man in the fifth.

In the only other real fight, Antonio Wade, now a 3-0 middleweight, had a similar kind of opponent as did Ware–a guy who came to fight from Milwaukee, Jose Smith, 2-5-1, who showed aggressiveness and moxie, and is the kind of opponent that matchmakers are glad to have around because he will give you a sincere effort. After the fight, Smith from the ring bellowed that he loved Detroit and begged to be invited back. For Wade, it was a good, but not great performance. He hardly threw a left jab until midway through the second, and he didn’t show a lot of energy in the third, but he scored a knockdown in the second, culminating a flurry with a nice left hook, and went all out in the final round, the fourth, much to the delight of his cornermen. Both Ware and Wade won every round on the scorecards.

The four undercard fights ended early, three in the first, one in less than twenty seconds, which is to say, nothing when ten of those seconds involved the referee counting. A hideously overweight Dalvin Henderson, 306, Southfield, kissed canvas and stayed there, recipient of a single blow from Detroiter Marcus Carter, 277, also a pro-debuter from Detroit. In another heavyweight bout, lefty Detroiter Anthony Coleman was squashed in just fifty seconds by Toledoian Cassius Anderson, 3-0. Junior Middleweight Andreal Holmes, moved to 3-0, knocking out the 0-1 Keith Bullock in a junior-middle bout involving Detroiters; and in a light heavyweight contest, Dearborn’s Sinan Fradi wasn’t given the benefit of a win in his pro-debut when Detroiter Brian Jackson, also a novice, took a shot to the back of the head in the second and the bout was declared a no contest. Jackson, who had been dropped earlier, escaped defeat due to the no contest, but showed little while Fradi was denied victory.