I’ve been as big a booster of Jorge Linares as anybody. The junior lightweight prospect really looked like the goods — speed, technique, power, heart. I wonder if him getting knocked out in one round in the video above shows everybody who’s been high on him is wrong, or if the unproven Juan Carlos Salgado turned out to be the real deal, or if it’s just a fluke thing. It’s hard to tell which if any of those things are true from the video, which features Salgado landing a nice left hook/overhand left kind of punch that rendered Linares knocked down and blitzed. When Salgado pounced on him after that, he was helpless, and couldn’t defend himself after the second knockdown, so the ref called a halt to it.
This is a massive upset. Massive.
Golden Boy Promotions just signed Linares a few weeks ago, and said he was one of the best pound-for-pound boxers out there. That was premature, but it wasn’t unfeasible to to me to think he might get there some day. And he still might; there’s no way of knowing, like I said. But this is a big setback.
As WF noted today, it’s been a bad year to be a GBP phenom, and as JPF said in reply, GBP must have built their HQ on some Indian burial grounds. Some of their prospects have already rebounded somewhat from rocky shoals in their career. I’d like to see Linares do the same, but this is the most shocking of all of the bad moments for young GBP products in 2009.
