The Chumash Event Center is buzzing on Aug. 15, even more so than it usually does during Friday Night Fights. Camera crewmembers are wildly running around putting wires where they need to go while two men, groomed far beyond everyone else in the event center, are waiting.
It wasn’t going to be a typical lineup of Friday night fights, with fight after fight of men circling each other in the boxing ring—ESPN was going to televise two of the fights.
The first ESPN-televised fight was between featherweights Jose Pedraza (17-0-0) of Puerto Rico and Juan Carlos Martinez (20-14-1) from Mexico. Martinez threw some good shots at Pedraza, but it was Pedraza—ranked fourth—who caused an eruption of “oohs” from the audience as he fired punches directly at his opponent’s head.
With every hit Pedraza landed, Martinez’s coaches shouted out “defencía … siempre!” from his corner of the ring.
The match ended before the seventh round started. As soon as the woman toting the card for round seven stepped out of the ring, Martinez’s corner threw in the towel.
ESPN’s main event featured two Russian boxers, Rustam Nugaev (27-6-1) and Denis Shafikov (33-1-1), who battled to fight lightweight International Boxing Federation Champion Miguel Vasquez.
At first, Nugaev—who knocked out his last five opponents—preyed on Shafikov, hammering him with blow after blow. But in the third round, Shafikov finally landed a punch that made Nagaev bleed.
Nugaev’s blood sprayed all over Shafikov’s white trunks.
Shafikov continued to dish out the hits, and Nugaev persevered through the bloody slugfest until the end of the eighth round: Shafikov hit Nagaev so hard, the audience roared to its feet. So it wasn’t a surprise when the referee called a TKO at 1:16 in the ninth round, making Shafikov the top ranked contender on his way to the lightweight championship battle.
After the main event was over, ESPN started tearing down their equipment, but the fights continued and the audience got rowdier.
It was time for the locals.
First up was one of two of Santa Marians on the night’s fight card: Ruffio “El Animal” Serrano (14-5-0).
Serrano took on Russian Khabir Suleymanov (16-4-1) in a close fight. It was a match of reaction—and awkwardness. In the first round, Serrano got knocked down for around eight seconds, but he returned by knocking Suleymanov down with a boxing glove to the head. Serrano basked in the audience cheers as his opponent lay on the ground.
In the third round, Serrano was knocked down again. But it wasn’t the straight hits that bothered his coaches. Suleymanov brought some unorthodox moves to the match—wrestling-style tosses and grabs—that the referee allowed, issuing only warnings to Suleymanov.
“There was a lot of fouling. [Suleymanov] was warned about three times about fouling,” Serrano’s coach, Carlos Ruiz, said. “We’re going to push for a rematch.”
In hindsight, Serrano said he should have stuck to the strategy that put his opponent on the mat.
“It was a hard straight punch that knocked him down,” Serrano said. “I should have kept doing that.”
The match was close, and Serrano lost by a cumulative five points. It was a hard loss for Serrano and his corner to swallow.
The only heavyweight match of the night was at the end of the card, between Santa Marian Makani Sarellano (1-1-0) and Andrew Tinae (0-2-0).
Sarellano, with the word “villain” tagged across his boxing trunks, began the match slowly against Tinae, who had his own tagline on his shorts—“Samoan Thor.” Tinae took advantage of Sarellano’s initial hesitance with solid, stunning hits, and dodged his counters, and even managed to trap him between the ring’s ropes. But Sarellano reacted, building up steam through a string of hits that left Tinae stunned.
Then, Tinae accidentally planted a below-the-belt blow that forced Sarellano to the mat, and the audience responded by angrily booing at Tinae. The referee called for a time out as Sarellano gasped for air on all fours. As the end of third round’s 10-second warning bell sounded, Sarellano went off in a flurry of punches and put Tinae on the mat.
Building off his last string of hits, Sarellano started the fourth round with fervor; 32 seconds into the fourth, he hurled a knockout punch at Tinae, ending the night with the audience on their feet and Sarellano’s arms waving in the air.
“I was really worried,” Sarellano said. “In the end, it was my conditioning that beat out his.
“I came out slow. He caught the back of my head, and that gassed me,” he added. “When he hit me in the balls, that also gassed me. It felt like they ran up to my gut.
“I knew that when I caught him with my hook, it wasn’t going to be good for him,” he added.
Sarellano was so excited and relieved about his win—and knockout—that he had trouble finding his check.
Although the match was over, Sarellano was already planning for his next. He said the fight started too slowly, and in the future, he wants to be ready the second that first-round bell rings. He attributes some of that night’s slowness to sitting around for six hours before the fight. Due to ESPN’s scheduling, there was an extra 30-minute delay, which forced Sarellano to sit around even longer.
“I can’t sit still for that long,” Sarellano said.
The Chumash Casino is starting to get used to being on national television through the boxing matches they schedule. As a host for Gary Shaw Productions fights, networks such as Showtime and HBO have done live broadcasts from the event center. According to tribe public affairs specialist Mike Traphagen, these special broadcasts happen just about every year.
“It packs the house and makes for a fun night,” Traphagen said. “We provide a safe place for people to watch some fights. There’s no fights going on in the stands.”
Contact contributor Henry Houston through the executive editor rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 21-28, 2014.