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MINNEAPOLIS – Ronnie Shields couldn’t believe Aidos Yerbossynuly left his corner round after brutal round Saturday night.
David Morrell Jr.’s trainer thinks their one-sided fight should’ve been stopped long before Morrell dropped the courageous Kazakh contender twice during the 12th round. The precise, powerful Morrell brutally knocked out Yerbossynuly with a right uppercut that dropped him flat on his back late in the final round at The Armory.
The previously unbeaten Yerbossynuly bled badly from his nose during the final 10 rounds and absorbed numerous flush punches to his head and body throughout a fight Morrell completely controlled. As the faster, stronger, taller Morrell (8-0, 7 KOs) hammered him with punishing shots, Yerbossynuly eventually went into survival mode and tried his best to avoid a knockout defeat.
Yerbossynuly (16-1, 11 KOs) was too badly battered by the 12th round to withstand Morrell’s onslaught.
Morrell first floored him with a straight left hand. Yerbossynuly, bloodied and fatigued, got up, only to have Morrell hit him with two left hands and the aforementioned right uppercut that emphatically ended their “Showtime Championship Boxing” main event in the Cuban-born Morrell’s adopted hometown.
“That fight should’ve been stopped sooner,” Shields told BoxingScene.com. “They let this kid take way too much punishment. But even the referee, and Tony Weeks is a really good ref, but sometimes you’ve gotta go to the corner and say, ‘Hey man, y’all need to stop this.’ And that’s when [Yerbossynuly] started fighting dirty, because he didn’t wanna get knocked out.”
The 30-year-old Yerbossynuly was taken to nearby Hennepin County Medical Center for evaluation after suffering so much damage.
“It was all pride,” Shields said. “I commend the guy for taking all that punishment, but you’ve gotta save guys from themselves. He took way too many punches. And you know what? This kid might never be able to fight again. That’s how bad it was.”
Morrell thought their fight would’ve been stopped earlier as well, yet the WBA world super middleweight champion didn’t express as much concern as Shields for the beating Yerbossynuly absorbed.
“I was surprised by plenty of things, including [that] he was trying to elbow me,” Morrell said, according to his translator. “Also like the head-butts that he was doing. The ref kept trying to separate us and I was like, ‘OK. You’re gonna keep doing that, then we’re gonna keep going.’ You know, but I kept doing my thing.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.