Not having
fought since May 20th, when she was knocked out and robbed of
her WBC title by Alejandra Oliveras of Argentina, 'The Aztec
Princess', Jackie Nava, wanted a warm-up before confronting her
nemesis on the 3rd March in Buenos Aires for the return. After
several cancellations, she got her wish in Tijuana on Monday
evening as Eli 'La Cubanita' Ruiz of El Fuerte, Sinaloa,
answered the bell in the Palenque del Hipódromo Caliente
for the first of six scheduled rounds.
Giving away
almost two kilos (at 53.5 kg to her opponent's 55.4), 'La
Cubanita' turned out to be a muscular young woman with a shaved
head and a fearsome scowl that belied her appalling record
(0-10-0 going into this fight); but although Nava found her
repeatedly in the course of the first two rounds with her left
hand – now to the head, now to the body – she might as well have
been fighting Oddjob for all the impact the blows seemed to
have.
In the third,
though, the former WBC champion began dusting off her
combinations, and in the fifth, her hooks; and to these the
Sinaloan had no resistance. She'd already visited the canvas
twice when Nava unleashed the nastiest of all – her trademark
hook to the liver – fifteen seconds from the end of the round.
The effect – on Ruiz, as on a number of her earlier opponents –
was devastating; in fact, of Nava's fourteen wins, nine have
come inside the distance, with a crippling hook to the liver the
most frequently cited cause. Nava sometimes follows with a
combination or a straight right to the jaw, but this was neither
necessary nor possible in this case. "The hook alone was
sufficient. It stopped her dead in her tracks," wrote Christian
Espinosa in El Sol de Tijuana, "As soon as she felt it,
the woman from Sinaloa fell, her face a mask of pain." And a
mask of pain it remained, even after the referee, Juan José
Ramírez, had completed the count.
"I think the
worst thing that can happen to a fighter in the ring is not
knowing what to do differently when things aren't working," Nava
told La Vereda back in 2005. The whole emphasis of her
training then was on developing as wide a range of skills as
possible; and although she lacked sharpness on Monday and could
still improve her movement (as she admitted herself), her
performance, in the view of Espinosa, "demonstrated clearly that
she still has enormous resources and speed as well."
This result on
its own, of course, is a meaningless indicator of how Nava can
be expected to perform on the 3rd March. Quite aside
from the fact that here she was fighting in her home town and
there she will be on a different continent, or that here she was
fighting a winless fighter whom she had already defeated, and
there she will be fighting an undefeated champion who knocked
her out last time they met, the styles of Ruiz and Oliveras are
completely different. Ruiz, on Monday, was trying to use the
full area of the ring – without much success, apparently –
whereas when she fights Oliveras, as Nava told Espinosa
yesterday, "she's going to be the one doing the attacking" –
hence the emphasis on movement. Although she was winning on
Monday, she says, "they were scolding me in the corner, trying
to get me to do up there in the ring the things we've been
working on in training."
She can take
heart, though, that Oliveras's own form in recent months has
been far from impressive; and if she really has overcome the
psychological effects of her defeat last May ("at the time, I
was inconsolable") and can remain focussed, Nava has every
chance, when she faces 'La Locomotora' for the second time, of
becoming the first woman to recapture, just as she was the first
in history to obtain, a WBC title.
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