| It’s a slow hour on a Saturday morning at the L.A. Boxing Gym and it’s
still cold. Wendy Rodriguez is curled up in a chair a week after her
long-awaited fight with Delia Gonzalez at the
Stratosphere in Las Vegas.
Serene and content for the moment, the sweet-faced young flyweight
admitted she was nervous before fighting the experienced veteran from
Chamberino, New Mexico, but quickly found her groove once the fight
started, comfortably slipping into the fluid style that her trainer,
Victor Hernandez, has developed for her and training partner JoJo Wyman.
Wendy fights Delia Gonzalez in Las Vegas
© Copyrighted photo by Mary Ann Owen
“I felt good during the fight. I didn’t feel like I lost a single
round,” she said adding that she never felt Gonzalez’s punches. Nor did
the gentle face show any traces of them. It's her moving, Wendy thinks,
that takes away the power of her opponent's punches.
Content with her performance, she will soon know the restlessness again
of getting her next fight, a difficult feat for a top-ranked boxer whose
savvy ring-skills have garnered attention ever since her standoff with
legendary flyweight champion Margaret Sidoroff of Canada.
Rodriguez wanted a match with
Kim Messer but now that seems impossible.
In a surprising announcement last month in Washington, Messer retired
despite gaining a large following in her native South Korea and
extensive TV and newspaper coverage after her last two fights there,
which included a thriller with Great Britain’s Michelle Sutcliffe.
Now that Yvonne Caples has returned to action, however, Wendy would like a
chance to avenge her only defeat.
And with Universum, the German promotional firm, losing a major source
of easy money after the collapse of giant TV conglomerate Kirch Group,
who knows? Last week, Universum announced that it had to cancel the next match
for their WIBF junior bantamweight champion Daisy Lang
for lack of funding because of Kirch’s insolvency.
Without soft money to subsidize soft matches for their carefully protected champions,
maybe they’ll now have to start finding real opponents for
Regina Halmich.
Wendy Rodriguez is waiting. |
