Amado Vargas went to London on short notice and left with another knockout. The unbeaten boxer stopped Callum Nulty in the second round at BKB 61 on Saturday, putting him down three times in the opening round before ending it with a heavy shot in the corner, Bloody Elbow reported.
The trip to the United Kingdom wasn’t the plan. Vargas was supposed to return to the trigon in Biloxi, but that booking fell apart at the last minute, and BKB re-slotted him in London against Nulty, a little-known opponent who at least made the first exchanges interesting. Nulty came out throwing and got an early flurry going. It didn’t last. Once Vargas settled, the gap in pure boxing became obvious, and nearly every clean punch he landed seemed to register.
The fight got messy before it got one-sided. Vargas put Nulty on the ground illegally and landed a punch while he was down, then appeared to hurt him with a body shot as they came out of the clinch. From there he took over. He scored three knockdowns in Round 1, though the referee docked him a point in the closing moments of the round for throwing another punch with Nulty already on the floor. In the second, Vargas added another knockdown and then found the last big shot in the corner, and the fight was waved off.
Vargas is the son of former boxing world champion Fernando Vargas, and he’s built an undefeated professional record in the ring with wins over Deen The Great and Sean Garcia. The Deen The Great fight left a bad taste. Vargas has said he won’t reconcile with a man he called a “disrespectful kid.” He made the jump to BKB earlier this year with a first-round knockout that went viral, and London was the follow-up to that debut after the Biloxi date collapsed.
He won’t have long to rest. Vargas is set to help his brother Emiliano prepare for a December 5 fight, and BKB CEO David Tetreault wants Amado on that same date in Los Angeles. If Tetreault gets his way, the Vargas brothers could be working the same weekend.
My take: the finish was real, but the point deduction is the detail I’d hang onto. Hitting a downed opponent twice in one fight, once to start the trouble and once at the end of the first round, reads like a boxer still unlearning boxing habits. That’s fair for someone this early in bare knuckle, and it’ll get him disqualified against somebody better. Nulty was a fill-in after a scrapped card. A December 5 slot in Los Angeles should come with an opponent who can test whether the skill gap holds up when the other guy can actually box back.
