Knew something was amiss with Jerwin Ancajas during the very first round of his encounter with Takuma Inoue held over the weekend in Tokyo.
There he was looking like somebody had put glue on the soles of his fighting shoes.
There was no bounce on his every step. He was right there ready to be hit.
And that’s exactly what happened as Ancajas saw his world title aspirations go up in smoke.
Inoue, who only scored four knockouts in 18 wins, appeared as though he was as hard-hitting as his elder brother, the more accomplished Naoya with his savage beatdown of the Filipino southpaw.
I asked Jerwin a question after the fight as he was being consoled by his lead trainer Joven Jimenez and promoter Sean Gibbons.
“You were getting hit a lot,” I told him.
“Why is that?”
I thought he would dodge the question or come up with an excuse.
But he was brutally honest.
“I also don’t know why I was getting hit that easily,” Ancajas said as Manila-based scribes listened to him intently.
I suspect that his two fights with Argentine slugger Fernando Martinez in their world title clashes at 115 lbs contributed to this shocking loss to the feather-fisted Inoue.
Another thing is the weight.
While Ancajas made the 118-lb limit, he had to take off his boxer brief to make the weight during the weigh-in.
Even at bantam, Ancajas had difficulties making 118.
Ancajas said it is unclear what he is going to do next.
There are suggestions that he should just abandon bantam and go up to super-bantam (122 lbs).
That could be a good idea since he won’t encounter weighty issues in the runup to his fights.
On the flight back to Manila last Monday, I could not shake off images of Ancajas going down from a body shot from the Japanese.
“I have never been down from a body blow. Never,” Ancajas said.
“But the one that I got from Inoue was something else. My breathing was cut and I could not recover from that even though I tried my best to overcome the pain,” he said.
The referee — American Mark Nelson — even hugged him after stopping the fight as if to say that Ancajas was done for this fight with Inoue.
Ancajas didn’t even protest the decision, proof that Nelson had done the right thing.
Given the factors that I mentioned that led to his defeat, there is still a chance that Ancajas could come back.
But I could be wrong, too.
Only Ancajas knows the answer.
