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Derry’s Duddy opens pro ledger with KO

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Showing quick hands and a clubbing left hook, the young boxer stopped Tarek “The Lebanese Tiger” Rashed at 2:25 minutes of the opening stanza in an exciting junior middleweight bout.
It was scheduled for four heats but neither fighter intended to stick around that long as they went at it from the first bell with power shots.
Rashed, a last-minute replacement for Ispafah Muhammad, was competitive for the first minute or so, during which he took Duddy’s best shots while scoring with some of his own.
“I thought that in the first 60 seconds he was a tough opponent,” Duddy said later. “I was getting him with right hands and not doing the job. Then I started catching him with the left to the body.”
The bread-and-butter punch of most top Irish fighters, the hook to the ribs began to slow the “Tiger” down midway through the round, leaving him vulnerable to Duddy’s relentless assault.
Rashed, however, made one final push to turn it around before succumbing to Duddy’s superior power. He tagged his 24-year-old foe with a hard one-two that Duddy walked through.
“I was like a bull at that point,” the winner said when asked if he was ever hurt. “Whatever he threw, I didn’t feel.”
Rashed, though, felt Duddy’s power when the debutant landed the left to the body, then brought it up and delivered a double hook to the jaw.
A Long Island resident who entered the ring with a 1-0 pro record, Rashed was hurled into Duddy’s corner. He bounced back only to catch more leather from an opponent who’d smelled blood.
Duddy’s final flurry was reminiscent of heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, whose cutman, Al Gavin, was in the Derry transplant’s corner.
“Very good,” Gavin summed up Duddy’s performance, which came to a climactic end when referee Steve Willis stepped in to rescue the concussed Rashed on the ropes.
Said the unmarked Duddy, 24, of his stunning debut: “I feel proud. It was better than I’d expected.”
He received massive ovations from the crowd in the arena, which prompted him to say: “So far from home, [yet] it felt like I was fighting in my backyard.”
Duddy’s popularity with the crowd wasn’t lost on a few promoters in attendance at the Final Forum, Inc., show who approached one of his handlers, Eddie McLoughlin, seeking the fighter’s services.
“He fought brilliant,” noted McLoughlin. “We came in looking for a [score of] 9 [out of 10] and got an 11.”
Duddy spent over five months training for his debut. His other co-trainers are Dexter Emanuel and Neil Ferrara.

MOORE STOPPED
A second Derry fighter on the card at Jimmy’s Bronx Caf

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