A key thing necessary to understand just how good Jesse Bam Rodriguez was in his performance is this: Sunny Edwards did not fight at all badly. In fact, for the first 6 rounds, he showed up pretty strongly- constantly showing fresh tricks and getting his own shots in. Bam had the power advantage from the start, but Sunny was by no means out of the fight at the halfway stage.
Then, all of a sudden, he was. Bam closed all the doors, found the gaps, and started beating the brakes off Edwards. Part of the issue was most likely increasingly impaired vision from his damaged eye, but it was also an exercise in intelligent boxing, as Rodriguez gauged his options and chose the ones that allowed him to do most damage. Let’s take a look at how.
The Breakdown: How Bam Rodriguez beat Sunny Edwards
To get into what Bam did so well, we need to first take a look at what he was up against. As mentioned, though forced from quite early into positions he didn’t want to be in, Sunny Edwards fought a good fight, giving Rodriguez plenty of things to chew on. He used his switch-hitting to good effect against Bam’s classy southpaw moves, and had answers even in difficult moments.
The first interesting decision on the Englishman’s part was how he responded to the jab. Bam had a big reach advantage- claimed on the tale of the tape to be seven inches- and working around it was going to be critical. Sunny’s choice of answer, particularly when in orthodox, was a check hook, throwing a left hand over the top of it and spinning off to Bam’s right. Hooking over the jab is a pretty standard answer to a southpaw, but the constant matador movement, in an attempt to be off-line and thus shorten the distance before the jab retracted, was a difficult thing to accomplish.
Edwards in the first round playing matador around Bam Rodriguez’s jab, with a hook on the way.
It did give him some joy, though. He was never able to avoid the jab, but the hook landed consistently. After three rounds or so, despite great success including the swollen eye, Bam clearly took some time to consider whether it was worth the payoff. His commitment to the jab dropped notably through rounds four to six. After that, though, he evidently decided it was, and brought it back into play.
Part of the reason the jab was so effective came (as is so often the case) in how Bam Rodriguez uses his feet. Edwards’ own footwork is very good, and he’s used to being the master of distance and timing in the ring. Bam made his name with flashy pivots and angles when he broke through, but perhaps the most high-level feature of his game is how well he disguises what he’s doing with his lead foot. He’s excellent at feinting with it, using a twist in his movement to hide both how far he’s going to step, and at which exact angle.
The first part made negating the distance advantage doubly difficult. The second somewhat impeded the check hook strategy, since ideally you want your lead foot on the outside to pull that off and he found it difficult to tell when Bam was going to step inside of him, and when he’d take that outside position. Edwards is agile enough that he was able to respond pretty quickly even if initially fooled, but it did give Bam extra seconds to work with that Edwards’ opponents don’t usually come close to seeing.
The second major part of Edwards’ gameplan was the aforementioned switch-hitting. Every so often, he’d switch southpaw, something he does comfortably (and often unexpectedly, disguising it behind an attack rather than just switching at range). It was a good tool for him in that fighting out of that stance he started finding the range for a good straight left as well as being able to put some snap on his jab. He never stayed in the stance for long, probably wisely to avoid giving Bam too much time to read it, but he had success whenever he did.
Bam Rodriguez with the high guard as Edwards approaches in southpaw
Bam’s response to this was two-part. First, somewhat interestingly, he’d switch up his guard. For the most part of the fight, he had his hands quite low- always ready to come up, but more interested in the deceptive potential of a low lead than pure protection. When Sunny switched, though, the hands came up to a more classic high guard. He didn’t exactly go fully defensive with it, and got caught plenty while throwing, but he clearly didn’t want to leave Sunny free shots upstairs at the shortened range of a closed-stance matchup.
Secondly, he took the opportunity to really commit to hitting Sunny to the body. He’d been throwing jabs there anyway, but there’s a difference between even a good power jab and a real power-hand sickener in the breadbasket, and he committed to those whenever Sunny stepped close in Southpaw. We can’t say for sure of course, but it may have been that more than anything that convinced Edwards not to commit to the stance for too long.
Sunny also simply displayed more ability and willingness to trade in the pocket than had been anticipated by most. To be fair, he has spent large portions of recent fights fading to the ropes and trading there – but this was different. Once it became clear that how compromised his ability to keep range was, he began to set his feet and throw combinations in the pocket. Always with the intent of getting back out, but he started to make it a nasty physical battle.
Trading like this was both a necessary adjustment by Edwards, and bad news for him.
That was always tough for him since he’s so clearly the smaller, less powerful man, but it meant Bam had to display his skills in close as well as approaching. Both are extremely good with active guards and catch-and-counters, but while it was initially quite equal, Bam started to find and force open the gaps in Sunny’s guard. It became clear that, while he’s capable there, of the two Sunny is more reliant on being able to get clear if necessary, and Rodriguez started to connect consistently.
So, the first five rounds were a good back and forth, adjustment and counter-adjustement. Round six is when Bam really started to get clear. There were a couple of factors that went into this.
First, and probably most importantly, he started to get a good read on when and how Sunny would try to switch direction, and sometimes stance, at range, and start closing as he anticipated it. This was well visible in the first exchange of round six, when he caught Edwards stepping and caught him off balance with a reaching left. Essentially, he started to drive forward in ways that would normally be risky, having figured out the times that Sunny was not set to throw properly even by his standards.
Secondly (somewhat relatedly), the high guard came up more permanently, allowing him to push into the pocket more directly, with less focus on the feints. Not that he abandoned them, but he’d mix the slick deceptive approaches up with more traditional, steady-pressing aggression, something which made both approaches doubly difficult to deal with. This was a great step to see from him in general- we’d seen one or the other gameplan from him in previous fights, but being able to switch from slickness to intensity at will makes him even more dangerous.
And finally, in the seventh and onwards, he decided that any punishment he’d take for throwing his jab was worth the tradeoff. Yes, he’d take some shots over the top of it, but not only was it a damaging shot in itself, but when he used it in his more aggressive mode, he was able to really keep Edwards off-stance and out of shape with it, preventing him from ever getting comfortable.
Not a position Edwards wanted to be in.
Edwards, who’d spent most of the fight trying to keep to center ring to a pretty solid extent, found himself driven to the margins more and more. He did manage a couple of moments where he faded to a corner then span and put Bam into it, allowing him to unload combinations. Bam is far too slick with his feet to allow that to happen more than a couple of times though, and once he figured the perfect distance to throw power combinations without letting Edwards tangle him, the fight was pretty much done.
The Finish: How Bam Rodriguez got it done
This heading is a bit of a cheat, since the knockdown didn’t actually end the fight- Edwards made it to the end of the round then pulled out in the corner. But it was a lovely piece of work that deserves to be singled out, so let’s do that.
It’s simple enough: he stabs to Edwards’ chest to freeze him up, then comes across with the left hand that drops him. A couple of things are notable: first, the sequence just before was a similar combination, but the jab came upstairs so Sunny, already slipping that, was in position to roll further with the loopy overhand. The second jab was to the body, which prevented Edwards from beginning that evasive movement and put Bam in a stronger position for a straighter, more crisp left hand.
The second thing is it’s another great example of Bam’s footwork. The first sequence sees that double movement, a feint and then the real move- the second sees the immediate big step. Edwards’ claim that his impaired vision made it harder for him to judge range is almost certainly fair, but he also simply had difficulty in judging how far Bam was going to move in any given moment, and it put him down here.
As mentioned, he got up, but it was waved off in the corner, giving Bam the unified championship. It was a nice cap to a brilliant performance.
The Future: Where do Bam Rodriguez and Sunny Edwards go from here?
Bam Rodriguez implied in the buildup that this would probably be his last cut to 112lbs, and in the aftermath he called out the superfly WBC champion Juan Francisco Estrada. That’d be a great fight – Estrada has been out for a year following his trilogy win over Chocolatito Gonzalez, but he looked great in that fight. It’d be a real test of where Bam is really at as a pound-for-pound star.
Other than that, as a champion moving up he’d probably be allowed to fight for the WBO title, which is about to be vacant as Junto Nakatani moves on up to bantamweight. If the IBF give him a favourable ranking too, a shot at their superfly champ Fernando Martinez would be entertaining, though you’d favour Bam pretty heavily. Either way, he’s got plenty of options to keep building his status.
On Edwards’ part, first he has to recover- that broken orbital is going to take a while to heal. After that, since both belts here are about to be vacant he’ll most likely get an immediate shot at one of them. There was some talk in the immediate aftermath of him fighting Galal Yafai, who also won on this card. He’d fancy his chances there, but it’d be an entertaining scrap with some buzz in the UK.
He also spoke, in a post-fight interview with Boxing News, of possibly moving down to light fly, since he makes the flyweight limit with no trouble at all. If he could wrangle a fight with the hugely exciting Kenshiro Teraji, who holds two belts at the weight, that’d be superb.
All in all, both have bright futures. It was great to see two young champions choose to face the toughest possible opponent instead of easier options. They drew renewed much-deserved attention to the lower weight classes. Bam’s star will only get brighter, and Sunny lost the fight but gained a lot of respect from fight fans. More nights like this from both of them would be a great thing to see.