Great Britain’s Ben Whittaker marked his American debut with an impressive second-round victory against Richard Rivera at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
The flamboyant Whittaker dropped the American at the end of the first round with a right hand, although Rivera pointed that the punch had caught him on the back of the head.<\/p>\n
But Whittaker, nicknamed ‘The Surgeon’, clinically caught his rival with a left-hander at the start of the second and, although Rivera staggered to his feet, the referee stopped the light-heavyweight bout.<\/p>\n
The win improved Whittaker’s record to 12 wins and a draw from his 13 professional fights, while Rivera suffered the third defeat of his 30 fight career.<\/p>\n
“Brooklyn, that’s how you do it man,” said Midlands boxer Whittaker, who is renowned for his showboating and did a little dance at the end of the first round on the way back to his corner.<\/p>\n
The fight took place on the undercard of Xander Zayas, who attempted to defend his WBA and WBO super-welterweight titles against Jaron Ennis.<\/p>\n
But Zayas succumbed to a seventh-round stoppage, with the referee ending the contest after the Puerto Rican boxer had been knocked down for a third time in the fight.<\/p>\n
It was the first defeat Zayas had suffered in his 24-fight career, while unbeaten American Ennis has 36 wins from as many fights. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Great Britain’s Ben Whittaker marked his American debut with an impressive second-round victory against Richard Rivera at Barclays…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":766734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":["post-766733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/766734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}