PBC on Fox Sports 1: Sammy Vasquez Trounces Jose Lopez, Stops Him in 5th

Local welterweight sensation Sammy Vasquez delivered the goods in front of his adoring fans as he tore through rugged Mexican veteran Jose Lopez, scoring a fifth round stoppage.

Vasquez used deft footwork and a sizzling jab to set up his vicious right hook to the head and as tough as Lopez was, he couldn’t hang with the Pennsylvanian in PBC on Fox Sports 1’s latest “Toe-To-Toe Tuesdays” card.

Lopez pressured Vasquez from the start and landed several clubbing overhand rights and left hooks, but they weren’t powerful enough to knock Sammy off his game. Vasquez remained calm and slugged when he needed to, and in the end, his precision punching and deceptive power paved the way for an entertaining knockout, which sent the capacity crowd inside the Convocation Center at California University in California, Penn., into a tizzy.

Vasquez rocked Lopez with a powerful right/left to the head with his back against the ropes. Lopez stumbled backward but he couldn’t recover in time to fend off the onslaught being launched at him from all angles. Finally, Lopez had nowhere to go but down and he barely beat referee Gary Rosato’s count. Vasquez, who thought the fight was over, had to halt his celebration and try to finish the Mexican off, which he did.

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Vasquez swarmed his still-woozy prey and tore him apart with an array of power shots to the head and body, but a four-punch volley to the head, capped by a final right hook, sent Lopez (25-4-1, 15 KOs) down onto this knees again, prompting Rosato to call it off. The official time was 1:08 of the fifth, allowing Vasquez, one of the best young welterweights in the sport, to improve to 20-0 with his 14th pro knockout.

Junior lightweight prospect Omar Douglas (15-0, 11 KOs) was too much for Braulio Santos (12-4, 10 KOs) to handle as he walked away with a lopsided unanimous win after 10 rounds. “Super O” scored knockdowns courtesy of the left in the first two rounds and pounded on the Puerto Rican for virtually every minute of every round. Both fighters were docked points in the fight (Santos for low blows, Douglas for punches to the top of the head) and in the end, Douglas won handily. The official scores favored the Delaware fighter via tallies of 96-90, 99-87, 97-89.

Local junior lightweight Milton Santiago improved to 12-0 with 3 KOs with an easy six-round unanimous decision win over Mexico’s Alvaro Ortiz (7-4, 5 KOs). Santiago’s speed and footwork were the key en-route to a lopsided win with scores of 60-54 on all three official scorecards.