Salita storms through Howard at Broadway Boxing

Salita storms through Howard at Broadway Boxing

By Saul Lelchuk (July 24, 2006)

Thursday was a good night for New York boxing fans and for New York boxers as well. There was a full house present in the Grand Ballroom of the Manhattan Center in Midtown to watch the newest Broadway Boxing show, put on by DiBella Entertainment and co-promoted by Damon Dash, CEO of Roc-A-Fella Records. Both Mr. Dash and Lou DiBella were very present throughout the evening and seemed to be enjoying the fights.

The main event featured Brooklyn welterweight Dmitriy ‘Star of David’ Salita, 25-0-1, 15), in a ten round fight against Missouri’s Shad Howard, 12-8-3 (6). After an uneventful first round as they felt each other out, Salita stepped it up a bit

in the second and third, beginning to throw some combos and go for the body. By the fourth this strategy – and Salita’s decisively superior skill and experience – paid off as a hard body shot forced Howard to put a knee down to recuperate. Either Howard never recovered from this, or Salita never let him, but either way the fight became completely one-sided from that point on. In the fifth flurries of downstairs blows caused the referee to pause the fight to determine if it could go on. Howard’s face seemed the picture of unexaggerated pain, while Salita, as he turned towards me to walk back to his corner, wore an expression of stolid frustration as he waited to be allowed to go back to work. In due course he was, and proceeded to punish Howard almost at will with hard combos until partway into the sixth round when the ringside doctor was called to examine Howard and – no surprise – called it a TKO.

Easily the most exciting fight of the night was Brooklyn’s previously undefeated Curtis Stevens, 13-1 (11), against Marcos Primera, 20-15-2 (13), fighting out of North Carolina. Stevens cut quite a figure as he entered in gaudy, sparkling blue shorts, with his face entirely and unexplainably bandaged in some kind of mask. When an undefeated fighter goes up against an opponent whose win/loss ratio is nearly equal there is always the question of how much bang for your buck you will get, and for much of the fight this seemed to be the case. While Primera didn’t look bad, Stevens looked good: he fought with his gloves held high, throwing tight, hard punches and some sizeable combos that put him ahead on points virtually every round. In the fifth round Primera (by this point visibly bloodied and bruised on both sides of his face) spent the better part of a minute on the ropes, barely throwing a punch, as Stevens hit him repeatedly with one and two punch combinations. In the seventh round a brutally low blow from Stevens brought the crowd up and Primera down for several minutes, but Primera, who looked as though he wasn’t hanging on by much, was able to continue fighting. But the match ended in a twist worthy of a Shyalaman movie when Primera – not as tired or hurt as he appeared – exploded out of nowhere in the eighth and final round, battering the surprised and formerly overconfident Stevens into a sudden and exciting TKO.

In another preliminary, Medford, NY native Derric Rossy, 12-0 (7), went six rounds with Demetrice King, 9-13 (7), backed by a wildly supportive crowd. Rossy, who was a defensive lineman while at Boston College, seems to have made the switch to heavyweight fighter without any trouble at all, especially considering he began boxing at a relatively ripe old age. His strength trainer, Mathew Shackles, said that since he had begun working with him Rossy had put on twenty pounds, bringing him up to 248 lbs, and he carried the weight well on his 6’3” frame. King was tough and kept on coming, but Rossy handled him well, knocking him down halfway through the fight and going on to win on points although he fought most of the fight with a nose that didn’t stop bleeding. Look for Rossy’s name to appear more as he continues to successfully defend his New York State Heavyweight title.

Also fighting were Junior Middleweights Jamelle Hamilton and Delbert Sommerville, Junior Welterweights Prenice Brewer and Roberto Acevedo, and a women’s match consisting of Junior Lightweights Maureen Shea and Olga Heron.