If you sneezed, if you blinked, then you missed it.
Making his first fight as a professional boxer, Edmonton’s Stan Surmacz-Ahumada stopped Winnipeg’s Dale Daniels 48 seconds into the opening round Friday night at the Shaw Conference Centre.
Now that’s what you call an auspicious debut.
“You always want to make a good first impression,” said Surmacz-Ahumada. “You always want to be impressive in your first pro fight. I felt comfortable. I just wanted to stop him fast.”
After the normal how-do-you-do, feel-out-your opponent, Surmacz-Ahumada unleashed a flurry of punches — a left hook, a right jab, another left hook and then the deciding blow, a right upper-cut that broke Daniels nose and his chances.
It takes longer to turn the channel then it took for Edmonton’s born-and-raised Surmacz-Ahumada to get his first professional victory.
“I was relaxed. I felt comfortable. I wasn’t expecting a knockout right away, but I was confident and I’m going to be confident in all the fights I’m going to have,” said Surmacz-Ahumada, who stands six-foot-four and came into the fight weighing 250 pounds.
Milan Lubovac, who is Surmacz-Ahumada’s coach, trainer and mentor, predicted before the fight that his boxer can be a world champion, so obviously, he wasn’t surprised about the outcome.
“Stan is too strong and too quick. He’s too fast and he’s too powerful,” said Lubovac. “This is just what I expected. And I’ve been expecting it for a while.”
Asked if he would have liked to have seen a little more, Lubovac said: “It doesn’t matter; these guys can’t go far with him; these guys can’t go far with him anyways. So if it had gone another minute … so what?”
As an amateur, Surmacz-Ahumada put together a record of 20-6. But after the fight, he said that record was a little deceiving.
“I battled injuries as an amateur,” he said specifically of a left shoulder which would often dislocate in the middle of fights — the same shoulder where he tore the labrum, which required surgery 16 months ago.
“Now I’m 100 per cent,” said Surmacz-Ahumada, who in a few months is expected to leave for Las Vegas, where he can find better and more suitable opponents. “Then we’ll see where we go from there.
“I believe I do have all the tools. I just have to put it all together.”
