Bakhram Murtazaliev drops heavily favored Tim Tszyu four times and stops him in third in memorable performance

Bakhram Murtazaliev essentially stood in front of former world champion Tim Tszyu Saturday at the Caribe Royal Resort in their bout on Amazon Prime Video for Murtazaliev's IBF junior middleweight championship and exchanged punches.

Tszyu entered the bout with 17 KOs among his 24 wins in 25 fights, and he leaned a number of clean, hard punches in the first round. So, too, did Murtazaliev, the first sign that this bout would be something out of the ordinary.

The second, and more significant sign came early in the second, when a blazing left hook by Murtazaliev dropped Tszyu on the seat of his pants in the corner. Tszyu ate those punches in the first round, but the second and third rounds were another story altogether.

Murtazaliev dropped Tszyu three times in the second round and then once more in the third before the corner threw in the towel to stop it at 1:55 of the third. The result was a TKO victory for Murtazaliev, who was a largely anonymous mandatory challenger for a long time before finally getting his shot at the title in April.

He went to Germany and took it from Jack Culcay with an 11th-round stoppage to improve to 22-0, but he had to apologize for his performance. A Muslim, he competed during Ramadan and was badly weakened.

But he was his full, strong and powerful self on Saturday and Tszyu barely knew what hit him.

"Things didn't go to plan," said Tszyu, the son of Hall of Famer Kostya Tszyu who lost for the second time in a row after opening his career with 24 consecutive wins. "The better man won tonight. No excuses tonight."

Murtazaliev was intent on proving he was not himself in the Culcay fight, and he drilled over and over during a 10-week training camp in preparation for Tszyu. 

He was a massive underdog -- At DraftKings sportsbook, Tszyu was a -700 favorite and Murtazaliev was +450 -- but he entered the ring filled with confidence.

"I didn't know when I was going to stop him, but I did everything with intention and a purpose during my training camp," Murtazaliev said. " ... We worked the same combinations all the time and during the fight, the opportunities [to throw them], just happened. It was nothing specific [we saw]. It was all automatically happening in the fight because we worked for 10 weeks on the same combinations all the time, over and over again."

Tszyu was never the same after the first knockdown. He got up with a glazed look on his eyes and unsteady legs. Murtazaliev landed a right that wasn't even clean and Tszyu went down a second time.

Valiantly, he pulled himself up but it was obvious he was living on borrowed time. Murtazaliev dropped him with another left in the waning seconds of the third. Tszyu got up in bad shape but the bell sounded before the champion could get another shot at him.

Tszyu wasn't so lucky in the third. Another left dropped Tszyu halfway through the round and Murtazaliev pounced. He was firing unanswered punches when the Tszyu corner threw in the towel.

It was the wise choice because he was not himself and would have likely gotten hurt had it gone on any longer.

Murtazaliev landed 50 of 104 power punches according to CompuBox, and connected on 32 punches in that pivotal second round.