If you love following a high-volume, powerful offensive fighter, Jaron “Boots” Ennis should be your guy. Ennis is a wonderful offensive fighter. He’s one of those guys who is a joy to watch, because he’s never afraid to mix it up and he has the power in both hands to hurt his opponents with a single shot.
He could stand to use his job more frequently, but there’s little offensively he can’t get done inside a boxing ring. smells blood in the water and when he gets an opponent in trouble, he usually gets rid of him.
The IBF welterweight champion is now 33-0 after outworking a game Karen Chukhadzhian Saturday at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia via a unanimous decision by scores of 119-107, 117-109 and 116-110. I had it 116-110 for Ennis.
Chukhadzhian inexplicably got another at IBF title after laying an egg when he met Ennis on Jan. 7, 2023, when Chukhadzhian did not compete and simply ran away.
He came to fight on Saturday and gave a good accounting of himself. He took whatever it was that Ennis had to offer and landed plenty of clean, hard, crisp shots of his own.
And that’s the one issue that is keeping an otherwise very good fighter from being great. He gets hit far too often.
There has been plenty of talk of Ennis moving up to 154 and facing Vergil Ortiz, who holds the interim WBC super welterweight championship. Ennis promoter Eddie Hearn says that’s one of the best fights that could be made in boxing, and he’s not wrong.
But if it were the heavy-handed Ortiz, who is 22-0 with 21 KOs, landing those shots instead of a moderate-punching Chukhadzhian, one has to wonder if Ennis would have made it 12 full rounds. In Major League Baseball terms, Chukhadzhian is a 10-12 homer a year guy. Ortiz is a 35-to-40 a year guy. There is a massive difference.
Getting hit so cleanly and so often is the fatal flaw at this point. According to CompuBox, Chukhadzhian landed 37.1 percent (128 of 345) of his power punches. That would have been lights out to be hit by those kinds of shots by an Ortiz or a Terence Crawford or even an Errol Spence.
He intimated after the fight that his struggles to make the welterweight limit of 147 pounds may have impacted him negatively.
“The performance was OK,” Ennis said, smiling. “I don’t know. It might be time to go to 154 pounds.”
There are a number of lucrative fights at that weight for Ennis, so it wouldn’t be a bad move.
And look, he’s still among the best fighters in the world. The question, though, is can he take the final steps toward greatness like Crawford did against Spence or like Canelo Alvarez did in two fights in 2017-18 against Gennadiy Golovkin.
Mark Robinson/Matchroom Sport
Karen Chukhadzhian (L) follows through after landing a left on Jaron Ennis Saturday in their IBF welterweight title bout.
He’s going to win the overwhelming majority of his bouts because few people are like Crawford, Ortiz, Spence and a few others. Even if he was a B against Chukhadzhian, Chukhadzhian didn’t have the tools to really take advantage.
Ennis knew Chukhadzhian couldn’t really hurt him and Hearn noted, correctly again, that that was an issue.
“Boots wasn’t always switched on like he would be against a guy that he has the fear factor against,” Hearn said.
Ennis' father/trainer, Bozy Ennis, kept repeating his advice, "get him out of there," round after round without offering his son advice on how to do it. So the younger Ennis got overanxious and went looking for the home run all the time.
The only knockdown in the fight came in the fifth round when Chukhadzhian took a knee late in the round as Ennis was landing some heavy blows. But other than that., he was handling everything Ennis threw at him with few problems.
So it makes one wonder if Ennis will be able to take that next step.
A fight with Ortiz would be a bombs away battle and appointment television, that's for sure.
Ennis, though, needs to work as hard on not getting hit, though, as he does on seeking out the knockout. If he doesn't get it right, his big dream of achieving legendary status in the sport is going to fall short.
Boxing is a sport in which quality defense isn't a luxury. It's a necessity, particularly when the likes of Crawford, Spence and Ortiz are the ones firing back.
It's a lesson Ennis should learn.
It's one he needs to learn.