LIMERICK, Ireland --- Groundhog day isn’t commonly celebrated in Ireland, but it was probably fitting that the first-ever professional boxing card staged in Limerick took place on February 2nd. 

You probably remember that “Whack The Groundhog” arcade game from your youth. You know, the one where you’re supposed to use a mallet to pound the pesky critters back into their holes. The denouement of Andy Lee’s homecoming fight looked pretty much like that, with Alejandro Falliga cast in the role of Punxatawny Phil,  his arms wrapped about Lee’s waist as he slid inexorably toward his burrow as Lee’s punches drove him ever downward.

Lee ran his record to 15-0 with Saturday night’s TKO over his ungainly Argentinian opponent, knocking Falliga down five times (though only four of them were counted by referee Emile Tiedt) in less than five rounds, but it was an inartistic bout unlikely to provide many moments on Lee’s personal highlight film.

“It was as if he did everything he could to make me look bad,” said Lee of the awkward Falliga.

“The bottom line is that Andy stopped a guy who’d never been stopped before,” said Lee’s manager-trainer Emanuel Steward.  “From the second round on it was obvious that (Falliga) was just in a survival mode. He wasn’t boxing, he wasn’t even throwing any real punches, and he was trying to butt Andy every time he got a chance.”

From the outset Falliga, who came into the bout 14-3-2, effectively took away Lee’s righthanded jab, electing to maintain a safe distance that negated almost any traditional boxing moves. His only attempts at engagement came when he halted his retreat long enough to cut loose with the occasional wild right hand – although at least a few of those seemed to find their mark.

“Not really,” insisted Lee, although he had a mouse on his left eye that suggested otherwise. “When he threw them near my face I usually blocked them, but he got me on the back of the head a couple of times.”

Effectively deprived of the jab, Lee had to improvise his own game plan on the fly. Midway through the second, with Falliga trying to tie him up in the center of the ring, Lee worked loose to land a thudding left just as the Argentine turned away. The punch that sent him down landed on the back of Falliga’s head, and would seem to have been either a knockdown or an illegal punch, but Tiedt declared it neither, instead wiping off Falliga’s gloves and allowing action to resume. (As the fighters faced off, Falliga smirked at Lee, adding a wink as if to say “Gotcha!“)

Later in the round, Lee trapped his foe in a neutral corner, where he cuffed him with a short right hook and then drilled him with a straight left down the middle. Falliga went down, but bounced right up, and the fighters were back in the middle of the ring by the time Tiedt caught up with them to belatedly acknowledge the knockdown and administer a count to the Argentine.

By the third Falliga was in full flight, but Lee emerged from a mid-ring exchange with blood streaming from a nick above his right eye, the result of a Falliga butt. While the offending blow may or may not have been deliberate, there was at least one subsequent occasion when Falliga appeared to fling himself headfirst at Lee’s face, but Lee escaped with a picturesque move worthy of a matador.

His hometown fans were madly cheering him on, but Lee was plainly growing frustrated, and in the fourth, Lee stopped chasing Falliga long enough to spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to say “Hey, will you cut the shit and fight?”

In the fifth, Lee stalked his quarry into a neutral corner, where he floored Falliga with a straight left hand. Falliga got up, and when action resumed threw a desperate roundhouse right. Lee sidestepped the punch and landed a short right, sending Falliga down again – more from his own momentum than the force of the punch which appeared to be little more than a tap on the head.

Lee, anxious to finish him off, caught Falliga with another hook, and the Argentine tried to clinch, but succeeded only in wrapping his arms around Lee’s waist, and it was time to play Whack The Groundhog, with Lee’s left hand serving as the mallet. Falliga was already on his knees and sinking even lower when Tiedt stopped it at 1:49 of the round.

“Once Falliga saw he couldn’t handle Andy’s speed, he quit trying,” said Steward.

Still, there was no getting around the fact that with all those wild rights Falliga was throwing, at least a few of them landed.

“I wasn’t worried,” insisted Steward. “Andy’s a smart boxer in there, and most people don’t realize it, but he’s also got a hell of a chin.”

The cut was repaired before Lee even left the dressing room, with Dr. Joe McKeever using three stitches to close the wound. The damage was deemed “a superficial cut,” one unlikely to imperil Lee’s scheduled March 21 main event against Brian Vera at the Mohegan Sun.

“But it might get me out of sparring with Wladimir next week,” said Lee, a twinkle in his eye.

Steward reiterated his intention to keep Lee on a fight-a-month schedule. If all goes according to plan, the March ESPN2 date in Connecticut will be followed by an April fight in Michigan. (“We’re looking at Willie Gibbs for that one,” said Steward.) Then it will be back to Ireland, where Lee is supposed to headline another Brian Peters promotion in May (Steward brought up Howard Eastman’s name – again – for that one.)

After that it begins to sound a bit fanciful. Steward said he hoped to make a Lee-Winky Wright fight for June, and also announced from the Limerick ring “and I’m in negotiations with Bob Arum for Andy to fight the winner of the (June 7) Kelly Pavilk-John Duddy fight.”

John Breen, the veteran Belfast trainer who faced Lee with Jason McKay back in December, smiled and shook his head when he heard that after what he’d just watched in the ring.

“Andy did what he had to do tonight,” said Breen, “but if Kelly Pavlik catches Lee with one of those right hands, he’ll knock him out.”

Breen did pick up an impressive win on the Limerick card when his junior welterweight Paul McCloskey, who picked up the IBF International belt in Belfast back in December, carved out a near-flawless win over Mexican veteran Manuel Garnica to run his pro record to 15-0. The Belfast youngster was facing in Garnica an opponent who owned wins over former champions Carlos Maussa and Gabriel Ruelas (and had gone the distance with both John-John Molina and Juan Lezcano), but was able to pressure the veteran throughout behind a strong jab and solid body attack. Once he realized he had the fight in hand, McCloskey, as he seems sometimes wont to do, seemed to preen in the ring more than was warranted.

There were no knockdowns, although Garnica (now 21-9) may have staved one off in the seventh when he spit out his mouthpiece, and Garnica bled from a cut over his right eye over the final three rounds. His incessant showboating aside, it was a solid performance for McCloskey. Referee David Irving scored it 98-93, while the Boxingtalk card had it 99-91.

“As an amateur McCloskey was a counterpuncher,” Breen reminds you. “We’ve finally got him moving forward, and I think you can see the improvement with each fight.”

Peters’ notion of a McCloskey-Paulie Malignaggi fight in 2008 may be as far-fetched as Lee vs. Pavlik seems at the moment. It would be an entertaining fight, all right, but you’d need an awful lot of mustard to cover those two hot dogs.

Cuban heavyweight Ismaikel (Mike) Perez, who had turned pro with a 95-second knockout in Cork just a week earlier, improved on that performance by dispatching his Hungarian opponent Sandor Balogh (0-4-1) in 41 seconds. The 22 year-old Perez, a former light-heavyweight gold medal at the Junior World Championships, dropped Balogh with a left hook early in round. Balogh arose, only to be put straight back down by a hard right to the head, after which referee Paul McCullagh stopped it without a count.

“At his present pace,” cracked Gerry Callan of the Irish Star, “Perez ought to win his next fight three seconds before the bell rings.”

   

McKay and Ciaran Healy, who played the victim’s role in Lee’s two previous Irish outings, posted a split verdict in their bouts against nondescript Latvian opposition. McKay (19-2), stopped by Lee in a December fight for the Irish super-middleweight title, got back into the win column with a one-sided win (60-54; Tiedt) over Martins Kukuls (3-16), while Healy (7-7-1), who lost to Lee in Dublin last August, struggled in dropping a decision to the unheralded Pavel Lotah (1-3), with Irving scoring the bout for the visitor by a 58-56 margin.

“I didn’t even start training until after New Years,” said McKay after his fight. “Even then I was only half-training – and when I found out who I was fighting, I trained even less.” (On the other hand, McKay looked the model of fitness compared to Healy, who appeared exhausted in handing Lotah his first pro win.)

McKay did double-duty Saturday night, rushing to the shower after his fight only to re-materialize behind a microphone as a commentator for Live95FM, a Limerick radio station.

Michael Sweeney, a Sean Mannion-trained cruiserweight from Mayo, outpointed his Lithuanian opponent Remigijus Ziausys in their four-round prelim, with McCullagh scoring the bout 39-37. Sweeney, who accompanied Lee to back Detroit in January for a week’s immersion course in the Kronk experience, is now 3-0, Ziausys 4-9.

*  * *

MIDDLEWEIGHTS: Andy Lee, 159 1/2, Limerick, Ire. TKO’d    Alejandro Gustavo Falliga, 159 1/4, Buenos Aires, Argentina (5)

Pavel Lotah, 155 1/4, Riga, Latvia dec. Ciaran Healy, Belfast, Northern Ireland 160 ½ (6)

HEAVYWEIGHTS: Ismaikel Perez, 239, Sancti Spiritus, Cuba KO’d Sandor Balogh, 208 1/2, Bekescsaba, Hungary (1)

CRUISERWEIGHTS: Michael Sweeney, 197 1/2, Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo dec. Remigijus Ziausys, 194, Klaipeda, Lithuania (4)

SUPER MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jason McKay, 163 1/2, Craigavon, Northern Ireland dec. Martins Kukuls, 181 1/2, Tukums, Latvia (6)

WELTERWEIGHTS: Paul McCloskey, 142 1/2, Dungiven, Northern Ireland dec.  Manuel Garnica, 142 1/2, Guadalajara, Mexico (10)

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