This victory might stand out among most of the others in Naoya Inoue’s already historic career.
The effort put forth by Marlon Tapales exceeded the name value he brought to his undisputed junior featherweight championship. Yokohama’s Inoue finally found a way to put a hole in the wall and scored two falls that night. The latter forced the visiting Filipino to go down for the full count of ten in the tenth round of their total linear, WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO unification clash on Tuesday at the Ariake Arena in Tokyo, Japan.
“I’m very happy to have achieved the knockout in such a decisive manner,” Inoue said of his latest historic achievement. “It was probably one of the most intense fights I’ve ever had, but my corner encouraged me and kept me focused throughout the fight.”
Inoue’s (26-0, 23KOs) latest victory marked his fourth consecutive fight in which he dethroned a reigning champion.
Tapales (37-4, 19KOs) took the WBA and IBF junior featherweight titles into their scheduled 12-round main event, having claimed the belts less than nine months ago.
The 31-year-old Filipino left-hander was not without his moments. Tapales won the seventh round on two of the three cards and the eighth on another, and was competitive at other points in the fight.
Of course, he didn’t fly to Tokyo just to settle for a participation trophy. Still, Tapales was rightly praised for offering a tougher challenge than the case as Inoue violently dethroned Nonito Donaire, Paul Butler and Stephen Fulton all in succession and barely lost a round in his previous three outings.
“He never showed any fatigue or damage to his face,” said Inoue, who outscored Tapales 146 to 52 according to CompuBox. “He surprised me a lot when he went down in the tenth round.”
Inoue completely unified bantamweight and junior featherweight, all in a span of just under 54 weeks. The feats are in addition to titles won at junior flyweight and junior bantamweight. Tuesday’s victory was likely the deciding factor in Inoue surpassing Terence Crawford (40-0, 31KOs) and Devin Haney (31-0, 15KOs) in the 2023 Fighter of the Year race.
Jake Donovan is a senior writer for BoxingScene.com. X (formerly Twitter): @JakeNDaBox
