Naoya Inoue bolstered his claim as the world’s best pound-for-pound fighter on Monday when he came off the floor to retain his undisputed junior featherweight championship with a technical knockout of Luis Nery.
A sold-out crowd of around 50,000 spectators at the Tokyo Dome was stunned into silence near the end of the opening round when a heavy left hook dumped Inoue to the canvas for the first time in his 12-year professional career. But a hyper-focused Inoue, the unbeaten Japanese star known as the Monster, returned the favor and then some. He knocked down his Mexican opponent in the second and fifth before closing the show with a devastating right hook in the sixth.
