Vasyl Lomachenko Leaves No Doubt over Elite Status in Dominant TKO Victory

It was the sort of performance that challenges vocabularies and perceptions.

Because it's not enough to simply say Vasyl Lomachenko beat Nicholas Walters.

And it's not enough to say he forced a heretofore sturdy Jamaican—previously unconquered in 27 professional outings—to think better of rising from his stool to reconvene hostilities in Round 8.

Those are, in fact, things he did.

But they don’t speak to the totality of Saturday night’s goings-on at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.

Instead, given Lomachenko's comprehensive dominance for every second of 21 combative minutes, it’s far more accurate to suggest he surged his star power to the highest luminosity.

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At least among the hardcore set, anyway.

While the casual watcher continued to doze off Thursday’s turkey or detox after an extra Saturday afternoon helping of college football, it was probably only the diehards still up past midnight (ET) to see a Ukrainian fight a Jamaican in a weight class outgrown by most 16-year-old American boys.

Bleary-eyed Sunday or not, though, it was their loss.

Because what the pedestrian fan missed was an effort so strategically superior and intellectually violent that it forced the HBO announce team to retreat across generations to locate a similarly gifted architect.

Toward that end, Harold Lederman—the network’s septuagenarian ringside scorer—went all the way back to a fighter who’d last laced them up just two months after he, Lederman, turned 26.

Full disclosure: He’ll be 77 in January.

"He is really special," Lederman said. "The movement. The hand speed. If there were more old guys like me around, you’d compare him to Willie Pep."

Associated Press

Pep, for the uninitiated, won 226 fights in a career that touched three decades and was part of the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s inaugural induction class—alongside more instantly recognizable surnames like Ali, Robinson and Marciano—in 1990.

“Willie Pep was special,” Lederman continued. "The only difference is that he was right-handed."

Given that Saturday’s fight was just the eighth of his pro career, it’ll be a long while before Lomachenko matches the 25 matches that Pep had after his own 35th birthday, let alone the 216 that preceded it.

But he’s already good enough to create the buzz.

And if Top Rank tsar Bob Arum—who celebrated promotion No. 2,000 on Saturday—is able to engineer the events suggested in its one-sided aftermath, the waiting may not wind up being the hardest part.

Among them, get-togethers with promotional stablemates Terence Crawford and Manny Pacquiao.

Intriguingly, HBO's Max Kellerman said Crawford and Lomachenko called each other’s names in meetings when asked to identify modern contemporaries so vastly superior to the flotsam and jetsam.

Colleague Roy Jones Jr. poured cold water by pointing out Crawford’s superior size—he’s 5'8" with a 70" reach, compared to Lomachenko’s 5'6" and 65 ½"—but didn’t add that Walters, who arrived with 21 KOs in 26 wins, was just a shade shorter than Crawford (5'7") with a significantly longer wingspan at 73".

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As for Pacquiao, though, the dimensions and career arcs do make more sense.

While Crawford has already leaped from 135 pounds to 140 and seems destined to evolve into a welterweight, those around the aging Filipino star have long suggested he’d be more comfortable—and perhaps more devastating—with a move down to 140, a division he invaded with a two-round erasure of Ricky Hatton in 2009 before chasing bigger names and purses at 147 and beyond.

Lomachenko would stand a half-inch taller in a press conference staring contest while conceding the same narrow difference in reach, and a successful match with a certified pay-per-view stalwart would go a lot further toward putting the Ukrainian over with fans—and tilling the ground for even bigger shows—than a middling unification at 130 with the limited likes of Francisco Vargas.

It's the "eventually, he'll get Pacquiao" path Arum used to suggest for Brandon Rios before age, weight and brawls took their toll on Bam Bam and made the duel more sparring than scintillating.

Lomachenko seems in no danger of such precipitous fizzling. 

"There’s no doubt who’s going to rise to be the No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world," Kellerman said. "You saw him this week. And it leaves us scratching our heads about who could fight him on this level."

Indeed, headliner shows warrant far better than bar-band encores.

And given the 28-year-old’s clear comfort on the big stage, there seems no reason not to start the tour right away.