Terry Flanagan has his way with Diego Magdaleno

Anxiously awaiting the start of his WBO Lightweight Title bout versus Terry Flanagan, Diego Magdaleno is shown pacing back and forth. To the right and behind Magdaleno is his new trainer Joel Diaz and manager Frank Espinoza.

On Saturday night, the reigning, defending WBO lightweight champion of the world, 26 year-old, 5’9½”, southpaw Terry “Turbo” Flanagan (28-0, 11 KOs) of Manchester, England made his first title defense

in front of the home folk at the Manchester Arena in a scheduled 12 rounder against a gentleman the promoters were touting as “the #1 ranked lightweight contender” 28 year-old, 5’6” tall Diego Magdaleno (28-1, 12 KOs) from Las Vegas, Nevada. Even though several ranking systems had Magdaleno ranked much lower, the WBO had him ranked in their Top 10. Even the local bookies in United Kingdom had the betting line as a toss-up.

After just five minutes and 38 seconds, the crowd was headed for the exits. The end came in round two when Flanagan dropped Magdaleno three times. After the repeated head snapping jabs, three extremely hard left uppercuts and a plethora of solid left hooks, referee Terry O’Connor finally concluded Magdaleno was incapable of continuing and stop the bout at the 2:38 mark of round two. Even though Magdaleno finished on his feet, there was no way he could have possibly continued after the beating he had taken.

With Magdaleno’s poor footing from an extremely wide stance, he reminded you of a first time ice skater falling on the slick ice. With his legs separating, he did two ballerina splits. To his credit, the fully exposed Magdaleno showed a lot of heart and kept throwing but missing the elusive Terry Flanagan.

The San Diego connection: Back on August 28, 2015, Diego Magdaleno was in San Diego and sister city Tijuana to be the color commentator on a live boxing broadcast “The Best In Boxing” from the Salon Mezzanine in Tijuana with fellow team members Rebecca Grant, both actress and former NFL sports reporter for Empire Sports, Fox Sports and ESPN plus Radio Rahim, a boxing reporter from the Bay area who has been covering the sweet science for over twenty years.

Sometimes when things go bad, they really go bad

The plan for this new venture “The Best In Boxing” (BIB), a show being developed to fill the gap in boxing between fighters just starting out and the top boxers in the sport, with the announcing team of Magdaleno, Grant and Rahim never panned out. BIB had this ambitious plan to broadcast more than three hours of live boxing covering each and every bout from the opening bout all the way through to the Main Event.

The first broadcast on Friday, August 28, 2015 was to feature the IBU Middleweight title bout between Tony Hirsch (18-6-2, 8 KO’s) and Rolando Paredes (9-2-2, 8 KO’s) and feature the popular female light flyweight Kenia Enriquez (13-1) plus lightweight Demond Brock (9-3). As luck would have it, the technical crew along with the equipment for this show had trouble at the border crossing and the live streaming of the event never took place.