No Doubt About It, ‘Tito’ Is Back

If there was any rust on Felix Trinidad, any cobwebs after two years away from boxing, he did his best to shake them off Saturday night.

He shook them off with flashes of the speed and power that made him a three-time world champion.

And with a glimpse of the killer instinct that once put him at the top of the fight game.

Most of all, he shook off the doubts about his comeback with an eighth-round knockout of the hard-charging Ricardo Mayorga in a wildly entertaining middleweight bout at Madison Square Garden.

“I knew I could keep up the pace,” he said. “I’ve been in tough wars before.”

The victory improved Trinidad’s record to 42-1 with 35 knockouts and immediately launched speculation about his next opponent. That speculation has included the names Oscar De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins, who handed Trinidad his only defeat.

First, however, there was Mayorga, who speaks as riotously as he punches. At two news conferences last week, the Nicaraguan dared Trinidad to fight him on the spot.

A former welterweight, junior-middleweight and middleweight champion, Trinidad said that after two years of hanging around the house with his family, and gaining a few pounds, he was drawn back to boxing by “the action.”

He got just that from a crowd of 17,406 that waved Puerto Rican flags and chanted his nickname, “Tito.” He got it from Mayorga (27-5-1), who came out as billed, hair dyed red, throwing wide lefts and rights from the opening bell.

It was the dervish versus the boxer. Mayorga scored with looping shots; Trinidad answered with straight rights and lefts, smooth hooks.

In the third round, Mayorga caught him with a glancing right, then a cleaner punch that sent Trinidad to a standing eight count.

It was not the first time he had been down. Nor the first time he would come back.

Even Mayorga realized it was a temporary victory. Asked if he had hurt Trinidad, he said, simply, “No.”

From then on, Trinidad looked quicker and smarter. He pressed the action, stepping inside those wide shots, cutting Mayorga under the left eye in the fifth round.

“I felt good about my performance, but my eye swelled up and I couldn’t see some shots,” a wobbly Mayorga said.

Even more telling was a punch to the body in the sixth round, a shot that Mayorga briefly complained was low. Another body shot put him down to start the eighth.

It was the first of three knockdowns in that round, the final one coming as Mayorga sagged to the canvas.

“My corner told me to go to the body shot and I did,” Trinidad said. “He can take a good punch and took a lot of them, which was bad for him.”

On the undercard, Travis Simms of Norwalk, Conn., won a unanimous 12-round decision over Bronco McKart of Detroit to retain his World Boxing Assn. super-welterweight championship. Rosendo Alvarez of Nicaragua won a 12-round split decision over Bebis Mendoza of Colombia but did not take Mendoza’s interim WBA light-flyweight title because he failed to make weight.