LaPorte Sees Enough of Padilla’s Punches : Boxing: Azusa fighter retains his title when opponent quits after 10 because of limited vision.

They checked their ballet shoes at the door, charged into each other for 10 rounds and exited bleeding.

“That’s boxing,” Azusa’s Zack Padilla said when it was over. “That’s how they did it in the olden days. Nobody was dancing, we just started out fighting.”

In a frenetic display of punching, Padilla shook off several hard overhand rights to the cheek by veteran Juan LaPorte and ignored a small cut over his left eye to retain his World Boxing Organization junior-welterweight title before a loud, mainly pro-Padilla crowd of about 3,000 at the Grand Olympic Auditorium on Sunday.

After several rounds when both fighters leaned in close and fired scores of short, hard shots to the body and head, Padilla (22-1-1, 14 knockouts) won when LaPorte quit before the 11th round because of limited vision in his left eye.

LaPorte (40-15) said he settled for the technical knockout because he had injured the eye in training and didn’t want to risk serious damage. “Zack’s just a machine,” LaPorte, a former featherweight champion, said. “He kept punching.”

LaPorte caught Padilla early in the first round with a sweeping right hand that seemed to stun him, but Padilla recovered quickly enough to dominate most of the early and middle rounds.

“Before the fight, I said he was going to come out throwing that big right hand, and that’s exactly what he did,” Padilla said. “See, I knew what I was talking about. But I felt his punches were weak.”

Padilla immediately began buzzing LaPorte with his trademark machine-gun attack, drawing in close, ducking under the rights and hitting LaPorte with hundreds of short-armed shots.

“Once I knew I could smother him, I knew I could execute what I wanted to do,” Padilla said. “

Although LaPorte looked weary in the middle rounds, he seemed to find strength in the seventh--and the eighth was three minutes of short-range blasting from both sides.

But Padilla’s attack never wavered, and by the ninth, LaPorte was catching blow after blow on the face and hearing the roars of Padilla’s fans.

In an earlier 10-round bout, highly regarded Pomona lightweight prospect Shane Mosley blitzed through Narciso Valenzuela, scoring a fifth-round technical-knockout.

Valenzuela, who was knocked out by Oscar De La Hoya last October and lost to Carlos Hernandez earlier this year, said after the fight that he thought Mosley, who concentrated on the body, hit harder than De La Hoya.

Mosley said: “I felt like he was soft in the midsection, so early on I went to the head, then tried to sneak in shots to the body.”

Mosley (13-0, 12 KOs) caught Valenzuela with a perfect left hook to the side in the third round that sent Valenzuela (35-17-2) toppling to the canvas, then scored the TKO when Valenzuela was left defenseless two rounds later.