Pepeli Feeling Much Better After 4th-Round Knockout : Boxing: He shakes off effects of illness to defeat Brinson and improve his record to 19-8-1.

Had the fight posters not been distributed and dozens of tickets purchased by his fans, Rocky Pepeli said he might have canceled his bout against Craig Brinson Wednesday night at the Warner Center Marriott.

It is, after all, the cold and flu season.

Instead, Pepeli chose to shake off the effects of illness and, like a good trouper, show up and give it his best shot.

That shot landed on the side of Brinson’s face.

After a sluggish start, Pepeli caught Brinson flush with a roundhouse left and put him away with a left-right combination to win by knockout one minute 37 seconds into the fourth round of their heavyweight co-main event in front of a crowd estimated to be about 800.

“I had second thoughts about fighting tonight,” Pepeli said. “I’m glad I did.”

Pepeli, weighing 226 1/2 to Brinson’s 200, appeared to be trailing early in the fight.

“I always start slow,” he said. “Once I got loosened up, I got going.”

Pepeli, from Simi Valley, improved to 19-8-1 with his 17th victory by knockout. Brinson, from Duarte, fell to 3-4-2.

In the other co-main event, former super-bantamweight champion Rudy Zavala outlasted Felipe Garcia, knocking him down three times and stopping him in the eighth round of a scheduled 10-round fight.

Zavala held a slim margin on all three judges’ cards when he caught Garcia with a right uppercut early in the decisive round.

Garcia, from Denver, competed gamely and held a slim margin early in the fight. However, he weakened as the bout progressed, perhaps the result of a bout with flu last week.

Garcia was a late replacement for Adolfo Castillo, who bowed to pressure from World Boxing Council president Jose Sulaiman’s call for Mexican fighters to boycott title fights in California to protest the passage of Proposition 187.

Zavala, who retained his WBC Continental Americas featherweight championship, improved to 24-4-2 with 20 knockouts. Garcia, a former kick-boxing champion, fell to 11-9-1.

In the night’s most action-packed matchup, Joani Cervantes upset previously undefeated welterweight Fili Castro with a fourth-round knockout.

Cervantes, alternating between left- and right-handed, knocked Castro down twice before referee Vince Delgado stopped the fight 1:34 into the fourth round.

Both fighters exchanged powerful body punches in the early going before Cervantes established an advantage midway through the second round. Castro, who came in with a record of 9-0, went down for the first time near the end of the round, but was up at the count of 5.

After a relatively uneventful third round, the fighters were trading haymakers in the corner early in the fourth round when Cervantes struck with a left-right-left combination that sent perspiration spraying several rows into the seats.

Again, Castro got up, but Delgado ended things after Cervantes quickly picked up the assault. Cervantes evened his record to 5-5 with three knockouts.

In an earlier fight, Don Goodwin, boxing for the first time in his hometown, made quick work of Santiago Negro Franco in a super-welterweight bout.

Goodwin, who had won only one of his four fights, knocked out Franco with two quick lefts 48 seconds into the match. After crumpling to the canvas, Franco, 18, beat the count, but referee Gwen Adair stopped the fight.

“It’s my turn now,” Goodwin said on the way to the dressing room. “That’s the way it’s going to be from now on, first round.”

Franco, who was considered somewhat of a prospect, never got in a punch. “I hurt him with my first jab,” Goodwin said. “I knew it, so I went right to the body.”

In another undercard fight, Paul Mayorquin, a stylish junior lightweight from East Los Angeles, stopped Jimmy Navarro at 1:11 of the second round.

Mayorquin, scoring often with quick, straight lefts, swarmed over Navarro from the opening bell, snapping his head back several times in the first round.

Navarro, whose record fell to 1-1, was given a standing 8-count less than a minute into the second round and referee Lou Filippo stopped the onslaught a short time later. Mayorquin is 5-0-1 with two knockouts.

In a lightweight bout, Jose Ferrer upset Anthony Johnson when the ringside physician stopped the fight at the end of the fifth round because of a cut on Johnson’s left eyelid.

Ferrer knocked Johnson down in the third round and the fifth, but could not catch the fleet-footed Johnson to put him away.