Lionel Rose vs Guts Ishimatsu

Only sixteen months after losing the world bantamweight championship, Lionel Rose defeated a recent world lightweight title challenger while competing some seventeen pounds above the division in which he had made his name. The ten-round contest, promoted by Bill Long at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda, Melbourne, on 10 October 1970, matched the 22-year-old former champion against Japan’s 21-year-old Ishimatsu Suzuki, later known as Guts Ishimatsu. It was a non-title lightweight bout, and Rose entered with a record of 38 victories and five defeats; Suzuki stood at 17 wins, six losses and four draws.

Rose had lost his bantamweight title to Rubén Olivares by a fifth-round knockout in August 1969, and his subsequent form had been uneven. He stopped Vicente Garcia but was knocked out by Fernando Sotelo and outpointed by Raul Cruz before rebuilding with victories over Freddie Wicks and Richard “Kid” Borias. The physical change was considerable. Rose had been a precise, economical bantamweight whose timing and left hand carried him through championship fights with Fighting Harada, Takao Sakurai, Chucho Castillo and Alan Rudkin. At lightweight he no longer enjoyed the same authority, and the heavier men could absorb punches that had commanded respect at 118 pounds.

Suzuki was not yet the accomplished boxer who would win the World Boxing Council lightweight championship four years later, but he had already faced first-class opposition. On 6 June 1970 he challenged Ismael Laguna for the recognised world lightweight championship in Panama and was stopped in the 13th round after taking a sustained beating. He returned in August to defeat Jung Bok Lee and came to Melbourne with advantages in natural size, height and reach. Rose, at 5ft 5½in, was approximately two inches shorter and had to depend upon speed, judgement and superior experience rather than strength.

Detailed round-by-round accounts of the contest are scarce, but the surviving result and later summaries agree that Rose produced one of the best performances of his post-championship career. He boxed with greater order than he had shown in several of his preceding appearances, using his left hand to interrupt Suzuki’s advances and relying upon short counters when the Japanese lightweight attempted to close the distance. Suzuki pressed and made Rose work throughout, but the Australian’s cleaner punching and command of the exchanges gave him the advantage over the first half of the bout.

The pattern continued through the later rounds, with Suzuki’s youth and physical strength keeping him competitive but Rose retaining sufficient sharpness to prevent him from taking control. Rose was never a heavy knockout puncher, even at bantamweight, and at lightweight his task was to score, move and avoid prolonged exchanges with the naturally larger man. He carried out that work steadily over the ten rounds and finished strongly enough to leave no doubt with the officials. No fouls or knockdowns are recorded in the surviving contemporary summaries. Rose was awarded a unanimous decision; the individual judges’ totals do not appear in the accessible official record.

The victory raised Rose’s record to 39–5 and restored some of the standing lost during the year after Olivares. Its value became clearer with time. Suzuki, then still fighting under his original ring name, later won the Oriental and Pacific title and in 1974 knocked out Rodolfo González to become WBC lightweight champion. Rose’s success did not lead to comparable achievement at the weight. Four months later he was widely outpointed by Jeff White for the Australian lightweight championship, although he subsequently received a challenge for Yoshiaki Numata’s WBC junior-lightweight title in Hiroshima. Rose lost that contest over 15 rounds, but his measured defeat of Suzuki remained evidence that, even above his best division and after his championship years had passed, his timing and boxing intelligence could still overcome a younger, stronger lightweight of genuine world-class.

I couldn’t find any video of the fight, so I’m going by the available reports. Rose was operating nearly seventeen pounds above the division in which he became world champion and faced a naturally bigger man who had recently challenged Ismael Laguna. He apparently used his timing, jab and judgement of distance to earn a deserved unanimous decision.

Ishimatsu Suzuki, later known as Guts Ishimatsu, went on to become WBC lightweight champion and beat Rodolfo González and Ken Buchanan. This did not make Rose a world-class lightweight, but it was a fine win which showed that, despite uneven form after losing to Rubén Olivares, his boxing brain remained intact.