DONNIE “AHAS” NIETES showed signs of Father Time for the first time, losing to reigning Japanese World Boxing Organization (WBO) super flyweight champion Kazuto Ioka of Japan via unanimous decision on Wednesday at the Ota-City Gymnasium in Tokyo, Japan.
At 40, the Bacolod native pug was an easy target throughout the 12-round bout to fall to his second defeat in the 51st bout and dropped to 43-2-6 win-loss-draw record with 23 knockouts.
It was also Nietes’ first defeat in 18 years.
He suffered a nasty cut on his left eyebrow in the tenth round and stayed slow the rest of the rounds, while the 33-year-old Ioka remained to be the busy fighter as he kept throwing a lot of jabs since the start of the fight.
At the end of the fight, the three judges scored the bout 118-110, 120-108 and 117-111 all for Ioka who avenged his split decision defeat to Nietes in 2018 in Macau for the same belt.
Nietes, accompanied by Long time trainer Edmund Villamor, was outboxed also in the early rounds by the Japanese who accurately hit the Filipino in the head and body.
Ioka improves his record to 29-2 with 15 knockouts.
His defeat was the fifth for the Filipinos this year in a world title fight after Jerwin Ancajas lost his International Boxing Federation (IBF) super flyweight title to Fernando Martinez of Argentina last February while Johnriel Casimero was stripped of his WBO bantamweight belt in England.
Nonito Donaire Jr. suffered a second-round technical knockout loss to Naoya Inoue of Japan last June 7 to lose the World Boxing Council (WBC) bantamweight belt, followed by split decision defeat of former IBF minimum weight champion Rene Cuarto last July 1st in Mexico City to Daniel Valladares.
And just recently Mark Magsayo lost his WBC featherweight belt to Rey Vargas last Sunday, leaving the country without a world boxing champion now.