Canada’s Pascal returns to defeat Kuziemski despite left shoulder injury

MONTREAL – Jean Pascal made a triumphant return from a 19-month layoff to score a one-sided unanimous decision over Aleksy Kuziemski on Friday night despite fighting from the fourth round on with only one hand.

The former WBC light heavyweight champion from Montreal (27-2-1) was having his left shoulder worked on between rounds and threw only rights in the final six rounds of the 10-round bout.

But the right-hander still landed power punches in nearly every round against 35-year-old Kuziemski (23-5).

Two ringside judges scored it 98-90 and the other had it 100-88 for the 30-year-old Pascal. The Canadian Press scored it 97-91 for Pascal, who knocked his Polish opponent down in the sixth and 10th rounds.

Pascal bounced back from a crushing loss to then-45-year-old Bernard Hopkins in May 2011, who took away the Montreal fighter’s WBC light heavyweight belt.

In the co-feature, David Lemieux (28-2) scored his third straight victory in under two rounds as the Montreal middleweight backed Russian Albert Ayrapetyan into a corner and knocked him out with a left-right combination early in round two of their scheduled 10-rounder. Ayrapetyan was down twice in the opening round as well.

The free-swinging 23-year-old Lemieux is scheduled to fight for the minor NABF and NABO titles on Feb. 8 at the Bell Centre against Jose Miguel Torres (26-5) of Colombia.

So confident was Pascal’s corner that he would beat Kuziemski, they had already scheduled a title bout on March 23 on the HBO specialty channel against (Bad) Chad Dawson, who dethroned Hopkins in April. He tried to add the super-middleweight belt as well but lost to Andre Ward in September.

Now that date may be in doubt if the shoulder injury is serious.

Pascal won the title in 2009 and defended it four times, including an 11-round win over Dawson and a draw in his first meeting with Hopkins in December 2010.

On the undercard, Eleider Alvarez (11-0), a Colombia native considered a promising light heavyweight prospect, dominated every round but it went to the eighth before he knocked Englishman Danny (Big Mac) McIntosh (13-4) down and out to retain the minor NABO title.

Super featherweight Logan McGuinness (19-0-1), the minor NABA champion from of Orangeville, Ont., lost his first four rounds but turned his bout around with a knockdown from a body shot in the fifth to take a 10-round decision over Carlos Manuel Reyes (23-2-1) of the Dominican Republic.

Kevin Bizier (19-0) was all over Doel Carrasquillo (16-23-1) for eight rounds but the Quebec City middleweight wasn’t able to put away the clowning American. He got the unanimous decision.

There were three Hungarians on the undercard and all lost in a total of nine minutes, 10 seconds. Featherweight Marc (Gwapo) Pagcaliwangan (2-0) of London, Ont., heavyweight Oscar Rivas (12-0) of Montreal and light heavyweight Andrew Gardiner (6-0) of Ottawa were the winners.