Ex-champ Pascal KOs Blades in five in tune-up for showdown with Bute

MONTREAL – Former champion Jean Pascal stopped veteran George (Honey Boy) Blades with three knockdowns in the fifth round in a light heavyweight fight on Saturday night.

The bout was the co-feature to Adonis Stevenson’s first defence of his WBC light heavyweight title against Tavoris Cloud later Saturday.

Pascal (28-2-1), who had not fought since December, was in a tune-up bout for his scheduled showdown in January with fellow Montreal fighter Lucian Bute, who watched from ringside.

Blades (23-5-2) never threatened Pascal. The 38-year-old has a bizarre record built up against C-level opponents. He has faced fighters with winning records only six times, and is 1-5 against them.

Pascal was going for the knockout from the opening bell. He finally caught Blades with an upper cut and dropped him with a combination in the fifth. Twice Blades got up, only to be pummelled to the canvas again before referee Marlon B. Wright stopped the bout.

“I was a little tight at the beginning,” said Pascal. “I tried to beat him with power and it wasn’t working.

“We said ‘use speed instead of power’ and it was speed and put him down.”

The Bell Centre crowd of about 8,000 was evenly split in chanting the names of Pascal and Bute as the fighters entered the ring. Bute stood and applauded Pascal in a show of sportsmanship.

He saw Pascal score his first KO since 2009.

“This does me an enormous amount of good,” said Pascal. “I’m a guy with power but it had been a long time since I knocked anyone out.

“Now I’ll go into camp with more confidence.”

A matchup of Colombian light heavyweights saw Eleider Alvarez (13-0) of Montreal dominate veteran Edison Miranda for a 10-round unanimous decision in probably his toughest pro fight to date.

Alvarez landed consistently with the right from the fourth round on, and scored a knockdown in the eighth with a right hook, but Miranda made it a hard-fought physical bout. It confused the ringside judges, producing scores of 99-90, 97-92 and 95-94.

Another light heavyweight bout saw Artur Beterbiev, a Russian fighting out of Montreal, improve to 2-0 with a second round stoppage of veteran Rayco Saunders (23-23-2).

Montreal welterweight Antonin Decarie (28-2) was back in the ring for the first time since his loss in Argentina in April to Luis Carlos Abregu and found himself in tough against Frenchman Salim Larbi (17-4-2). Decarie was cut over the left eye in the fourth round but did enough to earn a six-round unanimous decision.

Welterweight Kevin Bizier (21-0) of St. Emile, Que., had little trouble scoring a six-round unanimous decision over 37-year-old former European champion Giuseppe Lauri of Italy, who went down to a sixth straight defeat.