Oscar Valdez returns from broken jaw, stops Carmine Tommasone in 7th

Oscar Valdez and Carmine Tommasone each left the ring with something they’ve wanted for a long time. Valdez, fighting for the first time since breaking his jaw 11 months ago, retained his WBO featherweight title with an impressive seventh-round stoppage of Tommasone, a former Italian Olympian, in Frisco, Texas.

Valdez knocked Tommasone down twice in the fourth and once in both the sixth and seventh. He knocked Tommasone down with the first punch he threw in the seventh and referee Mark Nelson quickly stopped it, giving Valdez his 25th victory in as many fights.

Tommasone, though, after doing a brief interview about the fight with ESPN’s Bernardo Osuna, got to one knee and proposed to his girlfriend, who accepted.

Tommasone entered the bout unbeaten with a 19-0 record, but hadn’t faced anywhere near the kind of competition that Valdez had and looked badly overmatched. He attempted to jab and stay on the outside, but Valdez, fighting under the direction of new trainer Eddy Reynoso, did a businesslike job of breaking him down.

“I’m very excited,” said Valdez, who is 25-0 with 20 knockouts and hopes to face Josh Warrington in a unification bout. “I kind of didn’t want to get too crazy in there, but at the same time, I did want to get crazy. It was tough in that first round to get my rhythm, but finally, I did and I got the job done.”

It was almost like a sparring match for Valdez, who was never threatened and who managed to avoid taking too much punishment. The jaw, he said, was never an issue and he said he only thinks about it when he’s asked.

He dropped Tommasone for the first time with a right cross in the fourth, then right near the end of that round, caught him with a body shot that put the Italian to one knee.

It was clear these were different classes of fighters and Valdez just had to avoid a big mistake.

“I’m happy just to be in the ring,” Valdez said. “This is my passion. This is what I love to do. I love boxing. … I started well and the sky’s the limit.”

In a lightweight title fight earlier on the card, Richard Commey won the IBF title and perhaps the right to meet WBA-WBO champion Vasiliy Lomachenko in April when he stopped Isa Chaniev in the second.

Commey dropped Chaniev late in the first, and then dropped him with a left hook early in the second. Commey finished it with a flurry to get the stoppage and the apparent date against Lomachenko.

The only thing complicating that is that he said he injured the index finger on his right hand during the fight and plans to get it X-rayed when he gets home.

“This is everything for me,” Commey said. “This is what I worked so hard for. Finally being a world champion, I feel like I fulfilled a destiny for me.”

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