Fight Night in Irvine Pays Off for Sellout Crowd

Junior lightweight Dustin Kim’s six-round unanimous decision victory over Daniel Rodriguez was unpopular with the Irvine Marriott’s sellout crowd. But that might have been the only thing the 1,410 boxing fans got shortchanged on.

The Marriott’s fifth consecutive sellout crowd saw the impressive pro debut by La Habra middleweight Enrique Ornelas, who won a unanimous four-round decision over a gutsy but battered Rigoberto Plascencia of Sylmar, the comeback of a female boxer who was recovering from a microwave explosion that nearly blinded her, and a fan who jumped into the ring and started to take off his pants, apparently trying to become the first male ring card person in the show’s 16-year history.

Kim (12-0), of Honolulu, thought he won the main event, but he also had some problems with the judges’ scoring.

“I thought I won it by a point,” Kim said. “He came on strong in that last round. I just got tired.”

Marcos Rosales and James Jen-Kin had Kim winning easily, 59-55 and 60-54. Fritz Werner had it 58-56 in favor of Kim. Rodriguez (18-2-3) controlled the first two rounds, then took the middle rounds off, before rallying late. Just before the final bell, he landed a right hand that puffed up the right side of Kim’s jaw.

Ornelas hit Plascencia (2-1-1) with everything he could, sending him to the canvas twice in the first round and nearly closing his left eye by the second round. But Plascencia kept fighting back. At the end of the first round, he dazed Ornelas with an overhand right.

“He took all the punches,” said Ornelas, who played football for two years at La Habra High. “He’s a tough fighter.”

But he wasn’t any tougher than Spring Valley lightweight Michelle Vidales, who had plastic surgery six months ago to repair a second-degree burn on the right side of her face. She also lost two layers of her right cornea when two eggs that were being heated in a microwave blew up in her face.

“It’s a miracle that I’m here,” she said. “They thought I was going to be blind.”

But Vidales (2-0) looked like a million bucks in stopping Kanako Kudo of Long Beach at 1:27 of the second round.