Whicker: Oscar Valdez still undefeated, no longer untested after he beats Miguel Marriaga

CARSON — The printout says it was the 22nd pro fight for Oscar Valdez.

Actually it was his first.

The previous 21 had been scrimmages, pre-ordained victories, tightrope walks with several nets below.

A fight, by its very nature, is something bilateral and demanding and maybe a little unprecedented. When Valdez punched the clock Saturday night, it punched back.

Miguel Marriaga was the guy who barely blinked when Valdez unloaded, kept moving forward through the ill winds.

He was the one who made Valdez fight an 11th round for the first time in his career, and then a 12th round, too.

He and Valdez put on a show that was worthy of the StubHub Center tennis stadium that housed it, one that honored the boxers before them who had all their defenses stripped away and somehow found a way home. Valdez got there, winning a unanimous decision in his first defense of his WBO featherweight title. At the end he and Marriaga hugged, and a crowd of 5,179 stood in salute.

“You can’t fight in this place without expecting a knockdown,” said Jessie Magdaleno, the super-bantamweight champ who dismissed Adeilson Dos Santos in the second round. “You can’t come here without getting some bumps and bruises.”

It was a close, uncertain fight for everyone except the judges, who gave Valdez the nod by 11, nine and five points. That seemed strange and lopsided even to Manny Robles, Valdez’s trainer.

Marriaga got through Valdez’s early rush and seemed ready to take control after the halfway point. He was moving Valdez around the ring, slowing down his pace, and landing enough fire of his own. He has only lost once, and that was to Nicolas Walters on a night when Walters was over the featherweight limit at the weigh-in.

“I was scolding Oscar,” Robles said. “We lost a round, maybe the fifth or the sixth, and I said, kid, you lost that one and now we’re heading into the second half of the fight. I didn’t know what to expect. What was he going to be like after the 10th round? These are the championship rounds.”

Valdez seemed to answer that question with a left jab and then a big left hook, thrown off-balance, that put Marriaga down. But Valdez was overeager, and nearly exhausted himself trying to finish it, and Marriaga got his bearings and had Valdez backing up and gasping when that bell rang. Marriaga also held his own in the 11th and 12th.

When it was over, Robles went to the opposite corner and told Marriaga, “You’ve got everything it takes to be a world champion. You’re a great fighter.”

But then Marriaga was saying approximately the same thing to Valdez.

“The only other time I went 12 rounds was in sparring,” Valdez said, the price of the fight now visible in purple, beneath his eyes.

“I learned I’ve got to pace myself more. Maybe go back to the gym and work on bobbing and weaving a little more. You never stop learning. I didn’t listen to my trainer a couple of times. I’m just thankful I won the fight.”

Before Saturday, Valdez’s longest fight was a 10-round decision over Ruben Tamayo, also at StubHub two years ago. The next five fights totaled 21 rounds. Valdez beat quality fighters, like Evgeny Gradovich and Matias Rueda, but Marriaga was really his introduction to top-tier boxing, to nights of definition.

Even then, Marriaga never could make Valdez pay for missing home run right hands, and he didn’t have the one-punch power to make Valdez shiver. But you can be assured Valdez’s next fight won’t be this arduous, and it won’t be soon either.

Most likely, Valdez will fight a lightly qualified opponent in a homecoming bout in Tucson, where he went to high school. Then the plan is to fight someone like Scott Quigg, the Brit who lost a split decision to Carl Frampton and fights on the Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko card in a sold-out Wembley Stadium on Saturday.

Quigg is now trained by Freddie Roach and would challenge Valdez. But let’s get real.

With Valdez training at The Rock Gym in Carson, the L.A. area has three of the world’s top fighters in boxing’s deepest division.

Valdez, 26, should be fighting either Abner Mares or Leo Santa Cruz, after they fight each other for the second time, and it should happen at either Staples Center or The Forum. The fact that it won’t happen, at least not initially, is another sad victory for alphabet politics.

But if such stalemates give Valdez time to get better, maybe that’s good.

“I didn’t like how he reacted after he got the knockdown,” Robles said. “He started trying to bang with the guy. I told him, take your time, set things up, go back to boxing. He didn’t box enough in the last two rounds either. I said, why are you letting yourself get hit? Don’t be one-dimensional and try to chop his head off.”

Mistakes are fine when you survive them. They become lessons.

“It’s nice to know what you have,” Robles said. “After this fight, I know I got a guy with a great chin who can really crack. When you have those two things, you know you have the total package.

“And I thought he won by four or five rounds. The jab won him the fight, in the end. He was the better, more well-rounded fighter. That was the whole game plan. Sometimes you need to go into the deep waters.”

Robles smiled.

“If boxing was for everyone, the gym would be full of fighters,” he said. “This ain’t baseball, baby.”

It wasn’t, even though it felt like Opening Night.