Sean Monaghan KO 5 Joe McCreedy, Esquiva Falcao UD 6 Ethan Pena

Apr

LAS VEGAS — Olympic silver medalist Esquiva Falcao scored a unanimous decision over super middleweight Ethan Pena on Saturday night at the MGM Grand on the undercard of Tim Bradley-Manny Pacquiao II.

Falcao, of Brazil, rose to 2-0 with one knockout, and Pena is now 2-1 with a knockout.

In an earlier fight, light heavyweight Sean Monaghan (21-0, 14 KOs), of Long Beach, N.Y., dropped his man once in the third round and twice more in the final round of a fifth-round stoppage of Joe McCreedy (15-7-2, 6 KOs).

Monaghan used body shots to score his knockdowns. A two-bout winning streak ended for the 29-year-old McCreedy, who was stopped for only the second time in his career.

Monaghan had last been in the ring on Jan. 25 when he scored a first-round knockout of Matt Vanda on the Mikey Garcia-Juan Burgos undercard in the Theater at Madison Square Garden.

In a third fight that followed Falcao's, junior lightweight Oscar Valdez (10-0, 10 KOs) scored a fourth-round knockout over Adrian Perez (10-5-1, 1 KO), whom he hammered to the canvas with a left hook to the liver. Perez was counted out at the 1:23 mark by referee Russell Mora.

Also, light heavyweight Oleksandr Gvozdyk used a lights-out straight right hand to the chin to both drop and stop Mike Montoya (4-3-1, 2 KOs ) at 2:55 of the first round. It was the professional debut for Gvozdyk, who won a bronze medal for Ukraine at the 2012 Olympics.

Referee Russell Mora began his count, and then did not bother to finish, having determined that Montoya was in no shape to continue.

Photo by Chris Farina/Top Rank